Managing Inequality Without Dismantling It: Caste, Capital, and the Indian State

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Part 2

How do Hindutva politics and neoliberal capitalism reinforce each other in managing caste without dismantling it?

Hindutva politics and neoliberal capitalism reinforce each other by neutralising caste as a political problem while preserving it as a social and economic reality. They operate in different registers, but their convergence is structural, not accidental.

Hindutva dissolves caste upward into a homogenised Hindu identity. Its strategy is not to deny caste in practice, but to depoliticise it ideologically. By shifting the axis of politics from social justice to civilisational unity and cultural grievance, Hindutva reorders loyalties: caste contradictions within Hindu society are subordinated to a larger Hindu–Muslim antagonism. This allows dominant castes to retain material power while appearing as cultural equals within the Hindu fold.

Neoliberal capitalism, meanwhile, manages caste downward through markets. It treats inequality as a matter of individual capacity and access rather than inherited hierarchy. As public provisioning retreats, access to education, healthcare, housing, and employment becomes commodified—fields where caste advantage converts seamlessly into economic advantage. Markets do not erase caste; they translate it into class, obscuring its origins while reproducing its effects.

Together, they create a powerful equilibrium. Hindutva supplies the ideological cover—a narrative of unity, tradition, and national destiny—while neoliberalism supplies the material mechanism—privatisation, informalisation, and depoliticisation of labour. Caste-based disadvantage is recoded as lack of skills or effort; caste-based privilege is rebranded as merit or entrepreneurship.

Crucially, both projects are hostile to universal public goods. Hindutva prefers targeted charity and moral uplift; neoliberalism prefers targeted schemes and market delivery. Universal education, healthcare, housing, and labour rights would weaken caste advantage by flattening starting conditions. Their absence allows caste to persist without being named.

Affirmative action becomes the residual site of contestation—and even that is steadily narrowed through judicial caps, economic criteria, and contractualisation of work. This suits both forces: Hindutva can claim to transcend caste, and neoliberalism can claim to reward merit.

In short, Hindutva and neoliberal capitalism do not abolish caste; they stabilise it in a post-political form—stripped of overt ritualism, yet fully operative in determining life chances. Caste survives not despite modernity, but through a modern alliance of cultural nationalism and market rationality.

You argue that an exclusive focus on caste obscures other axes of deprivation—class, region, gender, and disability—reducing social justice to a competition of numerical claims (p. 165). How has this approach, adopted by political parties, contributed to deepening inequality?

By converting social justice from a project of structural transformation into a managerial politics of enumeration and bargaining, political parties have deepened inequality rather than reduced it.

An exclusive focus on caste as a numerical category fragments deprivation into competing claims, each measured, ranked, and negotiated within a fixed and shrinking pool of state resources. Class exploitation, regional underdevelopment, gendered labour, and disability are treated as secondary or derivative, even though they intersect with caste in producing deprivation. The result is not intersectional justice, but competitive arithmetic—who gets how much, and at whose expense.

This suits political parties. Numbers are easier to manage than structures. By foregrounding caste counts while sidelining questions of land, wages, informalisation, care work, and spatial inequality, parties avoid confronting capital, dominant regional elites, and patriarchal norms. Redistribution is replaced by recalibration. Inequality is not dismantled; it is redistributed among the already marginalised.

This approach also depoliticises class. When deprivation is framed primarily as caste disadvantage, neoliberal restructuring—jobless growth, privatisation, erosion of labour rights—escapes scrutiny. Upper-caste elites benefit most, but so do dominant intermediate castes who control land, local markets, and political institutions. The poorest within all castes—women, LGBTQ+, migrants, the disabled—remain structurally invisible.

Regionally, this logic allows chronic underdevelopment to be masked by identity representation. A Dalit MLA from a backward district does not alter the district’s lack of schools, hospitals, or employment. Representation substitutes for transformation. Similarly, gender inequality is folded into caste quotas without addressing unpaid care work, workforce exclusion, or violence.

