Becoming Agarwal: A new book examines how a dominant mercantile caste sustains its privilege today

The “new” Hindu India is an elite, exclusionary and violent project characterised by an ethnic democracy led by members of wealthy “upper”-caste Hindu groups and increasingly finding cultural resonance across caste groups. An ethnic democracy is one in which there is a two-tiered citizenship, with the majority having more rights than the minority. The BJP is traditionally seen as the Brahmin-Bania party. The majority rise of the BJP in 2014 and again for a second term in 2019 has seen an increase in the structural power of business.

In 2009, [Christophe] Jaffrelot and [Narender] Kumar wrote about the “plebeianisation” – or the rise of the lower castes in political power – by showing how the share of upper-caste members of legislative assemblies (MLAs) has steadily declined in many states from the 1950s to the 2000s. Two decades later, this trend was reversed, and Jaffrelot and [Giles] Vernier argued that there was a resurgence of political elites from upper castes in the Hindu belt along with non-dominant OBCs through the BJP’s careful social engineering. This came at the expense of sliding representation of women and religious minorities.

Elites are defined as “those with vastly disproportionate control over or access to a resource”. Resources, using Bourdieu,...

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