Why the Jantar Mantar Protest Failed to Become a People’s Movement

 

Why the Jantar Mantar Protest Failed to Become a People’s Movement

by Dr Anand Teltumbde17/07/2026                

 

                     

The prolonged protest at Delhi’s Jantar Mantar demanding the resignation of Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan raises a disturbing question. Why has a movement centred on the future of millions of students failed to evoke widespread public participation? Why are the youth, in whose name the protest is being waged, largely absent? Why have their parents remained passive despite repeated examination scandals and rising unemployment? And why has Sonam Wangchuk’s fast unto death—now stretching into weeks amid mounting concern over his health—failed to generate the moral urgency that such acts once commanded?

These questions deserve serious reflection because the issue at stake extends far beyond one minister or one protest. It touches the very condition of democratic politics in contemporary India.

Let me state at the outset that I stand in solidarity with every struggle against arbitrary power and therefore fully sympathize with those gathered at Jantar Mantar. Sympathy, however, cannot substitute for political judgment. A movement’s moral legitimacy does not exempt it from scrutiny of its strategy. Indeed, the greater the cause, the greater the obligation to ask whether the methods adopted are capable of achieving it.

In this respect, both the principal demand and the chosen mode of struggle appear strategically misconceived. Demanding the resignation of the Education Minister personalizes what is fundamentally a structural crisis. The repeated leakage of examination papers, irregularities in recruitment, the commercialization of education and the despair of unemployed youth are not the consequences of one minister’s failure alone. They are symptoms of a wider political and institutional order. Even if the minister were to resign tomorrow, the underlying conditions that produced these crises would remain substantially unchanged.

The same may be said of the decision to culminate the movement in a fast unto death. Ironically, the movement began with an act of remarkable political imagination. The slogan, “What if all the cockroaches come together?”—a response to the Chief Justice’s demeaning remarks about unemployed youth—briefly created a fresh political vocabulary. It transformed humiliation into collective defiance and carried the potential to unite scattered grievances into a broader democratic challenge. It spoke not merely to students but to an entire generation living under the shadow of unemployment, insecurity and diminishing opportunities.

Yet that initial creativity gradually gave way to a familiar repertoire of protest, which the regime is well prepared to deal with. Instead of developing new creative forms of collective action capable of broadening participation, the movement culminated in the most traditional of Gandhian methods: the fast unto death. Whatever its moral appeal, this shift also returned the initiative to a regime that has repeatedly demonstrated its capacity to outlast precisely such forms of protest. The disruptive political imagination of the opening moment yielded to a method whose effectiveness depends upon assumptions that no longer command the same historical validity.

As I write, Sonam Wangchuk’s health is reportedly deteriorating. Appeals from well-wishers urging him to end the fast are becoming more frequent—not because they question the justice of his cause, but because they see little possibility of the government responding. Such assessments are not expressions of cynicism. They arise from the accumulated experience of the past decade. The present regime has repeatedly shown itself willing to absorb prolonged public criticism, withstand moral condemnation and allow protests to dissipate without making substantive concessions. It remained unmoved by Professor G. D. Agrawal’s fatal fast to protect the Ganga. During the year-long farmers’ agitation, it held its ground despite the enormous human cost borne by the protesters, retreating only when sustained mobilization imposed significant political costs. Time and again, dissent has been met less with dialogue than with delegitimization, delay or repression.

This raises a larger question that goes well beyond the immediate fate of the Jantar Mantar protest. Why do methods that once appeared capable of shaking governments now seem increasingly incapable of moving them? Has the moral force of Gandhian politics itself diminished? Or have the conditions that once gave it political efficacy fundamentally changed?

These questions cannot be answered by invoking Gandhi as an article of faith, nor by dismissing satyagraha as obsolete. They require us to examine both the historical circumstances that made Gandhian protest effective and the profound transformation that has since occurred in the character of the Indian state. Only then can we understand not merely why this particular movement has struggled to become a people’s movement, but why democratic protest itself appears to be entering a new and uncertain phase.