Over time, this produces vertical inequality—a thin layer of empowered representatives and beneficiaries, and a vast base of dispossessed citizens. Social justice becomes a zero-sum contest among the deprived, while those who control capital, land, and policy remain insulated.

In short, by reducing justice to numerical claims rather than intersecting structures of power, political parties have turned social justice into a politics of scarcity. That is why inequality has deepened even as representation has expanded.

You note that India’s first Prime Minister and his advisors adopted a version of the Bombay Plan, drafted by industrial elites in 1944, as a development blueprint (p. 175). How did this choice structurally constrain the possibilities of social justice in postcolonial India?

Adopting the Bombay Plan as the blueprint for postcolonial development had profound structural consequences for social justice because it embedded elite interests into the very architecture of the Indian state. Drafted by industrialists, the Plan was designed to make the state build resource-intensive industrial infrastructure so that private capital could take off. In effect, it catalysed the centralisation of power and assigned the state a managerial role in economic growth—without any commitment to redistributing power or dismantling entrenched hierarchies.

The Plan prioritised capital-intensive industrialisation and centralised planning over rural development, land reform, or agrarian restructuring. Crucially, it sidelined the foundational task of building mass capability through universal education, public healthcare, and livelihood security. With no serious attempt to equalise conditions at the base, the majority—small peasants, agricultural labourers, and marginalised castes—were left outside the circuits of capital formation and value creation.

Structural inequality was reproduced by design, not accident. Industrial growth flowed to those already positioned to benefit—upper-caste business houses and urban elites—while the rural and informal sectors remained peripheral. The developmental state became an engine of elite consolidation rather than social transformation, institutionalising inequality at the very moment India promised democracy and freedom.

Second, the Plan envisioned the state as a mediator and stabiliser, not a transformative force. Social welfare was subordinate to growth; education, healthcare, housing, and labour rights were seen as instruments for creating a skilled workforce, not as universal entitlements. This institutionalised the idea that social justice is conditional, targeted, and managed, rather than structural and universal.

Third, the Bombay Plan’s framework normalised elitist control over economic and political decision-making. Industrialists, upper-caste technocrats, and bureaucrats shaped policy priorities, leaving little room for the kind of redistribution that Ambedkar and other radical thinkers advocated. Mechanisms like reservations, rural cooperatives, or universal public provisioning were allowed only as corrective or symbolic measures, not as foundational principles of development.

Finally, this blueprint aligned with a developmental model that tolerated, and often reinforced, existing hierarchies. Land and labour relations in villages remained largely untouched; caste and gender hierarchies persisted under the veneer of modernity. The resulting state structures—centralised, technocratic, and growth-focused—embedded inequality while providing limited avenues for political or economic redress for the marginalised.

In short, by privileging elite interests and growth metrics over redistribution and universal empowerment, the adoption of the Bombay Plan structurally constrained the scope of social justice in independent India. It made inequality an incidental byproduct of development rather than a core issue to be addressed, shaping decades of policy and political strategy.

You describe reservation as often functioning as a tokenistic mechanism of distributive adjustment rather than a tool for structural transformation (p. 182). In what ways has reservation failed to challenge the systemic foundations of caste inequality?

Reservation has failed to confront the systemic foundations of caste inequality because it functions as a point-of-entry correction rather than a structural intervention. Its effects matter, but they remain confined to the margins of the system; the deeper mechanisms that produce disadvantage are left untouched. From the outset, the policy rested on faulty premises—treating a historically entrenched hierarchy as if it could be neutralised at the moment of selection. This design flaw inevitably enabled the already advantaged layers to benefit first, while the most deprived are increasingly sidelined as unmeritorious.

The contradiction is built into the policy architecture: reservation benefits individuals or, at most, their nuclear families, yet the benefit is counted against the entire caste. In a society marked by precarity, this fuels resentment toward the group rather than the structure, and the burden of backlash falls disproportionately on those who have not benefited at all. The result is perverse: the policy intended for the weakest often consolidates advantage at the top of the beneficiary group and leaves the poorest untouched. It is an outcome directly at odds with its stated purpose. 

