South Asian politics

Essay on 'Why have caste tensions become more acute in Indian politics in the past three decades?' The central, overarching argument of this essay is this: changes in the ‘political’, both in the sense of actual political institutions and in the sense of the reception of the overarching idea of democracy, and changes in the ‘social’, both with reference to caste identities and with reference to social mobility patterns, are responsible for increasingly acute caste tensions in Indian p...