accountable governments often fail to reflect the interests of disadvantaged minorities. This paper exploits the institutional features of political reservation, as practiced in Indian states, to examine the role of mandated political representation in providing disadvantaged groups influence over policy-making. Ifind that political reservation has increased transfers to groups which benefit from the mandate. This finding also suggests that complete policy commitment may be absent in democracies, as is found in this case. (JEL D72, D78, Hl 1, H50)

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Can Mandated Political Representation Increase Policy Influence for Disadvantaged Minorities? Theory and Evidence from India

Introduction 1. Historical origins of a 'caste society' 2. The 'Brahman Raj': kings and service people, c. 1700-1830 3. Western 'Orientalists and the Colonial perception of caste' 4. Caste and the modern nation: incubus or essence 5. The everyday experience of caste in Colonial India 6. Caste debate and the emergence of Gandhian Nationalism 7. State policy and 'reservations': the politicization of caste-based social welfare goals 8. Caste in the everyday life of Independent India 9. 'Caste wars' and the mandate of violence Conclusion.

Caste, Society and Politics in India from the Eighteenth Century to the Modern Age

This article offers a new taxonomy of how actors may change ethnic boundaries. I distinguish between five main strategies: to redraw a boundary by either expanding or limiting the domain of people included in one's own ethnic category; to modify existing boundaries by challenging the hierarchical ordering of ethnic categories, or by changing one's own position within a boundary system, or by emphasizing other, non-ethnic forms of belonging. The taxonomy claims to be exhaustive and accommodates a considerable number of historical and contemporary cases both from the developed and the developing world. It aims at overcoming the fragmentation of the literature along disciplinary and sub-disciplinary lines and prepares the ground for an agency-based comparative model of ethnic boundary making.

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Elementary strategies of ethnic boundary making

Indian society suffers from substantial inequalities in education, employment, and income based on caste and ethnicity. Compensatory or positive discrimination policies reserve 15% of the seats in institutions of higher education and state and central government jobs for people of the lowest caste, the Scheduled Caste; 7.5% of the seats are reserved for the Scheduled Tribe. These programs have been strengthened by improved enforcement and increased funding in the 1990s. This positive discrimination has also generated popular backlash and on-the-ground sabotage of the programs. This paper examines the changes in educational attainment between various social groups for a period of nearly 20 years to see whether educational inequalities have declined over time. We use data from a large national sample survey of over 100,000 households for each of the four survey years—1983, 1987–1988, 1993–1994, and 1999–2000-andfocus on the educational attainment of children and young adults aged 6–29. Our results show a declining gap between dalits, adivasis, and others in the odds of completing primary school. Such improvement is not seen for Muslims, a minority group that does not benefit from affirmative action. We find little improvement in inequality at the college level. Further, we do not find evidence that upper-income groups, the so-called creamy layer of dalits and adivasis, disproportionately benefit from the affirmative action programs at the expense of their lower-income counterparts.

Changing educational inequalities in India in the context of affirmative action.

Recent debates regarding inclusion of caste in 2011 Census have raised questions about whether caste still matters in modern India. Ethnographic studies of the mid-20th century identified a variety of dimensions along which caste differentiation occurs. At the same time, whether this differentiation translates into hierarchy remains a contentious issue as does the persistence of caste, given the economic changes of the past two decades. Using data from a nationally representative survey of 41,554 households conducted in 2005, this paper examines the relationship between social background and different dimensions of well-being. The results suggest continued persistence of caste disparities in education, income and social networks.

Caste in 21st Century India: Competing Narratives.

Glossary 1. Who are the Untouchables? 2. The question of the 'Harijan atrocity' 3. Religion, politics and the Untouchables from the nineteenth century to 1956 4. Public policy I: adverse discrimination and compensatory discrimination 5. Public policy II: the anti-poverty programs 6. The new Untouchable proletariat: a case study of the Faridabad stone quarries 7. Untouchable politics and Untouchable politicians since 1956 8. The question of reservation: lives and careers of some scheduled castes MPs and MLAs 9. Subordination, poverty and the state in modern India Bibliography Index.

The Untouchables: Subordination, Poverty and the State in Modern India

In a compelling account of the lives of those at the bottom of Indian society, the authors explore the construction of the untouchables as a social and political category.

The Untouchables: List of tables

main stream of post-independence scholarship on agrarian India. Very soon after independence an academic orthodoxy hardened as to the character of agrarian social structure and power. The argument of this paper is that this orthodoxy is no longer valid and that it obscures what is a profound transformation in the character of agrarian India. For a period of roughly a generation dating from the early I950s, scholars drawn from both India and abroad set about providing a new picture of social life in rural India. Like earlier accounts of the British period, these post-independence studies were preoccupied with the phenomenon of caste. But there were also important departures, on both methodological and substantive levels. The new methodology consisted simply in systematic field-work conducted by live-in professional anthropologists, as opposed to the less rigorously empirical style of British, other European and Indian scholarship in earlier periods. The fruit of this empiricism was what seemed to be a substantially fresh account of the structure of rural society. The image of village India to emerge from the new anthropology was one of systematic domination and subordination that had little to do with the great books of Hinduism. Agrarian society was now seen A number of bodies have supported the research on which this work is based. My major institutional debt is to La Trobe University for the requisite leave and some travel assistance. The people who have helped in village-level research are too many to mention. When I began this work I was helped greatly by P. C. Mathur of the

The Transformation of Authority in Rural India

The Indian court system is by all accounts unusual. The proceedings are extraordinarily dilatory and comparatively expensive; a single issue is often fragmented into a multitude of court actions; execution of judgements is haphazard; the lawyers frequently seem both incompetent and unethical; false witness is commonplace; and the probity of judges is habitually suspect. Above all, the courts are often unable to bring about a settlement of the disputes that give rise to litigation. So great are these failings that the Indian judicial process can reasonably be seen as a ‘pathology’of a legal system.

Oliver Mendelsohn

Papers

The Untouchables: Subordination, Poverty and the State in Modern India

The Untouchables: Subordination, Poverty and the State in Modern India

The Untouchables: List of tables

The Transformation of Authority in Rural India

The Pathology of the Indian Legal System