India's Silent Revolution: The Rise of the Lower Castes in North India

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Columbia University Press, 2003 - History - 505 pages
Since the 1960s a new assertiveness has characterized India's formerly silent majority, the lower castes that comprise more than two-thirds of the population. Today India's most populous state, Uttar Pradesh, is controlled by lower-caste politicians, as is Bihar, and lower-caste representation in national politics is growing inexorably. Jaffrelot argues that this trend constitutes a genuine "democratization" of India and that the social and economic effects of this "silent revolution" are bound to multiply in the years to come.
 

Contents

Introduction
1
CONGRESS IN POWER OR INDIA
11
party of the intelligentsia or party
48
Indira Gandhi the populist repertoire and the aborted
115
82
128
THE UNEVEN EMANCIPATION
144
Were there Low Caste movements in North India?
185
Caste as the building block of the Other Backward
214
QUOTA POLITICS
254
The quest for power and the first Janata Government
305
The Lok Dal fighting for Mandal
327
The Janata Dal and the rise to power of
335
The B S P party of
387
THE UPPER CASTES POLITICAL
426
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About the author (2003)

Christophe Jaffrelot is director of the Centre d'Etudes et Recherches Internationales (CERI), part of the Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques in Paris. He is the author of The Hindu Nationalist Movement and Indian Politics, which the New York Review of Books hailed as "a scholarly tour de force."

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