Talk:Caste politics

Biased

The gist of the article is Forward caste people prospered via nation building and Lower caste people prospered due to corruption. But the truth is 90% of corrupt money is with Forward caste people. See List of scandals in India — Preceding unsigned comment added by 4thaugust1932 (talk • contribs) 07:23, 4 September 2012 (UTC)

I find this article to be highly unreliable whether lower caste or upper caste. Both are simply doing politics on this page..

Key Statistic

This is a good informative statistic to add, maybe in the initial section. "Caste is a major factor in Indian elections. More than 60% of people still vote according to their caste," says Utkarsh Sinha of the Lucknow-based Centre for Contemporary Studies and Research.

news source : http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/8000578.stm —Preceding unsigned comment added by 79.70.254.154 (talk) 12:25, 17 April 2009 (UTC)

Vote Bank politics

The language used when describing DMK, shows a certain bias, which goes against wikipedia's policy on neutral point of view. It should definitely be rephrased to meet this standard.--Harish89 (talk) 19:36, 14 August 2009 (UTC)

This is very very shame that still our nation runs on castism, Earlier some groups dominated some groups and now its just everse, —Preceding unsigned comment added by 119.82.102.101 (talk) 06:28, 7 September 2010 (UTC)

Critiques of the Current Page

• We suggest providing more background information and historical understandings of the caste system in India in the beginning of the page. The readers would thus have a better grasp on just what caste is before they read about the specifics

• We also would suggest providing a visual brake down of the caste structure for the readers to better comprehend the structure and hierarchy of this particular system

• It would also be a good idea to limit the jargon and technical talk to help better make the page clearer and more tangible to the lay readers.

• If we were to rewrite this page we would use this structure…

Structure

• Introduction

o Definition

o History

o Origin

• Chart of Indian Cast System

• How its affected Politics?

• Consequences of caste stem

o Specific examples

• Caste

o Comparative analysis of other caste system through out the world

• Religion

-However, we are still improving this outline.

--Meighon--Twang617 —Preceding undated comment added 22:13, 20 September 2011 (UTC).

Hi Meighno and Twang617,

Most of what you are proposing already exists in the entry Caste System in India. You should refer to it, but you do not want to repeat it. This entry is instead meant for a discussion of Caste Politics -- i.e. information about caste-based parties, information about how caste influences voting behavior or political activism or political violence, its interaction with clientelism, its interactions with the reservations system, etc. We need a better entry on how caste plays out in politics, as there is already a good one on caste in general.

Prof M Johnson (talk) 18:28, 21 September 2011 (UTC)

Hi Meighon and Twang617, I agree with Prof Johnson here. Do concentrate on the politics part more, with emphasis on caste based party system, vote bank politics, reservations, etc. Lynch7 18:18, 24 September 2011 (UTC)

Meg and I feel that we need to revise the introductory paragraph and present some brief and basic information on what a caste system is and its structure. This would help better illustrate how Indian politics is influenced by the caste system. --Meighon--Twang617 —Preceding undated comment added 04:20, 30 September 2011 (UTC).

Yes, definitely the lead needs improvement. But what I suggest is this: Work on the introductory paragraph in the last. This is because, the lead paragraph(s) are supposed to summarize the whole article. So, I suggest you work on the main body of the article first, and summarize it after your work is over. Lynch7 08:33, 30 September 2011 (UTC)

Yes, Tianyi and I are currently trying to find good resources to pull from for this topic for a better understudying. Do you have any suggestions? Meighon (talk) 05:43, 6 October 2011 (UTC)

Hmm, I don't know what books you have at your perusal there, so you can probably just have a general look in a library or something. In web sources, you can have a look at the archives of The Hindu, Indian express, and the Times of India, among other newspapers. Make sure to use the search field in those websites. Its a vast resource, and it might be difficult to search, but do give it a try. Lynch7 06:14, 6 October 2011 (UTC)

Here's our bibliography for this article. It is a work in progress. Any suggestions you have would be welcomed.Meighon (talk) 21:43, 6 October 2011 (UTC) Twang617 (talk)

1. Bayly, Susan. 1997. Caste, Society and Politics in India from the 18th Century to the modern age. London: New York: Verso.
2. Singer, Milton and Bernard S. Cohn, eds. 1968. Structure and Change in Indian Society. Chicago: Aldine Publishing Co.
3. Rao Anupama. 2009. The Caste Question: Dalits and the Politics of Modern India. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
4. Rai, Shirin. 1998. Class, Caste and Gender-Women in Parliament in India. IDEA’s Handbook: Women in Parliament: Beyond Numbers. 1-8.
5. Sirinivas, M. N. 1957. Caste in Modern India. The Journal of Asian Studies. 16 (4): 529-548.

