Caste and Voting

A post on Kafila by Shivam Vij about post Mandal politics.

while I am at it, I want to link to the post about the god-awful celebrity ad urging people to vote.
What is interesting is to look at the ad in contrast to the Stephen Colbert clip with Kanishk Tharoor that feigns incredible surprise at the idea that India has one of the largest voting populations, that India has a large group of poor and rural voters. Of course, Kanishk Tharoor's reading of the indian poor voting against the BJP's India Shining campaign, that the poor voted against viscous free market policies, is an opportunistic and simplistic reading but that is not the point of this other problem.

In the context of the Colbert video that claims that rural India votes more than urban India, the 'is desh ka kuch nahin ho sakta' emerges as targetted to a largely urban crowd, a call to bring out the vote in the urban middle class. This politics becomes specifically important when you think about South Mumbai seat where you have the old BJP candidate from bhuleshwar versus the younger Milind deora and have added to that the old mumbai constituency that involves the Arun Gawli seat. The ad specifically wants to bring out the vote against the constituencies that traditionally come out and vote. Now I want to do some statistical research to verify this, but for now I need to go back to writing my thesis.