Caste in Indian Politics

Rajni Kothari
• Contemporary theories view caste as traditional way
and politics as new way of structuring society
• When these come into contact, there is a conflict
• This line of thinking created many misleading
theories
• Kothari argues that political and development
institutions do not arrive from an exogenous source.
They find bases within existing structures.
• Social restructuring can happen by fusion, with a
‘readiness’ on the part of past and modern to be
flexible and accommodative.
• To understand how organization of public activity and
politics in a society is articulated along caste lines, three
aspects of caste should be highlighted
– Secular Aspect : It is necessary to shed light on caste
as also a system of conflict and interaction
– Integration Aspect : There is also an ‘agglomerative
dimension’ to caste.
– Ideological Aspect : There was always a desire for
social mobility
• Together, these aspects demonstrated the ‘readiness’ on
the part of old system and acted as a ground to
modernising impacts and responded without a great
conflict
• Politics and society began moving nearer and a new
infrastructure started coming into being. Kothari lists
three stages through which this happens.
– First Stage: Rivalries start emerging between the
between the Entrenched and the Ascendant Caste.
– Second Stage: Limited resources lead to intra-caste
competition. Multi-caste and multi-factional
alignments come up.
– Third Stage: The older ties weaken due to impact of
education, technology and urbanisation.
• The culmination of the three stages is a highly secular
polity.
• Competitive politics has drawn caste out of its
apolitical context. The interaction of the caste system
and politics is a extremely involved process of
adjustment. The new infrastructure has three distinct
but interrelated forms.
– First, there emerges a dominant elite drawn from
different groups.
– Second, castes take on an openly secular form for
new organisational purposes. Caste associations,
caste federations come up.
– Third, there are vertical structure of factions that
facilitates cross-cutting identifications.
 “No Society lives without traditions and the essential
challenge of modernity is not the destruction of
tradition but the traditionalisation of modernity itself”
Thank You