REVIVAL OF THE CASTE CARD?

In a year India hosted the world's largest democratic exercise, the Opposition appeared to wrest back space, but lost out on its edge to the BJP's superior electoral calculations

- Dhrubo Jyoti

The place that caste occupies in modern Indian life is unique. It is indelible yet sometimes imperceptible, enduring yet continually shifting. Its sticky strands entangle both the tech entrepreneur in Bengaluru and the farmer in Bihar, silently but relentlessly shaping a child's access to the classroom or the public space, her right to drink water or get her voice heard, her health care and successes at the workplace, her choice of partner and whether it is met with violence, and her sense of belonging and self. It is not only an enforcer of discrimination, but also a source of pride for some, and community for others. In each generation, it morphs into newer challenges, swapping untouchability for un-rentability, explicit slurs for implied exclusions, and outright brutality for pernicious exclusions. It is this sobering reality that lays the foundation for the stubborn persistence of caste as a central driver of Indian politics.

No year embodied this phenomenon more than 2024. It witnessed India host the largest democratic exercise in the world that loosened the Bharatiya Janata Party's (BJP) stranglehold on the electoral arena and buoyed the Opposition, before a clutch of crucial assembly polls saw the BJP wrest back momentum even as the Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance (INDIA) chalked up some victories. More importantly, more than any other general elections since the early 1990s, the primacy of caste in India's political landscape was established, belying prophecies that predicted the gradual paling of caste, either at the hands of modern urban life and laissez-faire capitalism, or by strident Hindutva and majoritarian politics that would subsume intercaste differences under a broader Hindu umbrella.