Historical Complexity and Evolution of Constitutional Democracy through Caste and Social Justice Political

Govind Dhaske, The University of Montana
Haresh Dalvi, School of Social Work, Grand Valley State University (GVSU)

Indian democracy has functioned as a historical site of recurrent caste conflicts, later centered around constitutional social justice. These structural dynamics emerging from historical caste hierarchies have been visible in movements, solidarities, stand-offs, and caste-based struggles. These processes have been generating legal innovations, political recalibrations, and relentless social contestation. This paper employs complexity theory to conceptualize India’s constitutional democracy as a complex system influenced by legal frameworks, social identities, and political mobilizations that interact in non-linear, path-dependent ways (Byrne & Callaghan, 2014). The objectified caste-based contestations, roughly beginning from the Poona Pact (1932) about representations of Dalits to the recent creamy layer expansion with sub-categorization (Behera et al., 2021; Jaffrelot, 2005), are neither isolated incidents nor anomalies. Surpassing a static structural classification, caste struggles are central drivers of Indian democratic evolution. This paper traces the historical trajectory of recursive constitutionalism, illustrating how constitutional democracy is an objective as well as a Bourdieuvian field where caste hierarchies are simultaneously contested, reformed, and perpetuated. At the center of this paper is the positionality of caste struggles within the historical processes, where it has been maintaining friction while sustaining the constitutional democracy to transcend the historical value-based order. The recursive caste struggles have produced constitutional and social narratives objectified to social justice. Using the lens of historical institutionalism (Pierson, 2004), the paper expands how the caste conflict serves to both strengthen and advance democracy and adds complexity through structural reproduction (Chatterjee, 2004). The dynamics of structure and agency, as understood from the complex interdependence, yield social change trajectories consolidating the constitutional democracy. India’s experience offers broader insights into the conjoined capacity-fragility of constitutional democracies when relentlessly confronted with deeply entrenched and dynamically evolving caste hierarchies.

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 Presented in Session 192. Ethnoracial Stratification as Privilege