Caste, Class and Vote: Consolidation of the Privileged and Dispersal of Underprivileged
| Published date | 01 December 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/23210230231203792 |
| Author | Suhas Palshikar,Jyoti Mishra |
| Date | 01 December 2023 |
Caste, Class and Vote: Consolidation
of the Privileged and Dispersal of
Underprivileged
Suhas Palshikar1 and Jyoti Mishra2
Abstract
This article attempts to examine the combined impact of caste and class on voting choices. By using
data from National Election Studies conducted by Lokniti from 1996 to 2019, the article seeks to situ-
ate the findings in the larger temporal frame of a quarter of a century. This allows us to also examine
if changing patterns of party competition affect the impact of caste–class combined. The article argues
that two patterns emerge: one is the consolidation of the more privileged social sections in terms of
class and caste and the other is the dispersal of the less privileged. The latter, by virtue of their political
dispersal, are unable to shape as a political force in both electoral politics and in agenda setting. This
finding is partly an extension of the earlier findings that politics of backward castes hit a dead-end and
politics of the poor never emerged as an all-India political alternative. Together with the earlier experi-
ence, the findings in this article throw light on the limits of democratization and on the prospects of
politics of the less privileged sections across the country.
Keywords
Class, caste, backward castes, OBCs, democratic upsurge
Literature on India’s voting behaviour has often believed that the social background of voters matters
considerably in shaping a voter’s party choice. This is not very extraordinary because of the close links
between social variables and their relationship with material interests of individuals. Among factors that
influence voter choices in Indian elections in this manner, caste is often presented as an important one.
A relatively less explored question is whether and in what way caste interacts with another equally
important factor leading to inequalities and stratification—class. An emerging scholarship on the
relationship of class, economy and voter choices helps us understand the possible patterns of class and
vote (Sridharan, 2014; Suri, 2009). So, it is not easy to discard class as a key determinant of how voters
choose to vote. But if both class and caste happen to impact the voters, how do these two factors interact
between themselves? In this article, we present long-term patterns of caste–vote relationship and aim at
exploring whether social location in terms of caste and class together offers us a more satisfactory
explanation of how voters vote compared to focusing on either caste or class in isolation as the
Original Article
Studies in Indian Politics
11(2) 258–273, 2023
© 2023 Lokniti, Centre for the
Study of Developing Societies
Article reuse guidelines:
in.sagepub.com/journals-permissions-india
DOI: 10.1177/23210230231203792
journals.sagepub.com/home/inp
1 Retired Professor of Political Science, Pune
2 Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, New Delhi, India
Corresponding author:
Jyoti Mishra, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, New Delhi 110054, India.
E-mail: jmishra23@yahoo.com
Palshikar and Mishra 259
determinants of vote choice. We further argue that besides divergent political choices, India’s politics
witnesses divergent and contrasting patterns of consolidation/dispersal among different social groups.
While this may help explain why the politics of poor does not become successful and why backward
politics tends to get fragmented, this finding alerts us to the limitations of the democratic upsurge of the
1990s and the difficulties in concretizing politics of the poor and underprivileged.
Context of the 1990s
We situate our findings in the overall context of competitive politics of three decades since the late 1980s
(1989–2019), known as the ‘post-Congress polity’. This is partly because the data that we present is
mainly from the 1990s and after, but equally important because there was a major departure in the pattern
of competitive politics around 1990. While there have been some exercises in explaining voter choices
going back to the 1960s and connecting that to the 1990s as in the case of Heath and Yadav (2010), it
may be a better strategy to first explore explanatory frames for the politics of the 1990s and then search
for a more broad-based theory of Indian voting behaviour.
In view of this, it may not be out of place to quickly recap the significance of the 1990s as far as
competitive politics in India is concerned. In a nutshell, the 1990s marked a decisive departure from the
previous politics centred on the Congress party. As is well known, that decade showcased the many
emerging and newly consolidating fault lines along which political competition would shape for a long
time to come. It is only to be expected, therefore, that voter mobilization would take place on the basis
of these newly shaped cleavages.
The decline of the Congress was important for the simple question as to what direction the structure
of party competition would now take. The 1990s began with all the trappings of multi-party competition.
Subsequently, that competition slipped into a tentative bipolarity, thanks to the formation of the two
coalitions led by the BJP and the Congress, respectively. That process of coalition-building ensured
somewhat stable majorities in the Lok Sabha, but it also meant that voter mobilization would assume a
paradoxical nature. On the one hand, the severe competition led to the intense mobilization of sections
of the voters. But on the other hand, the necessity to form grand coalitions also meant that issue
mobilization would remain constrained or even muted. Thus, while the BJP had to temper its Hindutva
mobilization due to necessities dictated by the coalition, the mobilization of OBCs too remained
incomplete once the OBC parties of North India got involved in all-India coalitions. As a consequence,
poor farmers, lower OBCs, Adivasis and less politicized sections of the Dalits were not adequately
mobilized, despite the requirement of the system to bring them into the political process as key social
forces having importance in times of intensified competition. In other words, the democratic upsurge
(Yadav, 1999) detected in the 1990s did not materialize beyond its early manifestations.
In a striking parallel to the 1970s, when the post-emergency election effectively postponed any
possible mobilization of the poor and the underprivileged as an electoral force, in the late 1990s and
onwards, debates over communalism and then the controversy surrounding Gujarat violence deferred
indefinitely the mobilization of the backward classes, even though the rhetoric was already integrated
into the political discourse of electoral competition. The introduction of economic ‘reforms’ was yet
another possible platform on which the poor and those adversely affected by the reform process could be
mobilized. But despite many negative rumblings against reforms, no party could bring that issue at the
centre stage of its political agenda because of the preoccupation with other issues and also because of the
expectations generated by reforms. In fact, the mainstream backward caste parties lacked an economic
or class agenda, and they were entrenched in caste-based political mobilization of voters. By the late
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