Over the past few decades, diverse social groups in India have been politicised and mobilised for electoral purposes on the basis of social cleavages, rather than on the basis of common economic interests, ideology or leadership. Almost all such social groups are spatially confined to a particular state or sub-region, following the reorganisation of states in India on a linguistic/ethnic basis,resulting in the rise of many state and sub-state parties. In effect, today India’s states are now important political units, and critical to the understanding of emergent ‘national’ politics.