Ground Report | New Delhi: What are castes system in India; India’s caste system is among the oldest forms of social stratification that have survived over the years. This system that divides Hindus into rigid hierarchical groups based on their karma (work) and dharma (the Hindu word for religion, although here it means duty) is over 3,000 years old and very complex.
What are castes system in India
India’s caste system is among the world’s oldest forms of surviving social stratification. The Indian society is socio-politically stratified. The caste system has prevailed for ages and arranges the people into social strata or classes.
Though this system is similar to the concept of racism that prevails in western countries where people are discriminated against on the basis of their skin colour, in India, people are socially differentiated on the basis of tribe, region, class, and religion. This means that when a child is born their status on the social hierarchy gets fixed on the basis of the caste he/she is born into.
The Indian caste system has a very complex and rigid hierarchy, determined from birth and traditionally passed on in a hereditary way by people who performed the same work like their ancestors. The origin of this system remains uncertain, but it is believed to have emerged between the years 1500 BC and 600 BC, at which time a kind of code of conduct was drawn up that designated different types of punishment for the same crime, but whose punishment depended on the caste of each.
What about work quotas?
In recent years, there have been demands from various communities to be recognized as an OBC. In 2016, there were violent protests by the Jat community in Haryana and the Patel community-led large protests in Gujarat in 2015 demanding access to the quotas provided for the castes.
Both are thriving and politically dominant communities, but they argue that much of their communities are poor and suffering. Some say the caste system would already have disappeared if politicians didn’t regularly revive it.
In elections, many caste groups continue to vote as a bloc and are courted by politicians who obtain electoral returns. As a result, what was originally intended to be a temporary affirmative action plan to improve the situation of disadvantaged groups has now become a vote-grabbing exercise for many politicians.
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