Why Gandhian Politics Worked—and Why It No Longer Does

The efficacy of Gandhian satyagraha has perhaps been romanticized by both its admirers and its critics. Whether fasting and voluntary suffering possess any intrinsic capacity to compel political change is doubtful. Unlike a strike, a fast halts no production. Unlike a boycott, it imposes no economic cost. Unlike civil disobedience, it need not obstruct the functioning of the state. By itself, a fast exerts no coercive pressure. Its force lies entirely in moral persuasion.

But moral persuasion is not an abstract ethical principle; it is a political relationship. It becomes effective only when the voluntary suffering of the protester generates wider public sympathy, transforms that sympathy into collective action, and ultimately imposes political costs upon those in power. A fast, therefore, is not itself an instrument of political pressure. It is merely a catalyst that may create the conditions under which such pressure can emerge.

This is why even Gandhi’s success cannot be understood apart from the exceptional historical circumstances in which he operated. His fasts were never solitary acts of self-sacrifice. They occurred within the framework of a vast national movement sustained by the Congress organization, an extensive nationalist press, international attention, and the support of influential sections of the Indian bourgeoisie. Above all, Gandhi possessed an unparalleled moral authority that transformed every fast into a national political event. Millions did not support the freedom movement because Gandhi fasted; rather, Gandhi’s fasts acquired extraordinary political force because they were embedded in an already expanding mass movement.

The character of the colonial state also mattered. However coercive British rule undoubtedly was, it remained vulnerable to public opinion in ways that are often forgotten. The British Government sought legitimacy not only before Indian subjects but also before Parliament, the British public and international opinion. A prolonged fast by Gandhi therefore threatened political embarrassment that extended well beyond India. Colonial rulers could imprison Gandhi, but they could not entirely ignore the moral and political repercussions of his suffering.

To universalize Gandhian satyagraha while overlooking these exceptional historical conditions is to mistake a contingent political strategy for a timeless method of struggle. Gandhi did not discover an eternal law of politics. He developed a repertoire of action uniquely suited to the political circumstances of his time.

The experience of independent India bears this out. Potti Sriramulu, himself a devoted Gandhian, died after a fifty-eight-day fast demanding the creation of Andhra State. Jawaharlal Nehru did not concede while he lived. Andhra was created only after Sriramulu’s death provoked widespread unrest, administrative paralysis and mounting political instability. It was not the fast itself but the mass upheaval that followed which compelled the government to act.

The same pattern recurred in later decades. Darshan Singh Pheruman died after a prolonged fast without securing his principal demands. Irom Sharmila sustained an extraordinary sixteen-year hunger strike against the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, only to be repeatedly arrested, force-fed and eventually compelled to abandon the struggle without achieving repeal of the law. More recently, Professor G. D. Agrawal (Swami Sanand) died after fasting to protect the Ganga, yet the government remained unmoved. These episodes suggest that even governments claiming democratic legitimacy have proved fully capable of outlasting individual acts of moral witness.

The historical lesson is sobering. Fasting becomes politically effective only when it ignites a broader social movement capable of imposing electoral, administrative or political costs upon those in power. Where such mobilization does not materialize, the fast risks becoming an act of solitary martyrdom. The failure lies not in the courage of the protester but in the mistaken belief that moral witness, by itself, can move a determined state.

The real question, therefore, is not whether Gandhian politics has lost its moral appeal. It is whether the political conditions that once enabled moral appeal to influence power still exist. That question leads directly to the transformation of the Indian state itself. For if the nature of the state has changed fundamentally, then the repertoire of democratic struggle must change with it.

The Transformation of the Indian State

If Gandhian methods appear increasingly ineffective today, the explanation lies less in any decline of moral courage than in a profound transformation of the state they confront. Every repertoire of political struggle presupposes a particular relationship between rulers and the ruled. When that relationship changes, inherited methods of resistance can lose much of their efficacy.

