Abstract
India is widely seen as one of the most promising emerging power in the world with China. The country is the largest democracy in the world; it has benefited from a strong economic growth over the last decade and counts more than a billion inhabitants. However India will have to face several political and social issues in the near future to fulfill all its great promises on the international scene. One of them refers to the idea of caste and its role played within the Indian society. Caste-based groups have gained an increasing influence in Indian politics since the independence of the former British Raj in 1947. Some may consider the collapse of the Old-Congress party in the late 1960s and the emergence of a competition between political parties for caste-based vote founded on populism as a key factor for such a trend.
Furthermore, the reservation policy for Scheduled castes and Tribes (SCs and STs) written down in the 1950's Constitution has made caste a central debate in the political arena, especially in relation to the claims for broadening this reservation policy to the Other Backward Classes (OBCs). Such wishes were finally granted by the 1979 Mandal commission report but would never be applied before the early 1990s, though briefly. Nonetheless, one may be interested in having a look first at what the idea of "caste" in Indian society does mean and highlighting the colonial roots of this new phenomenon in politics
