What Ails Dalit Movement: Lessons Learnt from Farmer Movement

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Contemporary Voice of Dalit, Ahead of Print.
The demand for equality and a ‘better’ share is always there for any ‘authoritative allocation of values’ and India is no exception. Farmers and Dalit movements present such demands with an aim to seek transformation in the existing power structure for better in political, social and economic spaces. However, one seems to be more organized and successful despite the existence of a multi-layered class structure, while the other remained fragmented and sporadic. It is, therefore, very pertinent to analyse why a considerable chunk of the citizenry is not able to get their due share and what ails their collective bargaining capacity. The present article is an attempt to draw certain commonalities between the ‘Farmer’ and ‘Dalit’ movements in India and identify the gaps—that the Dalit movement can fill by taking a cue from the farmer movement. Also, it attempts to analyse how with time all the farmers’ organizations collectively mobilized together on the pan-India level on a single platform to bargain for their common interest but why such consciousness is not being developed among Dalits even after 75 years of independence.

Ethnic political socialization and university elections

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Party Politics, Ahead of Print.
Foundational studies of political behavior find that university education facilitates the development of political attitudes and shapes socialization outcomes. But in unconsolidated democracies where identity is politically salient and ethnic political parties dominate, education may play a different role in shaping mass politics. In this paper, we develop a framework for understanding the consequences of political party intervention in annual university elections, a common feature of university life in the Middle East and the Global South. We draw on pre- and post-election surveys at the American University of Beirut in Lebanon to argue that ethnic political parties rely on partisan students to act as “party agents” who mobilize unaffiliated students through intensive peer-to-peer contact. Using a conjoint experiment embedded in both survey waves, we show that the university elections increase support in hypothetical national elections for in-group political elites and, to a lesser extent, ethnic political parties. By locating the university as an understudied site of competitive and contentious politics, our findings contribute new insights regarding the role of education in shaping political attitudes. We show that the persistence of ethnic political power can be attributed in part to party activity in less obviously political arenas that have not been systematically studied.