First, reservations target access to education, government jobs, and elected positions, but do not alter the broader conditions that determine success in these arenas. Inequalities in schooling quality, household resources, health, housing, and social networks remain largely untouched. The majority of Dalits and other marginalised groups continue to be excluded from meaningful participation in economic and political life. In other words, reservations are like providing ladders into a building whose foundations are still unequal and unstable.

Second, the system incentivises elite capture within marginalised communities. A small section of the relatively better-off within the Scheduled Castes or OBCs benefits disproportionately, creating a new hierarchy among the oppressed. Meanwhile, the structural reproduction of caste—through land ownership, informal labour relations, and social customs—remains unaffected.

Third, reservations do not confront dominant caste power in social and economic institutions. Village governance, corporate hierarchies, and market networks remain largely caste-structured. Political representation through reserved constituencies often depends on dominant caste patronage or party machinery, which undermines independent Dalit political agency.

Fourth, reservations operate within the existing economic and political order, rather than transforming it. They are administratively managed and legally enforced, but they do not redistribute wealth, democratise institutions, or restructure access to capital. As a result, caste hierarchy is preserved in everyday life even as quotas are met on paper.

Finally, the framing of reservation as a temporary or compensatory measure rather than a foundational right reinforces the illusion that caste inequality can be “managed” rather than abolished. This legitimises incrementalism and political compromises that perpetuate structural disadvantage.

In sum, reservation addresses symptoms of caste inequality—representation, access, visibility—but leaves its roots intact: inherited economic power, entrenched social hierarchies, and institutionalised discrimination. Without complementary measures of universal empowerment and redistribution, it remains a tokenistic adjustment rather than a vehicle for true structural transformation.

With the steady weakening of the public sector under neoliberal reforms, how crucial is the demand for reservations in the private sector today?

The demand for reservations in the private sector has become extremely crucial, but for reasons that go beyond simple inclusion—it is a symptom of a broader structural failure.

Neoliberal reforms since the 1990s have steadily weakened public sector employment, which historically provided secure, caste-neutral opportunities for upward mobility. Government jobs were the main pathway for marginalised communities to enter the formal economy with dignity and autonomy. As privatisation, contractualisation, and informalisation have expanded, the private sector has become the primary source of employment—but it is highly unregulated, caste-segregated, and profit-driven. Without affirmative measures, access for Dalits, Adivasis, OBCs, and other marginalised groups is minimal, and caste-based exclusion reproduces itself in hiring, promotion, and workplace culture.

Reservations in the private sector are therefore not merely about numbers; they are about ensuring structural access to the sites where economic power is concentrated. Without them, the retreat of the public sector and the rise of corporatisation risk concentrating advantage among upper castes and reinforcing inherited hierarchies. This is compounded by the fact that neoliberal markets valorise meritocratic narratives that mask social privilege as individual talent, making exclusion appear natural rather than structural.

Reservation in the private sector is now an imperative, but it cannot simply be a mechanical extension of the existing quota system. The quota framework assumes a stable organisational structure—like that of government agencies or public-sector units—where hierarchy, recruitment channels, and job classifications are standardised. The private sector, by contrast, is a heterogeneous field: from large corporations to small enterprises, from formal manufacturing units to volatile service economies. Its constant restructuring in response to market conditions makes the direct implantation of quotas unworkable and easy to subvert.

The only viable approach is a regime of closely monitored affirmative action: mandatory diversity benchmarks, transparent reporting of workforce composition, and a system of incentives and penalties that makes non-compliance costly. This shifts the burden from symbolic compliance to enforceable accountability.

In the neoliberal context, private-sector reservations are not a luxury or an afterthought—they are a necessary defensive measure. Without them, caste domination will deepen in the very sectors that increasingly control employment, capital, and technological transformation. Without enforceable intervention, social mobility for marginalised groups will stagnate or even reverse.

There is a further caution, especially in the context of jobless growth driven by automation and emerging technologies like Artificial Intelligence. In such an economy, neither reservations nor affirmative action—important as they are—can fully confront the larger structural crisis. These measures remain patchwork solutions against forces that are transforming the very meaning of work, employment, and economic participation. The viability of social justice itself is threatened if technology-driven exclusion becomes the new normal.