Meg and I finished a summary of our improvements for this article. We briefly introduce the concept of caste system and its potential political influences. Caste system shapes the voting patterns and generates different influences in different regions of India. Caste system has a strong influence on the political representation of women and the modern caste system functions as a political process that deliberately create inequality. We will expand our articles and research for more examples and details soon. We are likely to add new ideas or make changes to the structure of the article as well. Twang617 (talk) Meighon (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 03:57, 21 October 2011 (UTC).

Seems perfect. Do go on! Lynch7 12:47, 21 October 2011 (UTC)

Essay-like structure

Hi Meg and Tianyi, I appreciate your work on this page. I must, however, point out that it looks more like an essay than an article :). For starters, section headings should be simple and to the point. Instead of saying "a Trajectory", simply make use of words like Overview or Background, or something like that. Next, insert some Images if you feel appropriate (and if you find suitable free images). I'll try to make some minor tweaks in the meanwhile. Good luck. Lynch7 18:17, 29 November 2011 (UTC)

Good presentation today. I agree, however, with Neelix’s comments that it isn’t quite structured as a wiki should be yet. In addition, it isn’t obvious why it is in the order it is in, the ordering seems a bit off. In fact, you likely need to combine your paragraphs.

I agree with Neelix. Here is my suggestion for changing it.....

Caste and Political Power

Access to Power

How caste influences access to power….

Clientelism

How caste plays into clientelism…

Caste Politics in Flux

Brief paragraph stating that changes in Indian economy and politics have resulted in shifts in caste’s role in politics

Political Competition

Talk about how greater party competition has altered role of caste in politics – combine your two contributions to this topic Put your info about declining patron-client ties here

Economic Liberalization

Put your info on how economic change has changed caste politics here

Caste-Based Mobilization

Talk about how caste-based parties have come to power or challenged system –again requires a combining of your work

Controversial Issues

Reservations System

Put your Mandel Commission here and link to reservations in India

Peer Review

Hey guys, I really like the article and the information you guys put in it. I fixed the grammatical errors and such. I like that everything I read was properly cited and I think you did a very good job addressing the issues that exit in the Indian Political System as far as Caste Politics is concerned. I like that you have the criticisms at the end but I think that you need to expand more on that sections and find some positive criticisms as well. Also I think you need to move the Mandal Commission,Voter Bank Politics,Before 1980s section before you start talking about corruption and electoral politics.You also need to discuss the post independence period before. I think you need to give more background information about caste politics in India before discussing the issues. Good luck! Kkhari29 (talk) 21:24, 12 November 2011 (UTC)

Hello,

So there is a lot of information, which is really good, but the page looks really plain and blocky. I recommend putting in more subsections or headers, so that it may make it even more easier to navagate. Photos would also be a nice touch, possibly a chart of the Caste system with Indian specific references would be great. Some sentences need restructuring to make the article flow better. I will email you a word doc with proposed changes, since most of them aren't necessarily gramatical changes and need your background on the subject. I agree with Kkhari29's suggestion to move the Mandal Commission,Voter Bank Politics,Before 1980s section. Also the Criticism and Before 1980's section could be expanded or made in to a subsection instead of it's own header.

Best of Luck,

Marauz (talk) 05:49, 13 November 2011 (UTC)

Hi, You should probably move the vote banking section up and incorporate it into the section on Caste and Electoral Politics. This is a general issue, you need to not only add but also edit and move around what others have done.

You should add wiki hyper links to anything, like the Congress Party, that is also an article on Wikipedia.

Also, I moved your intro into the intro section of the article, but it needs to be expanded. It needs to be a summary of your entire article. Prof M Johnson (talk) 20:42, 11 November 2011 (UTC)

You also need to think about the order of your article, why is the Mandel Commission at the bottom when it is older than some of the issues you talk about earlier?

Also, why cover corruption before you talk about post-independence politics? In general, you need a better outline. What about talking 1st about history of caste in politics under the British, then about caste when the Congress dominated, specifically about caste, patron-client politics, and vote banking. Then you can move into caste in politics since the weakening of Congress which include your talk about corruption but also would necessarily include a discussion of caste-based parties and how they have challenged the Congress party which you don't yet seem to have. Prof M Johnson (talk) 20:51, 11 November 2011 (UTC)

GA Review

This review is transcluded from Talk:Caste politics in India/GA1. The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.

Reviewer: Piotrus (talk · contribs) 00:39, 2 December 2011 (UTC) GA review – see WP:WIAGA for criteria

1. Is it reasonably well written?

   A. Prose quality:

   Seems fine to this ESL.

