Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. 424 pp. US$45.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-199468157.
The increased mobilization and participation of marginalized groups and the durability of democracy in India contrasts with the predominant recent pattern of democratic decline in Third Wave developing countries, sometimes involving emergent group disempowerment. A significant literature, some of which adopts a comparative pan-Indian or global perspective, addresses lower-caste mobilization, particularly by the most successful lower-caste-led party, the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP). Panthers in Parliament examines a less prominent party based among former untouchable castes (commonly called Dalits or “broken people”), the Viduthalai Chiruthaikal Katch (VSK), present in the southern state of Tamil Nadu since the 1990s. This “movement party” has combined non-electoral popular mobilization, electoral participation, and engagement of the state since it emerged from the Dalit Panthers movement in this state, which the author has also written about (Gorringe, Untouchable Citizens: Dalit Movements and Democratisation in Tamil Nadu, Sage, 2005). Such studies complement the focus of many scholars on the BSP, especially in its stronghold of Uttar Pradesh, India’s largest state, and could help us identify the determinants of the varying levels of subordinate group mobilization, representation, and empowerment in India. Based on extensive interviews of leaders and cadre, ethnographic research and consultation of movement literature, but limited electoral, institutional, and comparative analysis, the book presents a rich, albeit incomplete, picture of the party’s limited institutionalization, its engagement of state, society, and other parties, the extensive changes it sought, and the more modest changes it effected in patronage distribution, policy, and “caste common sense.”
Tamil Nadu witnessed initiatives for Dalit empowerment from the late nineteenth century onward. But Dalit-led parties did not emerge there until the late 1990s because, we are told, these early efforts were partly incorporated into upper-middle-caste and middle-caste-led Tamil and Dravidian nationalist movements and parties focused on language and caste/anti-caste identity that dominated the state from the 1960s. Early Dalit initiatives were merged into multi-caste parties, and their transformative potential went partly unrealized, as it did in Punjab, Bengal, and to some extent Kerala. While the limited representation, benefits, and power that multi-caste parties offered Dalits helped independent Dalit initiatives reemerge, the sparse support gained by Dalit-led parties restricted the changes they could make in Dalit wellbeing and caste relations in Tamil Nadu. The author attributes the limited realization of the VCK’s goals to several factors: the party’s weak institutionalization; the reduced attention to the inversion of the values of caste society and increased reliance on the leader’s charisma since the organization’s electoral turn; the monopolization of support by two Dravidian parties since the 1970s, which their anti-caste egalitarian rhetoric aided despite its inconsistent policy effects; and the unequal alliances the VCK therefore forged with these parties, which provided inadequate space to press Dalit demands even while providing patronage benefits. However, the study indicates that, largely independent of their electoral allies, the VCK leaders and cadre protested many instances of anti-Dalit violence, pressed to regain lost Dalit land, opposed agricultural land appropriation for industrial use, enabled Dalit access to cremation grounds, helped Dalit entry into business ventures, gained Dalit symbols greater visibility, and made Dalits more central to popular visions of Tamil identity (274–282, 340–342). The party’s pressures also aided in the adoption of a Special Component Plan directed toward Dalits and a 3 percent sub-quota in education and government jobs for the state’s most backward Dalit caste, the Arunthathiyar (166–167, 352–354).
That said, the book offers inflated estimates of party support. The VCK has polled no more than 1.5 percent of the vote in state assembly elections, gaining merely 0.8 percent in the last elections of 2016, in which it was allied with neither of the state’s two major parties and contested 25 of the 234 seats. This compares poorly with Dalits’ share in the state’s population (20 percent) and is incompatible with assertions that the VCK “attracts a significant share of the vote” and has “redrawn the map of Tamil politics” (292, 359). The study does not directly address why the party gained far less Dalit support than India’s two most successful Dalit-led parties, the BSP in Uttar Pradesh and earlier the Republican Party of India in Maharashtra, or why it generated limited non-Dalit support, unlike the BSP, despite associating itself with an inclusive Tamil identity. A reason could be that, prior to the emergence of Dalit parties, multi-caste parties had built closer links with Dalits in Tamil Nadu than in Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra by offering Dalits more representation and benefits, and greater inclusion in their communitarian visions. The emergence of a stronger party among the lower-middle-caste Vanniars (the PMK, which polled 5.9 percent of the vote at its most successful) despite this group’s more extensive incorporation in larger parties suggests that the manner of Dalit incorporation did not preclude greater Dalit party growth, too. Neither did Dalit mobility through increased agrarian wages, education, government employment, access to social welfare goods, urbanization, and international migration, which was greater in Tamil Nadu than in Uttar Pradesh.
Panthers does not identify why VCK support was largely restricted to the Parayars (Tamil Nadu’s largest Dalit caste, accounting for 12.6 percent of the state’s population) although its founding leader was a Pallar. Nor does it examine how party strategies interacted with prior partisanship to generate greater support in Tamil Nadu’s northern districts, where the major leaders sometimes won elections, than elsewhere including the Kaveri delta where the Parayars are also numerous. (In view of this, it is puzzling that the research focused on the state’s south-central regions rather than also exploring the north). This could be because the parties which gained greatest Dalit support until the 1970s in the north (the DMK and the AIADMK) engaged Dalit interests less than their counterparts in the Kaveri delta, the communist parties. The book inadequately explores the reciprocal effects of VCK growth and Dalit socioeconomic mobility, and the changes, more extensive than in electoral support, that VCK mobilization enabled in popular aspirations and caste relations. It could have contributed more to understandings of Dalit empowerment and democratic deepening in twenty-first century India if it had systematically addressed some of these questions.
Narendra Subramanian
McGill University, Montreal, Canada