ABSTRACT
There is often a tendency to treat caste and communal conflicts and politics as separate. In fact,however,the degree to which one of these identities is salient in politics or conflicts at a particular time is often linked to the institutional and economic incentives supporting mobilization around the other, or to another identity such as language or class.1 André Béteille pointed out long ago for instance that communal politics seemed to take a HinduMuslim pattern in the north but have a caste pattern in the south, and he noted that even within the south there was substantial regional variation, with Muslim political mobilization strongest in those areas such as Kerala and parts of Andhra, where the non-Brahman movement had been weakest.2 In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the interconnectedness between the salience of caste and communal identities became even more apparent in the violent political contest between “mandir” and “mandal”:the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Sangh Parivar, on the one hand, pushing a policy of Hindutva (“Hinduness”), and parties representing a variety of backward and lower caste interests pushing a policy of caste reservations.
