Ethnicity and Democratic Politics In India Caste as a Differential Mobilizer in Bihar

Students of comparative development have found the Indian caste system of great interest as a social structure of salience in the modernization process. Indeed, it has served as an institution of upward social mobility, political mobilization and participation, and interest aggregation in recent decades. It has been suggested that, in its mobilizing role, caste works as a medium for transmitting the concepts and practices of democratic politics from national government down to the individual citizen. In this article the author proposes to explore these suggested tendencies toward political democracy by examining the mobilizing and aggregating functions of caste in the north Indian state of Bihar. After a general consideration of the problem, we shall look first at two constituency case studies and then consider the place of caste in the politics of the state as a whole. The conclusion reached is that, while caste performs the transmission belt function, it does so in a highly differential fashion. Specifically, it is only the upper and middle caste groups, with their resources of wealth and numbers, that have enjoyed the fruits of caste-oriented democracy, while the lower castes have been left for all practical purposes outside the political arena. The politics of caste pluralism works for some, but definitely not for all. Recent developments may, however, produce change in this situation of pluralistic exclusion.