Explained: In Hindi heartland, upper castes dominate new Lok Sabha

'Election results decoded: The last decade has seen the return of the upper castes and the erosion of OBC representation... What does the new Lok Sabha look like in terms of its caste composition? We are responding to this question using data that a team of researchers from the Trivedi Center for Political Data (Ashoka University) and the CERI (Sciences Po) have collected, coded and compiled in the framework of the SPINPER project – The Social Profile of the Indian National and Provincial Elected Representatives. We focus here only on the Hindi belt for two reasons, first for the sake of consistency because caste systems are very different out of this meta-region and second, because the Hindi belt (also known as “the cow belt”) accounts for almost half the MPs in Lok Sabha...'