Mobilizing the Marginalized

Ethnic Parties without Ethnic Movements

Amit Ahuja

Modern South Asia

Explores how the parties chosen by the caste once known as untouchables (Dalits) do in elections and explains the inconsistencies of their success and failures
Offers insight into the incomplete, but irreversible change in Indian society and politics that mobilized some of the most marginalized citizens in the world and counts as one of the most significant achievements of Indian democracy
Develops a new theory on the often orthogonal relationship between social and political mobilization

Mobilizing the Marginalized

Ethnic Parties without Ethnic Movements

Amit Ahuja

Description

India's over 200 million Dalits, once called "untouchables," have been mobilized by social movements and political parties, but the outcomes of this mobilization are puzzling. Dalits' ethnic parties have performed poorly in elections in states where movements demanding social equality have been strong while they have succeeded in states where such movements have been entirely absent or weak. In Mobilizing the Marginalized, Amit Ahuja demonstrates that the collective action of marginalized groups—those that are historically stigmatized and disproportionately poor — is distinct. Drawing on extensive original research conducted across four of India's largest states, he shows, for the marginalized, social mobilization undermines the bloc voting their ethnic parties' rely on for electoral triumph and increases multi-ethnic political parties' competition for marginalized votes. He presents evidence showing that a marginalized group gains more from participating in a social movement and dividing support among parties than from voting as a bloc for an ethnic party.

Mobilizing the Marginalized

Ethnic Parties without Ethnic Movements

Amit Ahuja

Modern South Asia

List of Figures, Maps, and Tables
Preface
Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
1 Introduction
2 Mobilization and the Marginalized
3 Historical Dalit Social Mobilization
4 The Effects of Historical Dalit Social Mobilization
5 Dalit Party Performance and Bloc Voting
6 Dalit Social Mobilization and Bloc Voting
7 How Mobilization Type Shapes Dalit Welfare
8 The Identity Trap
9 Conclusion: Whither Dalit Politics?
Appendix A Focus Groups and Follow-up Interviews
Appendix B Locality-based Campaign Survey
Appendix C An Observational Study Assessing Caste Boundaries in the Indian
Marriage Market
Glossary
Index

Mobilizing the Marginalized

Ethnic Parties without Ethnic Movements

Amit Ahuja

Modern South Asia

Author Information

Amit Ahuja, Assistant Professor of Political Science, UC-Santa Barbara

Amit Ahuja is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research focuses on the processes of inclusion and exclusion in multiethnic societies. He has studied this within the context of ethnic parties and movements, military organization, intercaste marriage, and skin color preferences in South Asia. Professor Ahuja's research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Institute of Indian Studies, the National Bureau of Asian Research and the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars, the Hellman Family Foundation, the University of California at Santa Barbara, and the University of Michigan.

Mobilizing the Marginalized

Ethnic Parties without Ethnic Movements

Amit Ahuja

Modern South Asia

Reviews and Awards

Winner of the Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay Prize for best non-fiction from the New India Foundation

"Armed with substantial research and possessing intellectual energy to challenge conventional wisdom, Amit Ahuja provides a convincing counterpoint to fallacious understandings of the layered relationship between self-assertion movements and ethnic electoral mobilization." - Telegraph

"This book embarks on an important intellectual enterprise that crosses disciplinary boundaries. No wonder, then, that Ahuja arrives at an argument differing from much prior research that emphasizes how social movements sustain, rather than undermine, allied political parties. Ahuja expertly relies on an eclectic array of evidence, ranging from public opinion data to a survey experiment to sustained field research that includes scores of interviews and focus groups. Ahuja deftly distills lessons from his extensive fieldwork, which helps make this a volume of serious scholarship that is unusually readable and accessible." - Perspectives of Politics

"Amit Ahuja's Mobilizing the Marginalized (Oxford University Press) is a brilliant study of the interface between Dalit social and political movements." - Open Magazine

"Mobilizing the Marginalized is a theoretically rich book grounded in solid empirics that addresses important puzzles surrounding the social and political mobilization of India's Dalits. Bringing the agency of Dalits to the forefront of its analysis, it joins others studies connecting subaltern social movements with democratic politics and accountability in India. It also speaks to comparative literature on the mobilization of marginalized groups and offers fruitful avenues for investigating the experiences of marginalized groups outside of India." - Berkeley's South Asia Research Group's — South Asia blog

"a valuable contribution to the study of South Asian politics." - B. E. Donovan, University of Iowa, CHOICE