The Indian state that emerged after Independence was far from ideal. It often suppressed popular movements, resorted to police violence and imprisoned political opponents. Yet it continued to derive much of its legitimacy from the institutions of constitutional democracy. Governments remained comparatively sensitive to parliamentary criticism, an independent press, judicial scrutiny and public opinion. Electoral uncertainty meant that sustained popular mobilization could impose real political costs. Protest, therefore, retained the capacity—however imperfectly—to influence the calculations of those in power.

That political ecology has altered significantly over the past decade. Electoral competition has increasingly been supplemented by the manufacture of consent through an unprecedented concentration of political communication, the centralization of executive authority, the weakening of institutional checks and balances, and the systematic delegitimization of dissent. The objective is no longer merely to win elections but to shape the political environment in ways that reduce the costs of governing and diminish the disruptive potential of collective action. In such circumstances, governments become progressively insulated from the moral pressure that Gandhian protest presupposes.

The record of the present regime illustrates this shift with remarkable consistency. The anti-CAA movement was met with police action, internet shutdowns and prolonged refusal to engage with its central demands. The wrestlers’ agitation, protests over recruitment irregularities and examination scandals, the Agnipath demonstrations, and Sonam Wangchuk’s previous movement for Ladakh were variously ignored, delayed or contained through preventive policing and sustained efforts to discredit the protesters. Across these movements, the state’s instinctive response has been less to negotiate than to outlast, fragment or delegitimize opposition.

The year-long farmers’ movement stands as the principal exception, but even this ultimately reinforces the broader pattern. The government initially rejected demands for repeal, fortified protest sites with barricades and trenches, imposed internet shutdowns, employed force, and repeatedly portrayed the movement as infiltrated by extremists. The three farm laws were withdrawn only after more than a year of sustained resistance, considerable human suffering and the approach of politically significant state elections. The retreat bore the character of a tactical recalibration rather than an acknowledgment of the protesters’ moral claims. It demonstrated not the responsiveness of the state to dissent but the extraordinary scale of mobilization required before political concessions became unavoidable.

Recognizing this transformation is not an argument for political despair. On the contrary, it is the beginning of political realism. Every successful movement begins by understanding the terrain on which it struggles. To continue deploying methods fashioned for a different historical relationship between state and society, while ignoring the altered architecture of power, is to mistake nostalgia for strategy. Democratic politics cannot rely indefinitely upon inherited repertoires of protest when the conditions that once made them effective have fundamentally changed.

This changing political landscape also helps explain the puzzle with which we began. If citizens increasingly believe that governments can withstand prolonged protest without meaningful concession, public participation itself is likely to diminish. The problem is no longer simply fear of repression. It is the gradual erosion of confidence that collective action can alter political outcomes. Once that belief weakens, even causes commanding widespread sympathy struggle to become genuine mass movements.

The Crisis of Democratic Politics

The transformation of the state also helps explain the most troubling feature of the Jantar Mantar protest: its failure to become a genuine people’s movement. The issue it raises—the collapse of examination integrity, chronic unemployment and the shrinking horizons of an entire generation—touches millions of families. Yet public participation has remained remarkably limited. The explanation lies not simply in organizational weakness but in a wider transformation of society’s relationship with politics itself.

Fear is undoubtedly one element. The repeated use of criminal law, investigative agencies, preventive detention, surveillance and public vilification has created an atmosphere in which participation in protest carries increasing personal risk. Repression need not be universal to be effective. A few exemplary punishments are often sufficient to deter thousands who might otherwise have joined. Fear, however, is only part of the story.

Equally important is the growing insecurity of everyday life. Unemployment, precarious work, indebtedness, inflation and the relentless struggle for economic survival have left large sections of society with little emotional or material capacity for sustained political engagement. People may recognize injustice and sympathize with those who resist it, yet feel unable to bear the additional risks that public action entails. Survival itself becomes a full-time occupation.

