Seminar by Dr. Jayaseelan Raj

21 August 2024

Start

August 21, 2024 - 3:30 pm

End

August 21, 2024 - 5:00 pm

Address

Centre for Development Studies, Thiruvananthapuram   View map

Topic: Caste violence, electoral politics, and local democracy in Tamil Nadu

by Dr. Jayaseelan Raj, Associate Professor in Anthropology and Development, School of Global Affairs, King’s College London

 

Abstract:

Some of the recent literature on the lived experience of Indian democracy focuses on the grounded explanation for its resilient nature and relative stability despite the huge diversity, poverty, and inequality. This strand of scholarship further rationalises the relative success of Indian democracy compared, for example, to the emergence of autocracy in Pakistan. Such a focus deviates from the way the Indian democracy operates within the hierarchical logic of the violent caste system at the local level and the crisis for Indian democracy that it generates. This paper focuses on the violence against Dalit Panchayat presidents in Tamil Nadu in explaining the operation of caste as a system within India’s local democracy. The paper also discusses how the violence is connected to the caste-based agrarian political economy and corruption in infrastructural development projects. In Tamil Nadu, the violence against the Dalit presidents is carried out by the dominant OBCs, who perform and uphold both caste and anti-caste politics. While these intermediary castes often project themselves against the domination of the upper caste, they simultaneously act as caste Hindus of the villages, policing, maintaining, and reproducing caste order. The violence exposes the contradictions of local participatory democracy in a casteist society but also explains how the specific form of violence rationalises caste hierarchy and conditions the Dalit experience of oppression.