Dalits cannot afford to be passive spectators to this transition. They will have to assume a vanguard role in the struggles ahead—confronting caste discrimination within the emerging technological structures while also shaping the direction of this evolution. The fight will not only be for inclusion in the new economy, but for contesting the terms on which that economy is being built.

You emphasise the need to survey the domination of elite castes who have historically monopolised power, privilege, and public resources. Why has this question remained marginal in public debates on social justice?

This question has remained marginal because public debates on social justice in India are designed to focus on the deprivation of the marginalised while leaving elite power unquestioned. There are several structural and ideological reasons for this.

First, social justice discourse has been framed primarily in compensatory terms: identify disadvantaged groups, allocate quotas or welfare, and claim moral progress. This approach treats inequality as a problem of access rather than a problem of concentrated power. Counting and compensating the oppressed is politically safer than scrutinising the mechanisms by which dominant castes monopolise land, capital, education, and political influence.

Second, confronting elite dominance threatens the interests of those who shape the state and economy. Bureaucrats, industrialists, and upper-caste political elites control the institutions that mediate policy, public discourse, and research funding. Critiquing their monopoly would invite resistance, whereas focusing on marginalised communities allows elites to appear benevolent and progressive while preserving their structural advantage.

Third, electoral politics incentivises fragmented, identity-based mobilisation. Parties compete to represent specific marginalised groups, often using caste counts as bargaining tools. This creates zero-sum politics among the deprived rather than questioning the accumulation of power at the top. Elite domination is rendered invisible because it cuts across electoral constituencies—upper-caste advantage is diffuse but structural, making it harder to politicise in the same way.

Fourth, there is an ideological bias in the discourse of merit and modernity. Dominant castes are often portrayed as naturally skilled, hardworking, or culturally superior. Structural privileges—historic access to education, networks, and property—are reframed as individual merit, masking the inherited advantage that perpetuates inequality.

Finally, confronting elite power would require systemic redistribution—land reform, wealth taxes, universal public goods, labour protections—which has historically been resisted by successive governments across parties. Focusing only on marginalised claims allows the state to manage inequality superficially without challenging entrenched hierarchies.

In short, elite domination remains marginal in public debates because social justice has been operationalised as management of disadvantage rather than dismantling of privilege. This preserves the structural status quo while giving the appearance of progress.

You argue for a shift from the First-Past-the-Post system to Proportional Representation (PR). How would such an electoral reform transform political representation for marginalised communities?

This was, by far, the gravest structural blunder at the foundation of the republic. For a country that is essentially a museum of diversities, the first-past-the-post (FPTP) system is fundamentally unfit. It is a resource-intensive model that rewards money power, media control, and patronage networks. In practice, it has produced a plutocracy wearing the mask of democracy—and India has been living with that contradiction ever since.

Yet there remains a striking silence around problematising FPTP, let alone advocating for its alternative: Proportional Representation (PR). Unlike FPTP, PR does not reduce representation to a game of arithmetic majorities; it guarantees that every vote counts and every constituency—social, political, cultural—is reflected in power. Had PR been adopted at the republic’s founding, the struggles for separate electorates or legislative reservations would not have been necessary; representation would have been built into the system rather than begged for from outside it.

Its greatest strength is flexibility. PR is not a rigid template; it is customisable. India could have designed its own version, tailored to its plural social fabric and historical inequalities. Instead, we inherited an electoral mechanism that consolidates dominance and calls it consent. Shifting from First-Past-the-Post (FPTP) to Proportional Representation (PR) could transform political representation for marginalised communities in fundamental and structural ways, not merely symbolic ones.

Under FPTP, representation depends on geographically concentrated vote banks. Marginalised communities, especially Dalits, Adivasis, and lower OBCs, are often dispersed or outnumbered by dominant castes in most constituencies. This forces their representatives to negotiate with dominant castes, align with mainstream parties, and moderate agendas to survive electorally. As a result, reserved constituencies often produce legislators who are dependent on elite patronage rather than autonomous advocates of structural change.

