The “General Category” Is India’s Greatest Scam

In the previous episode of Past Continuous, we looked at how India's "middle class" is actually just a tiny group of upper caste elites. (Watch here: • Does The Indian Middle... )
In this episode, we explain how this group managed to "forget" their caste while converting their traditional caste privileges into success in the modern world. And we explore how this collective "forgetting" affected everyone else in India.
India Ink is a public history project that simplifies complicated ideas from Indian history that are relevant to today's debates. More at indiaink.org.
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Corrections:
1. In our section about the Mandal Commission's population estimates, we said the Commission estimated that the OBC population was 56%. It's actually 52%.
2. In the video, we quote a 2009 study as saying that applicants with upper caste names were twice as likely to get selected as applications with Dalit names. The original paper actually says the odds of a Dalit being called for an interview were 0.68 of the odds of an upper caste applicant. The full paper is accessible here: dalitstudies.or...
3. We say that reservations is only in the Directive Principles. That isn't correct. It's also mentioned in Articles 15(4) and 16(4) of the Constitution where they were still seen as an "exception". This has since changed, most notably through the case of NM Thomas where the Supreme Court clarified that these shouldn't be exceptions but were fundamental to equality. For more about how the jurisprudence has changed, see indconlawphil....
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Sources:
1. Source for IIT Admissions data from 1969 and 2011: web.mit.edu/ske...
2. Source for data about upper caste in general category in IIT Madras in 2018: www.newindiane...
3. Gender ratio at IIT: economictimes....
4. Upper castes in courts: timesofindia.i...
5. Upper castes in newsrooms: www.newslaundr...
6. Upper castes in corporate boards: www.epw.in/jou...
7. Studies about caste discrimination in elite educational institutions:
journals.sagep...
www.epw.in/eng...
www.epw.in/jou...
timesofindia.i...
8. For examples of violence against Dalits for riding horses, just google it.
9. Subramanian, Ajantha. 2019. The Caste of Merit: Engineering Education in India www.jstor.org/...
10. Deshpande, Satish. “Towards a Biography of the ‘General Category.’” Economic & Political Weekly, no. 15, 2013. www.jstor.org/.... Our summary of the paper: indiaink.org/2...
11. Satyanarayana, K. 2014. “Dalit Reconfiguration of Caste: Representation, Identity and Politics,” Critical Quaterly 56 (3). 46-61 onlinelibrary....
12. Mandal Commission Report ncbc.nic.in/Use...
13. Ambedkar, BR. 1936. Annihilation of Caste www.mea.gov.in...
14. Galanter, Marc. 1984. Competing Equalities. www.amazon.co....
15. Omvedt, Gail. 1990. "Twice-Born Riot Against Democracy," 1990 www.epw.in/jou...
16. Roy, Rajat. 2020. "From Postcolonial Irony to Dalit Truth: A Perspective on Experience," EPW www.epw.in/jou...
Music: Quasi Motion by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License. incompetech.com/