Breaking down the question

The question has two linked parts. The first asks for the social bases of political mobilization — the collective identities and cleavages around which parties and leaders gather electoral support in India: caste, religion, region, language, tribe, class and, increasingly, gender. The second part asks whether these bases have changed over the roughly seven decades since Independence, which demands a comparison between the early republic and the present.

Political mobilization means the process by which social groups are organised into political action — turned into voters, supporters, agitators and constituencies. The examiner wants the sociologist's eye: not a list of parties, but an account of the social raw material on which Indian democracy has worked, and how that material has been reshaped by democratic competition itself.

At ten marks the answer must be compact yet cover both the enduring bases and the direction of change.

How to approach it

  • Define political mobilization and identify the principal social bases — caste, religion, region and language, tribe, and class.
  • Explain how, in the early decades, mobilization worked through vertical patron-client networks and dominant castes.
  • Trace the shift towards horizontal caste consolidation, the rise of backward-class and Dalit assertion, and identity politics.
  • Note newer bases — regional and linguistic parties, gender, and a fragmented middle class.
  • Conclude that the bases persist but their form has changed decisively.

The political parties, pressure groups and political elite note supplies the institutional backdrop.

Model answer

Political mobilization in India has always worked upon a dense fabric of social identities rather than on individual, atomised voters. The principal social bases have been caste, religion, region and language, tribe, and — more weakly — class. What has changed over the last six or seven decades is not the existence of these bases but the manner in which they are organised and expressed.

In the early decades after 1947, mobilization was largely vertical. Rajni Kothari described a Congress system in which dominant landed castes, acting as local patrons, delivered the votes of their dependents through networks of clientage. Caste operated less as a horizontal solidarity than as a chain of patronage linking village to state. M. N. Srinivas captured the parallel process by which dominant castes translated their ritual and economic weight into political power.

Over time this gave way to horizontal mobilization. As democratic competition deepened, castes began to organise as broad blocs pursuing shares of power and reservation — what Kothari called the politicisation of caste and the secularisation of caste, whereby caste lost ritual meaning but gained political function. The Mandal moment consolidated the Other Backward Classes as a mobilising category, while Dalit assertion produced parties built explicitly on ex-untouchable identity. Yogendra Yadav documented this as a second democratic upsurge, in which the participation of the lower orders overtook that of the elite.

Newer bases have since emerged. Regional and linguistic identities have sustained powerful state-level parties, giving rise to coalition politics at the centre. Religion has been mobilised more overtly, sharpening communal cleavages. Gender is a slowly rising axis, with parties courting women as a distinct constituency through targeted welfare. Class, though always weaker than caste in India, surfaces in agrarian and informal-sector mobilisation.

Thus the social bases have both persisted and transformed: caste, religion and region remain central, but mobilization has shifted from vertical patronage to horizontal identity assertion, from single-party dominance to fragmented, competitive and coalition politics, and from elite management of the masses to the masses' own upsurge. The bases are old; their political grammar is new.

Examiner's perspective

The examiner rewards candidates who treat this as a two-part question and answer both halves explicitly — the bases first, then the change. Scripts that merely list identities without charting the historical shift lose the analytical marks the second clause carries.

Command of the key sociological vocabulary — vertical and horizontal mobilization, dominant caste, politicisation and secularisation of caste, the democratic upsurge — signals conceptual depth, and crediting Kothari, Srinivas and Yadav accurately raises the answer above a journalistic account. The strongest short answers close with the paradox that the bases endure while their form is transformed, which is precisely the change the question probes.