Political Rights and Durable Inequality: Caste in India and Race in the United States

Inequalities proved particularly durable in the relations between the groups at the poles of the racial orders of the Americas and the caste systems of South Asia.  The comparison of race relations in the United States with caste relations in India merits more sustained consideration. Both countries witnessed deep inequalities between ascriptive groups for long despite the significance of discourses of popular sovereignty, and the more recent stability of democracy.  The paper considers some factors which influenced the changes in the situation of India’s lower castes and African Africans since these groups gained the franchise after the Second World War. 

The extent to which political enfranchisement gave subordinate group interests better representation in policy depended on the subordinate groups’ share of the population, patterns of group classification and cohesion, elite openness to subordinate group representation, and the relative timing of the subordinate groups’ enfranchisement and their autonomous political mobilization.  Relative group size and the timing of elite openness favored India’s lower castes.  But, African Americans were more cohesive and their autonomous political mobilization was crucial to their enfranchisement.  By way of contrast, India’s lower castes gained the vote after decolonization despite their limited mobilization because the predominantly upper caste political elite of the time wished to demonstrate that it valued the reduction of caste inequality.  As substantial subordinate group mobilization preceded enfranchisement in the United States alone, enfranchisement had a more immediate effect on redistributive policy in the United States.  However, the lower castes found it easier to build coalitions with other groups than African Americans did.  This gave India’s lower castes more influence over policy when their autonomous mobilization increased through the second generation after their enfranchisement.