Beyond fear and insecurity lies an even deeper problem: the erosion of political efficacy. Over the past decade, citizens have repeatedly witnessed large movements ignored, prolonged protests outlasted, and dissenting voices delegitimized or criminalized. Many have gradually come to believe that protest no longer changes outcomes. This is not political indifference but political resignation. When people cease to believe that collective action can alter the course of events, they retreat into the private sphere, not because they no longer care, but because they no longer expect to make a difference.

Seen in this light, the tragedy of the Jantar Mantar protest is not simply that it may fail to secure the resignation of one minister. It is that it reflects a wider crisis of democratic politics. The moral conviction of protesters increasingly confronts a political order that has become insulated from moral appeal, while those who might naturally join them have grown uncertain that protest itself remains an effective instrument of change. The widening gulf between public grievance and collective action is perhaps the most serious democratic challenge confronting India today.

This does not mean that resistance has become futile. It means that democratic politics must rethink its inherited repertoire. Every generation inherits methods of struggle shaped by the political conditions of an earlier age. Gandhi’s satyagraha emerged in confrontation with a colonial state vulnerable to questions of legitimacy. It retained some efficacy in the early decades of the constitutional republic. But no political method remains permanently effective merely because it once succeeded. As the nature of the state changes, so too must the forms through which citizens organize, mobilize and exercise democratic power.

The challenge before India’s youth, therefore, is much larger than securing the resignation of one minister. It is to discover forms of political action equal to the realities of the present. Moral courage remains indispensable, but courage without strategy risks becoming martyrdom. The task is not to abandon Gandhi, but to recover the spirit of political creativity that made him effective in his own time.

The real lesson of Jantar Mantar is thus not that democratic protest has become impossible. It is that democratic protest can no longer succeed simply by reenacting the repertories of the past. If democracy is to be renewed, it will require new forms of organization, new languages of solidarity and new strategies capable of confronting a state that has fundamentally altered the relationship between power and public dissent. Until then, even the noblest acts of self-sacrifice may inspire admiration without generating the political force needed to bring about change.

Gen-Z needs to be to be creative enough to defy imagination of the arrogant regime.

countercurrents.org

Anand Teltumbde is a political theorist

https://countercurrents.org/2026/07/why-the-jantar-mantar-protest-failed-to-become-a-peoples-movement/

ANNIHILATION OF CASTE: WHY AND HOW

 

                                ANNIHILATION OF CASTE: WHY AND HOW

                                    Anand Teltumbde

                     

(An edited transcript of the online speech delivered on 17 April 2026 at the seminar on Brahmanization at Jadavpur University)

Long ago, while speaking about the annihilation of caste to the audience like you, I put forth my view in the form of a paradox:

Annihilation of Caste is not possible without a revolution. And revolution is not possible without the Annihilation of Caste.

It may sound as a clever formulation, but it is not. It succinctly captures the reality of what ailed India as a civilization. It is a living, breathing description of the trap that Indian society finds itself in. It will tell you why every movement for social justice in this country has either stalled, been co-opted, or been strangled before it could walk.

I may use this paradox as a framework for today’s discussion too.

So today, I want to do two things. First, I want to make the case for why caste must be annihilated — not reformed, not managed, not accommodated, but annihilated. And second, I want to speak about how — not through the comfortable illusions of reservation politics or constitutional tinkering, but through the far harder, far more demanding work of structural and psychological revolution.

Before we can talk about annihilating caste, we must understand what caste actually is. And I submit to you that most people — even those who oppose it — do not fully understand it. As you all know, I have been writing on these issues for over five decades and have seriously gathered this impression. I published a book recently, “The Caste Con Census” to explain what caste is.

Caste is typically described as a system of social stratification. A hierarchy. A ladder with Brahmins at the top and Dalits at the bottom, with everyone else arranged in between. Ambedkar analogized it as a multi-storey tower without a staircase connecting the storeys. This metaphorical description is not wrong. But it is radically insufficient.

