Rajni Kothari was the most influential Indian political sociologist of the postcolonial period, and the intellectual architect of the field now called Indian politics as a scholarly subject rather than a branch of constitutional commentary. His early work explained how a plural, deeply unequal, largely illiterate society had managed to sustain competitive democracy; his later work attacked the developmental state that democracy had produced. Across both phases he insisted that Indian politics be explained through India's own social structure — caste, community, region and locality — rather than through categories borrowed from Western political science.

Two ideas made his reputation. The first is the Congress “system”: an account of one-party dominance that treated the Congress not as a party in the European sense but as an arena of competition in its own right. The second is his reversal of the modernisation thesis on caste — the claim that democracy did not dissolve caste but politicised it.

Life and institution-building

Kothari was born in 1928 and trained in economics and political science, spending a period at the London School of Economics before returning to teach in India. His decisive act was institutional: in 1963 he founded the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS) in Delhi, which became the country's premier site for empirical election studies, survey research and political analysis, and the home of a distinctive Indian tradition of interpretive social science. In 1980 he helped found Lokayan, a forum linking activists and researchers, and he edited and wrote extensively for journals of opinion. He also worked with international networks on alternative development and human rights, and served in public advisory roles. He died in 2015.

The Congress “system”

In a 1964 article and then at length in Politics in India (1970), Kothari argued that India after 1947 had not a one-party state but a one-party dominant system with genuine internal competition. The Congress functioned as a party of consensus: it contained factions representing most significant social interests, absorbed dissent by co-opting leaders, and moved as an aggregating coalition rather than an ideological bloc. Around it stood parties of pressure — the socialists, the communists, the Jana Sangh, regional formations — which rarely displaced the Congress but exerted what Kothari called a margin of pressure, shifting policy by influencing factions inside the ruling party and by threatening its dominance at the margin.

The system's key mechanism was that the real contest occurred within the Congress. Factional competition at district and state level performed the work that inter-party competition performs elsewhere, and the party's internal plurality gave it an unusual capacity to represent a diverse society. Kothari also traced the system's decline: the centralisation of the party under Indira Gandhi, the destruction of intermediary local leadership, the split of 1969, the Emergency of 1975–77, and the eventual arrival of coalition politics.

Caste in politics, politics in caste

Kothari's edited volume Caste in Indian Politics (1970) reframed the most persistent question in Indian sociology. Modernisation theory expected caste to wither under universal suffrage, urbanisation and secular law. Kothari observed the opposite: caste supplied the ready-made organisational networks through which political mobilisation actually happened. His famous formulation is that it is not politics that becomes caste-ridden but caste that becomes politicised.

The consequences run both ways, and the distinction between them is the point examiners look for:

  • Caste in politics — caste identity is used as a resource for electoral mobilisation: candidate selection, alliance-building, the appeal to community sentiment, and the vote bank, the bloc of dependent voters delivered by a dominant local patron (a term M. N. Srinivas introduced and Kothari made central to political analysis).
  • Politics in caste — participation transforms caste itself. Caste associations become modern pressure groups with offices, funds and publications; local jatis federate into wider clusters to reach electoral scale; ritual rank loses ground to numerical strength; and the idiom of caste shifts from purity and pollution toward interest, entitlement and representation.

Kothari identified three levels of political entry — an entry phase in which elite castes dominate, a fission phase of factional splitting within them, and a consolidation phase in which excluded castes organise their own platforms. This furnished the standard explanation for the fragmentation of the Congress vote, the rise of backward-caste and Dalit politics after the Mandal period, and the growth of regional parties — outcomes he read as a genuine, if turbulent, democratic deepening rather than a decay of politics.

Fragmentation, the state and development

From the late 1970s Kothari's tone changed from analytical optimism to sharp critique. In State Against Democracy (1988) and Politics and the People (1989) he argued that the Indian state had detached itself from the society it claimed to serve: increasingly centralised, technocratic, coercive and allied with a narrow class of beneficiaries. The development model was his central target. Large dams, mining, industrial displacement and the Green Revolution had, he argued, produced growth that dispossessed the very groups in whose name it was undertaken, creating what he described as a large mass of people treated as surplus to the economy.

This led him to non-party political formations: environmental, tribal, women's, civil-liberties and anti-displacement movements that operated outside electoral politics and outside the party system. In his 1984 essay on the non-party political process he read these as a new site of democratic energy — locally rooted, ethically driven, and capable of raising questions that parties had stopped asking. Alongside this came a broader argument for humane governance, decentralisation, ecological limits and non-Western models of modernity, and a defence of human rights understood as the rights of the poor rather than a legal abstraction.

Criticisms

Kothari's work has been challenged from several directions. Marxist critics, including A. R. Desai, argued that his focus on caste, faction and identity obscured class formation and the material interests of the bourgeoisie and landed elites. Others hold that the Congress-system model was a description of a specific conjuncture that lost explanatory value once coalition and then single-party majoritarian politics emerged, and that it romanticised Congress factionalism as representation. His enthusiasm for non-party formations has been questioned for overestimating the scale, coherence and staying power of movements that were often small, donor-dependent and unable to convert protest into policy. Finally, the celebration of the politicisation of caste can slide into accepting identity mobilisation uncritically, leaving little to say about its exclusionary and violent forms.

Legacy

Kothari established that Indian democracy had to be studied empirically and on its own terms, and CSDS institutionalised that conviction; the modern tradition of Indian election studies descends directly from it. His caste-and-politics framework remains the standard vocabulary for discussing electoral mobilisation, and his later writing anticipated the environmental and rights-based critiques of development that dominated the following decades.

For the UPSC answer

Kothari is best used as the bridge between Paper II's caste chapter and its politics chapter, so keep both halves of his argument ready. State the Congress “system” precisely — one-party dominance, party of consensus, parties of pressure, margin of pressure — and then trace its breakdown through centralisation, the Emergency and coalition politics, since questions often ask about the decline of the Congress system rather than its structure. On caste, the single most valuable line you can write is his inversion: democracy politicised caste rather than abolishing it, so distinguish caste in politics from politics in caste and give concrete illustrations such as caste associations, federation of jatis and the Mandal-era rise of backward-caste parties. Attribute the vote-bank concept to Srinivas and note that Kothari analytically extended it. Balance the answer by adding the Marxist objection that class is displaced by caste in his framework, and finish with his later critique of the state and of development, which links him directly to questions on non-party political formations and new social movements.

References & further reading

  1. Kothari, R. (1970). Politics in India. New Delhi: Orient Longman.
  2. Kothari, R. (ed.) (1970). Caste in Indian Politics. New Delhi: Orient Longman.
  3. Kothari, R. (1964). The Congress ‘System’ in India. Asian Survey, 4(12).
  4. Kothari, R. (1988). State Against Democracy: In Search of Humane Governance. Delhi: Ajanta Publications.
  5. Kothari, R. (1984). The Non-Party Political Process. Economic and Political Weekly, 19(5).
  6. Kothari, R. (1989). Politics and the People: In Search of a Humane India. Delhi: Ajanta Publications.