NEW DELHI, INDIA, November 10, 2002: Brahmins continue to dominate India’s sociopolitical spectrum, despite Mandalisation (legislation to reduce their influence). Four years after Prime Minister V. P. Singh’s decision in 1990 to implement the Mandal Commission recommendations, it was hailed and reviled with equal fervor. While the upper castes saw it as the death knell of their aspirations, the backward castes and Dalits (“untouchables”) believed it was the gateway to a new world, free of brahminical hegemony. But 12 years after the announcement, and eight since the judgment, brahmins are far from marginalized. Nine of the 12 years have seen brahmin Prime Ministers, P.V. Narasimha Rao and Atal Bihari Vajpayee and for five years there was also a brahmin President, Shankar Dayal Sharma. The current Lok Sabha Speaker, Manohar Joshi is a brahmin, as are the three chief ministers of Uttaranchal, Tamil Nadu and West Bengal. The chiefs of the Army and the Air Force, Gen. S. Padmanabhan and Air Chief Marshal S. Krishnaswamy, are also brahmins. Brahmins proliferating in top corporate positions, or at the top of the culture and entertainment worlds are too many to name. Additionally, four permanent fixtures in the Indian cricket team, Sourav Ganguly, Sachin Tendulkar, Rahul Dravid and Anil Kumble, are brahmins. Although in the North, brahmins have held their own even more successfully than in South India, undoubtedly, lasting changes did occur, rendering brahmins irrelevant in politics. In the bureaucracy, too, brahmins have been reduced to a minority, but even that minority is not doing all that badly. Also South Indian brahmins continue to thrive in the private sector. In the new fields of technology the Indian contribution to software development, is primarily the achievement of South Indian brahmins.
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