It depicts caste as a stagnant, fossilized, frigid system without life. This understanding still informs much of anti-caste activism which starts and ends with abusing Brahmins and selectively citing Ambedkar. No, caste have evolved and they are still evolving, Castes are not what they were in Buddha’s time. They are not what they became in Mauryan period or Gupta period or in medieval times or in colonial times. Castes are not even what they were spoken or written about or fought against by Ambedkar. Our contemporary castes have since evolved. They are largely shaped by the Constitution and the post-colonial political economy. That is why I called them as “constitutional castes”. You may see it in my book, “Republic of Caste”. They are the contemporary castes that we are faced with.   

A simple way to understand caste is to see it as a structure that is homomorphous with Indian society itself. What does homomorphous mean? It means that caste does not merely exist within Indian society as one institution among many. It means that caste and Indian society share the same form. The same shape. The same skeleton. To say that caste is homomorphous with Indian society is to say that if you were to remove caste from Indian society, you would not have Indian society minus caste. You would have something fundamentally, structurally different. Something that has never yet existed.

Think about what this means. It means caste is not a feature of Indian society. It is the architecture of Indian society. It is not something that sits in Indian society. It is something that Indian society sits in.

Look at the economy. The caste division of labour is not incidental to Indian economic organization. The hereditary assignment of occupations — the fact that certain communities were confined to sweeping, to tanning leather, to carrying night soil, to washing clothes, to fishing, to farming — this was not a market outcome. This was not voluntary specialization. This was a forced economic architecture in which your birth determined your labour, your labour determined your income, your income determined your life chances, and your life chances were deliberately kept asymmetric to reproduce the hierarchy across generations.

Look at land. Land ownership in India has always been, and continues to be, substantially a caste phenomenon. The agrarian structure of this country — who owns the land, who tills it, who is landless —still follows caste lines with remarkable consistency. When you see Dalits being denied land rights in villages across UP, Bihar, Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu — you are not seeing isolated incidents of prejudice. You are seeing the economic structure of caste reproducing itself.

Look at marriage. Endogamy — marriage within the caste — is the biological mechanism by which caste reproduces itself across generations. This is what Ambedkar identified as the key to caste. Not untouchability. Not pollution. Not even hierarchy. Endogamy. Because as long as people marry within caste, caste reproduces. As long as caste reproduces, everything else that flows from it — the economic asymmetry, the social hierarchy, the cultural contempt — reproduces with it.

Look at religion. The ritual order of Hinduism — as it has been historically practiced, not as it is sometimes theoretically described — is a caste order. Who can enter the temple. Who performs the puja. Who reads the scripture. Who interprets the law. The entire ritual architecture of mainstream Hindu practice has been, for centuries, architecture of caste privilege.

Look at politics. The vote bank. The caste arithmetic. The fact that in most Indian elections, caste is the single most powerful predictor of voting behaviour. The fact that political parties are essentially caste confederacies dressed in ideological clothing. The fact that even parties that claim to oppose caste organize themselves along caste lines to gain power. You cannot ignore the caste maths in India’s electoral politics. Look at the rise and fall of the Bahujan Samaj Party!

Look at the family. Look at the kitchen. Look at who can sit where. Who can touch whom. Who can draw water from which well. Who can wear what clothes. Who can ride a horse at their own wedding.

Caste is everywhere. It is in the economy, in the polity, in religion, in marriage, in the family, in the kitchen, in the body. It is not a system that operates within society. It is the operating system of society itself. And that is precisely why it is so devastatingly difficult to dislodge.

But structure alone does not explain the full tenacity of caste. If caste were merely a structural arrangement — if it were merely a matter of who owns what and who does what — then it could theoretically be dismantled through redistribution, through land reform, through economic restructuring. Difficult, yes. But conceivable.

