-The Hindu Limited impact in western Uttar Pradesh’s sugarcane belt After attracting thousands of farmers from Punjab and Uttar Pradesh to join a year-long agitation, farm union leaders were largely unable to leverage that mass support to tilt the results in the Assembly polls.  In Punjab, the union leaders who fought the elections are set to lose their deposits. In U.P., where the wider Samyukt Kisan Morcha (SKM) platform campaigned against the BJP...

-The Hindu Caste data will help us understand the contours of inequality and craft reasoned and inclusive policies The debate about whether the decennial Census should collect data on caste from individuals who fall into the administrative categories of ‘General’ and ‘Other Backward Classes’ (OBCs) has been argued by public intellectuals, politicians, and government administrators for decades. As the Census currently only collects data on ‘Scheduled Castes’ (SCs) and ‘Scheduled Tribes’ (STs),...

-Scroll.in India runs massive policy programs based on caste. Yet refuses to collect data on them. This paradox means the government is working blind. On July 20, the Modi government told Parliament that it had decided to not conduct a caste census. The only caste-wise data the next census would collate would be on Dalits and Adivasis, the same as every census in independent India’s history. India’s largest caste bloc – the...

-Livemint.com Politics in India has been based on caste in recent decades. But a rising middle class and increasing inequality within caste groups is paving the way for a class-based faultline. One cliché looms large in every election campaign in India: that caste politics may finally give way to class politics. But as counting begins on the day of the election verdict, caste subsumes every other factor, even in serious analyses of...

-The Indian Express Bihar Assembly election results 2020: Held against the backdrop of the pandemic, the Bihar contest was also one of the closest in recent times. In this post-poll survey, Lokniti-CSDS unpacks the many aspects of NDA’s narrow victory over the Mahagathbandhan — caste & community, confidence in Modi, and women voting more for NDA. As the counting of votes in Bihar continued through the day on Tuesday, the close nature...