   B. MoS compliance for lead, layout, words to watch, fiction, and lists:

   1) Per WP:LEAD, lead should provide a comprehensive overview of the rest of the article. It doesn't (for example, the article has a large section on corruption, which is not mentioned in the lead). Also, lead should not introduce new information not covered later; currently it seems to begin with the introduction to the "caste system in India", which instead should have its own subsection. 2) Per WP:BTW, many more blue links are needed. 3) Section titles need to be decapitalized (see WP:CAPITALIZATION). They are also on occasion too "artsy" and not informative enough; for example "Caste Politics: A Trajectory" should likely be just "History". 4) The history section should also be structured more chronologically, why is it that after "By the early 1990s", we see "In the 1951 election" and then again "In the 1990s"? I also don't see how this section is logically different from "Caste Politics in the Post-Independence Period", both seem like a likely candidate for a partial merge and rewrite. There likely needs to be one clear history (of caste politics, not of the caste system) section, at the very least. 5) "colleges across the country" - shouldn't that be universities? I think India system of education is mostly focused on the university type of institution, not the US-centric college.

2. Is it factually accurate and verifiable?

   A. References to sources:

   References are not adequately informative. Presumably book references are missing page number; presumably because many refs only have the author and title, which is not enough to be able to distinguish between book or journal. Some references only have titles and urls. One reference is to another Wikipedia article, which is not allowed (Wikipedia cannot be the source for itself). In some parts of text, there are useless ibid notes.

   B. Citation of reliable sources where necessary:

   Multiple paragraphs and entire subsections are missing references.

   C. No original research:

   Potential fail, as there is much unreferenced content that could be ORish.

3. Is it broad in its coverage?

   A. Major aspects:

   I don't think the article is broad enough. Which parties are associated with each castes, for example? One of the things I'd expect to find here would be an answer to this, perhaps in a nice table / chart format. If some information on which party is related to which caste is present in this article, it is most certainly not found in one place. Worse, untouchables are mentioned once outside the lead; Brahmin's - three times, and other castes like Kshatriyas, Vaishyas and Shudras are not even mentioned in the article at all! I frankly cannot phantom how can this article lay any claim to comprehensivness and broadness if three out of five official castes are not mention in name. And no, just adding them to the one introductory sentence does not suffice; I'd expect to see a dedicated paragraph, at least, about the situation of each case in the Indian politics. Some good references were suggested on talk which have not been explored. Bayly has a chapter of welfare, this word is not even present here. Ghanshyam Shah "Caste and democratic politics in India" (2004) seems like an excellent work on the subject. There is a wealth of other easily accessible sources, some of which strive for an overview of the subject and whose analysis would likely suggest how to structure a comprehensive article. Overall much of the content in this article needs to be logically restuctured - at present there is no logical flow, and the article looks like a hodge-podge of random facts about caste politics in India, arranged mostly at random. In other words, what the article tells to the reader (me) is: "caste players a role in Indian politics. Here are some examples, in no particular order. The end." Once the structure is sorted, expansion of certain aspects is needed. On a final note here I note that there have been good suggestions in the past, and many of the issues I raise have been noted by others.

   B. Focused:

   Everything seems to be related to the subject in question, if in an often messy way.

4. Is it neutral?

   Fair representation without bias:

   No bias detected.

5. Is it stable?

   No edit wars, etc:

   Check.

6. Does it contain images to illustrate the topic?

   A. Images are copyright tagged, and non-free images have fair use rationales:

   No images, no problem.

   B. Images are provided where possible and appropriate, with suitable captions:

   No. At the very least, some images from Caste system in India could be imported. Not that that article has great images, but some effort to improve the imageless state should be undertaken.

7. Overall:

   Pass or Fail:

   On hold awaiting responses. Please let me know if anything is not clear; please consider pinging me on my talk page to ensure I am notified ASAP. If something is addressed, please make a clear note of that both here and in the edit summary. If I am not notified of any changes on my talk page, I may not revisit this page before a week or so, when I will assess the progress made based on the comments here, and if no rationale have been presented for extra time, I'll pass or fail the article based on its state at that time. --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk to me} 01:21, 2 December 2011 (UTC)

Thank you for all your helpful suggestions. Both my partner and I will try to address all we can in the limited time we have left on this project. We have changed the struture and intro and hopelfuly you find the flow of the article more user friendly. However, if you have time to help us clean up some of the citations you were refering to or know of any images that would help the understanding of our artical, we would really appreciate it.--Meighon (talk) 04:01, 6 December 2011 (UTC)

I am sorry, I had a very busy few days and was unable to help you with the citations. If that was the only issue standing between this article and the GA status, I'd have fixed that and passed, sadly, this is not the case. As I see no further comments (requests for extension, questions, etc.), as announced previously, I am re-reviewing the article after a week mark. In particular, I am not seeing any clear response to my question about the broadness of coverage (or lack of therefore). And sadly, while I see more content, it is poorly formatted. This article has no WP:LEAD anymore, and much of the added content is unreferenced. I am afraid I have to fail it. That said, if the students intend to do some last dash editing before the course is due, I would be willing to rereview it. --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk to me} 23:20, 13 December 2011 (UTC)