PR, by contrast, allocates seats based on overall vote share, allowing dispersed groups to gain representation proportional to their population. This has several consequences:

• Independent political agency: Marginalised communities could elect representatives accountable primarily to their own constituencies rather than dominant-caste intermediaries. This reduces co-optation and increases the likelihood of pursuing structural reforms—land redistribution, education, labour rights—rather than symbolic or tokenistic gains.
• Pluralisation of politics: PR encourages multi-party formation and coalition-building. Smaller, identity-based parties can negotiate power on equal footing with larger parties, rather than being absorbed or marginalised. This would give historically excluded communities real bargaining power in legislatures.
• Intersectional representation: Because PR does not depend on concentrated geography, dispersed minorities—whether by caste, region, gender, or religion—can secure representation. This allows politics to reflect the actual social composition of the population rather than reproducing elite-dominated hierarchies.
• Reduced incentive for majoritarian manipulation: FPTP often incentivises parties to consolidate upper-caste and dominant-class votes at the expense of marginalised groups. PR shifts the calculation: every vote counts toward proportional allocation, making exclusionary strategies less effective.
• Policy focus on redistribution: When representation is proportional, legislative priorities are more likely to include structural redistribution rather than merely negotiating patronage within existing hierarchies. Marginalised voices would gain leverage to push for universal education, healthcare, land reform, and labour protections.

In short, PR would make political representation structurally inclusive rather than conditionally granted. It could transform legislatures from instruments of elite negotiation into forums where historically excluded communities exercise real agency, enabling systemic social and economic reform rather than superficial redistribution.

Do you see possibilities for anti-caste politics beyond political parties through labour movements, Adivasi struggles, feminist movements, or autonomous Dalit organising?

Absolutely. Anti-caste politics is not and cannot be limited to formal party structures; in fact, much of its transformative potential lies outside the electoral arena. Political parties—even those claiming social justice credentials—are often constrained by elite patronage, vote-bank calculations, and bureaucratic logic. Autonomous movements create space for structural challenge rather than tokenistic reform.

Labour movements can be powerful anti-caste vehicles because caste and class intersect in India’s economy. Organising across caste lines in factories, construction sites, and informal labour sectors creates solidarity based on shared exploitation, challenging inherited hierarchies. Historically, Dalit and backward-caste workers in mills and plantations have mobilised to demand fair wages and conditions, showing that labour struggle can erode caste hierarchies materially as well as symbolically.

Adivasi struggles often combine territorial, economic, and cultural claims. Land rights, forest access, and resistance to extractive industries confront both state and corporate structures that perpetuate inequality. By foregrounding collective ownership and self-determination, these struggles challenge hierarchies imposed by both caste and class, offering a model of intersectional, place-based anti-caste politics.

Feminist movements address gendered dimensions of caste oppression. Dalit and Adivasi women, for instance, experience violence and exclusion at the intersection of caste, class, and patriarchy. Autonomous feminist organising—whether against sexual violence, labour exploitation, or domestic oppression—can expose the limits of caste-neutral or male-centric social justice frameworks, insisting that caste cannot be disentangled from gender.

Autonomous Dalit organising remains critical. By forming independent networks, unions, and civil society groups, Dalits can assert political and economic agency without dependence on upper-caste intermediaries or party patronage. Examples include grassroots education initiatives, cooperatives, cultural assertion, and local governance experiments, all of which build institutional and social capacity within the community itself.

Across these arenas, anti-caste politics can pursue structural redistribution, social solidarity, and cultural assertion simultaneously, rather than relying solely on electoral representation or state-managed welfare. Such movements are less constrained by party hierarchies and can experiment with strategies that directly challenge power relations, making them indispensable complements—or even alternatives—to mainstream politics.

In short, the future of anti-caste politics lies as much in autonomous, intersectional organising as in formal electoral struggle. Parties can mediate and amplify these movements, but they cannot substitute for the bottom-up transformation that movements generate.

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