What makes caste something qualitatively different — different from all other stratification systems that necessarily existed in all ancient societies but in course of times disappeared-- what makes it perhaps the most formidable system of social control ever devised — is that over centuries of conditioning, it has embedded itself not just in social structure but in social psychology. It has colonized not just the body but the mind. Not just behaviour but belief. Not just practice but identity. Here comes the role of Brahminism that masquerades as Hindutva today!

The genius of caste — and I use the word genius with full irony and full horror — is that it persuaded its own victims of its legitimacy. It created, in the oppressed, what Ambedkar called the graded inequality — a system where each level of the hierarchy had just enough superiority over the level below to give them a stake in the system. The Shudra could look down upon the Atishudra. The lower OBC could look down upon the Dalit. The Dalit could find someone even more marginalized to distinguish himself from. And so, the pyramid held, because everyone in it had something to lose by its demolition.

There has been incessant internecine struggle for superiority among castes within their vicinity that kept the overall structure unchallenged. That explains the longevity of the caste system. That is why this evil system becomes the longest living man-made system in the world.  

This is social psychology that became automated social control. It’s conditioning is so deep that the oppressed become the enforcers of their own oppression.

And this conditioning does not spare the oppressor either. The upper-caste individual who has internalized caste — who genuinely believes, at some level, in the naturalness of the hierarchy, in the ritual logic of purity and pollution — is not simply a villain making a rational choice. They are also a product of centuries of conditioning. Their humanity has been deformed by caste just as surely as their victims' humanity has been denied by caste. The deformation takes a different form, but it is deformation nonetheless.

I say this not to excuse complicity. Complicity must be confronted and held accountable. I say it because if we misunderstand the depth of the psychological problem, we will prescribe insufficient remedies. And insufficient remedies, in a crisis of this magnitude, are worse than no remedy at all. Because they create the illusion of progress while the structure remains intact.

Some of you might identify what lacked in the communist movement: They stressed structural revolution but ignored to deal with the social psychology shaped by Brahminism. The similar may be said of the Dalit movement that problematized the social psychology but ignored the structural constitution. They have to be conjointly dealt with.  

The Paradox equates Annihilation of Caste with the Revolution.  And by revolution, I mean radical transformation, as Marx conceived through the culmination of class struggle. The million-dollar question is what is this class struggle.

Constitutional reforms like abolition of untouchability, right to equality, positive discrimination in favour of the Dalits and OBCs created an illusion in peoples’ mind that they were revolutionary measures. Yes, in a historical process, they were important but they were certainly not revolutionary.

I would not dismiss Constitution as a bourgeois device. Taking stock of the extant balance of forces, I think only that much was possible. However, even within the bourgeois framework, there was an opportunity to set the directions in the Constitution so as to propel the country on the path of reforms like weakening castes, lessening inequality, building capability of people, and so on, as has been done in many countries. But what is done in the Constitution is reverse; it strengthened castes. It accentuated inequality and impaired peoples’ capacities. The constitution making, so much eulogized by the people, was an exercise in self-deception. I can only touch upon it. Those who want my explanation, may see my latest book- “Dalits and the Indian Constitution” and the forthcoming book: “We the Non-People of India.”  

Let us consider the so called most revolutionary measure of the Constitution: The Abolition of Untouchability. It is the recorded fact of the history that all the upper caste reformers, who came in contact with western civilizations, felt ashamed of the inhuman custom of untouchability and wanted to abolish it. But never by mistake they spoke against caste. Gandhi famously represented this trend. Naturally, when the opportunity came while writing the Constitution, they unanimously abolished untouchability. Only three members, ironically all from Bengal where ‘touch-me-notism’ form of untouchability was weakest in India, spoke against it. The first was Pramath Ranjan Thakur, the great grandson of Harichand Thakur, the founder of the Matua movement and the first barrister from the Dalit community. He said that he did not understand how untouchability could be abolished when the castes lived. Two more Bengalis, both Bhadralok, supported him. Barring them none uttered a word and relished in contributing to the self-congratulatory chorus.

