Social exclusion

In the existing literature the concept of mobilisation is used to analyse electoral strategies employed by political parties to obtain votes from a section of the population - in this case dalits. This aspect has been extensively covered for both Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh during the 1990s. The attempt here is to understand the response of political parties to fundamental shifts in the democratic arena in the 1990s in these two states: the decline of the single-dominant party system and the emergence of narrower political formations based on identity which has created a more competitive environment. The differential patterns of mobilisation employed by the BSP and the Congress in the two states using state power from above to put into effect programmes for dalits in order to enlarge their support base among them are examined.

The discourse of caste, in many instances, cannot be constituted in separation from discourses on several other aspects of the Indian social structure. This paper, however, seeks to understand a relationship of a different order, that between caste and crime which in colonial India came to be linked in socially significant ways. Administrative discourse in colonial India sought to classify castes lower in the hierarchy and aboriginal tribes as criminal tribes and castes. Colonial administrative and metropolitan ideas and practices were thus used to classify certain groups as 'criminal'. Even as the state specified due requirements in the classification of such groups, these were prompted by broader imperatives - the consolidation of the colonial administrative edifice.

In a modern market-oriented economy, possession of basic social and physical necessities of life can be considered the basis of a dividing line of different levels of deprivation. This paper, by using consecutive NFHS data (1992 and 1999), attempts to estimate levels of deprivation based on possessions at the household level of some basic amenities of life. It examines changes in levels of deprivation, categorised as 'abject deprivation', 'moderate deprivation', 'just above deprivation' and 'well above deprivation' across Indian states and also analyses changes in terms of caste and religion.