ABSTRACT
In 1933, K. M. Panikkar, an Oxford-educated historian, diplomat and administrator, published a book titled Caste and Democracy. He argued in the book that caste and democracy are irreconcilably opposed to each other. Panikkar claimed that, in the inevitable contest between caste and democracy, democracy would eventually vanquish caste. This chapter reviews some of the outcomes of the interactions between caste and democracy. In particular, it engages with three paradoxes arising from the following: the modes of censoring caste-talk in democracy, the modes of resisting the same by subordinated castes and the act of writing caste into law as part of democratic politics. The opposition between the consensus-enforcing and consensus-breaking aspects of democracy indicates that democracy as part of the secular modern does not automatically guarantee the space for stigmatized identities such as caste. Thus, a continuous deconstruction of democracy as a concrete set of practices, instead of valorising it as an abstract ideal, is what radical politics demands.