Was caste abolition not possible? There was a tacit argument that perhaps silenced the SC members, which is that if the castes were abolished, their reservations would go away. Was it true? Reservations were instituted by the Government of India Act 1935 on the basis of an administrative category created by the colonial rulers, “Scheduled Caste”. It was not a Hindu Caste. Therefore, the Hindu caste system could have been very much abolished if they wanted to do so without affecting the extant reservations. No, they did not want to let the caste go off. Caste and religion had proved their prowess in Britishers’ divide and rule strategy. The post-colonial rulers would not like to lose them. Castes were preserved with above intrigues and the religion was preserved with the skilful dodging of true secularism. Notwithstanding the impression that the Constitution has given us secularism, its text does not have this word beyond the Preamble, which also was an illegitimate insertion in 1976, during the Emergency.

Even reservations could have aided the project of annihilation of caste if the rulers had the honest intent. They only had to upend the rationale behind it from being a helping hand to uplift Dalits to be a countervailing force against the prejudice the society bears against them. It would have rightly pushed the onus on society to correct itself so as to do away with this exceptional policy at the earliest. The present provision implicitly stigmatized Dalits as a disable lot. But instead of doing such a thing they proliferated reservations to “Backward Castes” with an awkward criterion of “social and educational backwardness”. In a country like India, which even today ranks among the most backward societies, which community would not meet such a criterion? No wonder, there is no community that has not staked claim to reservation as socially and educationally backward community.       

The key to understand all this lies in the fact that the post-colonial rulers adopted the entire colonial state apparatus that served colonial purpose in suppressing people. Some positive looking changes like universal franchise, justiciable fundamental rights, and non-justiciable directive principles were incorporated in tune with the ethos of times but they were overwhelmed by the larger structural logic. The constitution that was created with much hullabaloo also borrowed most of its contents from the 1935 Act and validated colonial infrastructure of the state. The constitutional state therefore was the colonial state plus Brahminic cunning, the perfected machine to suppress Indian people, which is what we empirically experience today. 

Take the case of very radical provision of universal franchise. Its entire positive essence is lost in the choice of the election system: First-Past-the-Post (FPTP), which structurally loses most votes while maintaining the illusion of popular participation. No party that ruled India touched even 50 per cent datum of popular votes but still claimed invincibility. What does it mean? It means that more than 50 percent voters at any point did not give their consent to the rulers to rule. Except for the election rituals, the people do not have any recourse to participate in the democracy. In fact, the FPTP election does not have a minimum datum and hence it is not the peoples’ votes that matter but the political strategies of political parties in the Indian democracy.

Was there no alternative? When the election system was proposed by the Montague-Chelmsford Reforms in 1919, the Proportional Representation (PR) system was suggested by the Select Committee considering India’s diversity. Obviously, nothing was done and the Westminster FPTP system was adopted for the Indian elections as default. Since then, all Indian politicians were accustomed to this system. During the constitution-making, however, the issue of election system was hotly debated and its proponents, mostly Muslim members and even many non-Muslim stalwarts supported the PR system. But it was ignored. None other than D R Gadgil, the famous economist and senior Congress leader, supported the PR system but revealed that the Congress leaders, whom Granville Austin called oligarchy would never accept it because they wanted a single party strong government at the centre which only could be guaranteed by the FPTP system. The single biggest merit of the PR system is that it is a customisable system whereas the FPTP system is a rigid system. One could configure it to have near perfect democracy as per one’s polity. In the context of caste, the PR system would have dampened the caste politics to a great deal.       

After the initial decade of Congress dominance—sustained by its aura from the freedom struggle—shifts in the political economy reshaped the polity and made electoral competition more intense. In this context, caste-based vote banks emerged as a central axis of electoral politics, effectively giving caste a renewed instrument.