Discuss the social bases of political mobilization in Independent India. Has some change occurred in these during the last 60-70 years?

Early decades

The national movement bequeathed a coalitional Congress (Rajni Kothari’s Congress system): Brahmins and other elites plus dependent rural votes, with socialist and communist class pockets. Language reorganised states. Farmer and landed dominant castes (Srinivas) captured state politics. Religion was never absent (Hindu Code debates, communal riots) but was not always the master frame.

The long shift

Mandal (1990) and Indra Sawhney (1992) made OBC the central arithmetic in the Hindi belt; Christophe Jaffrelot called it a silent revolution. Dalit parties (BSP) turned Ambedkarite identity into a vote. Mandir politics from the 1980s–90s recentred religious polarisation. Regional parties (DMK, TDP, Shiv Sena, Akalis, TRS/BRS) mobilised linguistic and sub-national pride. After 1991, a new middle class and private media changed campaign style. The last fifteen years added direct benefit transfer, welfare delivery and digital campaigning as a social base of their own: the beneficiary household.

Women vote more autonomously in some surveys; they are not yet a single bloc. Class remains: farmers’ protests, union belts, and informal labour, but class is usually spoken through caste and region. Yogendra Yadav described a democratic upsurge of the socially disadvantaged; later work asked whether that upsurge was captured by new elites of the same groups.

Social media and WhatsApp do not invent new bases so much as intensify religious and caste publics that already existed. Farmer identity in 2020–21 showed that class can still break through when prices and law hit a landed constituency. Adivasi belts mobilise around jal-jungle-zameen more than around a national Left.

• Change, then: from one-party accommodation to competitive caste-religious federalism, then toward a national religious-welfare combination—without the older bases disappearing.