It was not until the 1950s that academics in India began to acknowledge the role of caste in Indian life. Within two decades caste had come to stay in public discourse. The Emergency of 1975-77 and its aftermath were turning points in the public acknowledgement of the continuing significance of caste. It began to be argued that far from being antithetical to democracy, caste had an essential part to play in the advancement of democracy in India. In course of time the media took up the argument for the salience of caste in Indian society and this has now become almost a part of the conventional wisdom. However, there is evidence to show that caste is in fact losing its strength in India, though not uniformly or dramatically. With the media giving a sensational turn to caste in its daily coverage, the long-term changes in caste are being ignored.

The strength or weakness of constitutional morality in contemporary India has to be understood in the light of a cycle of escalating demands from the people and the callous response of successive governments to those demands. In a parliamentary democracy, the obligations of constitutional morality are expected to be equally binding on the government and the opposition. In India, the same political party treats these obligations very differently when it is in office and when it is out of it. This has contributed greatly to the popular perception of our political system as being amoral.

In the Indian context, classes and communities do not form interchangeable categories. Caste, a defining feature of the community in India, has been a vital socio-economic institution since historical times. But it is Indian politics, especially since post-independence, that has been shaped by competing communities and the ascendancy "acquired" by certain communities over the other. However, as this article suggests, the two categories are not wholly disparate; rather it is the middle class that has been largely responsible for spearheading the interests of their respective communities. A potent tool in this ascendancy has been the issue of "reservations".

The relationship between poverty and inequality is neither clear nor direct. Poverty and inequality are analytically distinct concepts. They vary independently of each other, and it is misleading beyond a point to treat the one as a marker of the other. The study of both poverty and inequality has been closely associated with an interest in economic and social change. But poverty and inequality do not change at the same pace, and they may even change in opposite directions. It is difficult to make any meaningful statement about the relationship between the two without specifying which conception of poverty and which aspect of inequality one has in mind.