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Reverting

A spate of disruptive addition on the article completely deteriorated it.I have reverted to last best version by @Utcursch:; the administrator.I will take time to structure it nicely with sources in coming time. Heba Aisha (talk) 14:21, 3 August 2020 (UTC)

• Reverted too far.....but later realised that some useful contribution was also there so reverted to last version by @Sitush:.Heba Aisha (talk) 14:36, 3 August 2020 (UTC)

Outdated info

I will work on it as it contains info of pre mandal era .since then a lot of development has taken place Heba Aisha (talk) 01:26, 7 August 2020 (UTC)

Wikipedia Ambassador Program course assignment

This article is the subject of an educational assignment at Mills College supported by WikiProject Politics and the Wikipedia Ambassador Program during the 2011 Q3 term. Further details are available on the course page.

The above message was substituted from {{WAP assignment}} by PrimeBOT (talk) on 16:06, 2 January 2023 (UTC)

India Education Program course assignment

This article was the subject of an educational assignment supported by Wikipedia Ambassadors through the India Education Program.

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Wiki Education assignment: Gender and Politics in Global Perspective

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 15 January 2023 and 26 April 2023. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Sefinkel (article contribs). Peer reviewers: Kamara03, Metroblum.

— Assignment last updated by A.lejla (talk) 19:20, 4 May 2023 (UTC)

Wiki Education assignment: India in Global Studies

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 18 January 2023 and 14 May 2023. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Shriya175 (article contribs). Peer reviewers: Reneemessinger, Akankaria.

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Wiki Education assignment: Gender, Race and Computing

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 25 September 2023 and 15 December 2023. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): !777francis777! (article contribs). Peer reviewers: NavyBear314.

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Wiki Education assignment Edits

Hi everyone,

Here are the edits that I made to the article after reading through the talk page

1. Article restructuring: I saw that the overall structure of the article was a major issue described in the talk page, and I tried to address this by moving the "History" section to right after the Lead because it seems to make more sense to first talk about the history before going into other details. I also moved the "Political Corruption" section from the "History" section into the "Caste and political power" section since it seemed more like something that talks about how castes play a role in politics rather than how we got to where we are now in terms of the role of castes in politics. I recognize that there are still lots of other structure issues with the article, but I hope these changes that I made helped improve the situation.
2. Rewriting the Lead: I saw from the GA review that the lead was inadequate in terms of describing the content covered in the article, so I rewrote the Lead to address this issue. I kept some of the text from the original Lead. I also wrote this lead while keeping the restructuring work that I did in mind.
3. Adding images: The GA review also noted the lack of images in the article, and I tried to improve on this situation by adding two images: one of the caste system in India to the Lead and another of Mulayam Singh Yadev—the founder of the Samajwadi Party— to the "History" section. I also wanted to add an image for the "Political Corruption" section, but there seems to be a lot of un-cited material in that section. I didn't want to add an image catering to content that might be later removed.

I hope these changes helped improve the overall quality of this article. Please let me know if there is anything that I need to change about the edits that I made. Thank you! !777francis777! (talk) 01:31, 3 December 2023 (UTC)

Neutrality dispute

@Nizil Shah: Why is this article's neutrality being disputed? Jarble (talk) 20:45, 5 February 2024 (UTC)

The article has changed a lot since 2016 when I added the tag. So the tag may not be perfectly relevant now but still there are places where the article does not seem neutral. For example: The very nature of caste politics inherently means that there are no boundaries between "civil society" and "political society", as demonstrated by the proliferation caste mafia. The mafia dons became mayors, ministers, and even members of Parliament. Therefore, there was no alternative to fight against these mafia figures and political brokers. Because rule of law was perceived to be a mechanism of upper caste control, corruption used by caste mafia became popularly accepted, as it was perceived to be a means to achieve lower caste empowerment. The corruption elevated to such a level that nearly all elected officials in some towns and regions were also criminals. The upper castes who had used their control over the state to discreetly plunder its institutions for their own gain, were now replaced by the mafia dons who now openly pillaged the state institutions. Many of these elected ministers/mafia dons were jailed for the illegal practices they employed; however, this was widely touted as the upper castes trying to regain dominance by eliminating supporters. Corruption and politics became so common that at a time it was not uncommon for election results to be contested from a prison cell. This uncited paragraph is not neutral in language and looks like opinion. There is a clear need to rewrite entire article scholarly references.-Nizil (talk) 06:03, 6 February 2024 (UTC)

Still you may removed the tag if you feel it is not needed anymore.- Nizil (talk) 06:05, 6 February 2024 (UTC)