1 CAN DALITS ALSO FORM A DOMINANT CASTE? CHANGING PATTERNS OF POWER RELATIONS IN RURAL UTTAR PRADESH (Draft of the paper to be finalized after presentation) (Draft for presention the conference to be organized on “ The Implications of the Declining Power Hierarchy in Rural India: What We Know, What We Suspect, and What We Need to Discover” on June 1-3, 2011 by the IIAS , Yale University, and School of Advanced Study, University of London). Jagpal Singh Associate Professor, Faculty of Political Science, School of Social Sciences, IGNOU, Maidan Garhi, New Delhi-110068. Email:
[email protected] The rise and political empowerment of dalits resulting in the enthronement of BSP regimes in UP since the 1990s is culmination of a process which can be traced back to the 1950s. This process has occurred at two levels, i.e, local or village level and supra-local or regional levels. Since UP consist of several regions with the villages showing different patterns of caste dominance and patterns of mobilization, it is difficult to generalize about entire state. However, on the basis of dominant trends from different regions some general patterns can be deciphered. This paper seeks to address two issues; one, changing composition of the dominant castes at the local/village level in western Uttar Pradesh, and; two, changes in the supra- local milieu in terms of social, cultural, economic and political processes. It argues that as the notion of the dominant caste is applicable to the local level or the village level, the composition of dominant castes varies from village to village or from a group of villages to another group of villages.