Caste and Political Power: The Dynamics of Caste-Based Identity Politics in India

Few features of Indian society have proven as durable, or as politically consequential, as caste. What was once a rigid system of social ranking determined by birth has, over the decades since independence, become one of the most powerful organising principles of electoral politics. Caste did not disappear when the Constitution promised equality. Instead, it found a new home in the democratic arena, where numbers translate into votes and votes translate into power. Understanding how caste-based identity shapes political competition is essential to making sense of modern Indian democracy.

From social hierarchy to political resource 🔗

Caste began as a hierarchical system in which a person’s status, occupation, and social privileges were fixed at birth and reinforced by religious texts and ritual practice. The upper castes traditionally enjoyed advantages not only in religious life but also in economic, educational, and political spheres. The lower castes, especially those treated as “untouchable,” faced systematic exclusion and indignity.

This system stands in direct opposition to the values of a democratic political order, which is built on the principles of liberty, equality, and the rule of law where no one is above the law regardless of social status. The framers of the Constitution were acutely aware of this contradiction. They did not simply hope caste would fade away. They built specific legal weapons to dismantle its worst features.

The constitutional assault on caste 🔗

The Constitution attacks caste discrimination from several directions at once. Article 15 prohibits the state from discriminating against any citizen on grounds of religion, race, caste, sex, or place of birth, and guarantees equal access to shops, restaurants, wells, roads, and other public spaces. Article 16 ensures equality of opportunity in public employment while permitting reservations for backward classes who are inadequately represented in government services.

The most direct provision is Article 17, which abolishes untouchability in all its forms and makes its practice a punishable offence. Importantly, the article does not target untouchability in a literal sense but the practice as it developed historically in India, referring to the social disabilities imposed on people because of their birth in certain castes. In the landmark case of State of Karnataka v. Appa Balu Ingale (1993), the Supreme Court described untouchability as an indirect form of slavery and an extension of the caste system, observing that the caste system and untouchability had stood together historically and would fall together.

These provisions were later strengthened by dedicated legislation such as the Protection of Civil Rights Act, 1955, and the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989. Together, they form the legal architecture meant to translate constitutional promise into lived reality.

Reservations and the politics of recognition 🔗

The policy of reservations is the most visible instrument of affirmative action in India. By setting aside seats in education, jobs, and legislatures for Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, and later the Other Backward Classes, the state attempted to correct centuries of exclusion. But reservations did more than open doors. They gave caste a new significance in public life.

Once benefits were attached to caste categories, caste identity became something worth asserting and defending. Communities that had been told to be ashamed of their position now had reason to organise around it. This is the paradox at the heart of caste politics. The very policy designed to dissolve caste-based disadvantage ended up reinforcing caste as a category of political identity.

The Mandal moment 🔗

No single event transformed caste into political capital more decisively than the implementation of the Mandal Commission report. The commission, officially the Second Backward Classes Commission, was set up in 1979 under the chairmanship of B.P. Mandal to identify socially and educationally backward classes. Its 1980 report recommended that 27 percent of central government jobs be reserved for OBCs.

For nearly a decade the report sat unimplemented. Then in August 1990, Prime Minister V.P. Singh announced its implementation. The decision brought total reservations in government jobs and public universities to roughly 49.5 percent and triggered an immediate and violent backlash. Upper-caste students protested across northern cities, and incidents of self-immolation became searing symbols of the anger felt by those who saw reservations as a threat to merit.

Yet the long-term consequences ran in the opposite direction. The Mandal period saw the end of single-party dominance and the rise of caste-based political mobilisation that reshaped India’s electoral landscape. Communities such as the Yadavs, Kurmis, and Jats translated their numerical strength into political assertion. Leaders like Mulayam Singh Yadav and Lalu Prasad Yadav built powerful regional formations on the back of OBC consolidation. Caste was no longer just a social fact. It had become a currency of power.

How caste entered the machinery of democracy 🔗

The political scientist Rajni Kothari offered the most influential framework for understanding this transformation. Writing in his classic study Caste in Indian Politics, Kothari rejected the popular assumption that caste and modern democracy were simply incompatible. He argued that politics works by building on the organisational forms that already exist in society, and caste was the most widely available and well-articulated of these forms.

Kothari described the relationship as a two-way process. On one side, politicians mobilise caste groups to organise their support and win elections. On the other, caste groups use politics as an arena to assert their identity and compete for positions and resources. He identified factors such as the spread of education, government patronage, and an expanding franchise as the forces that drew caste into the heart of democratic competition. Far from democracy erasing caste, the two became mutually dependent.

Dominant castes and vote banks 🔗

The sociologist M.N. Srinivas added another crucial idea with his concept of the “dominant caste,” a group whose numerical strength, landholding, and economic weight give it disproportionate political influence in a region. In a system where elections are won by mobilising blocs of voters, a numerically large caste becomes an obvious target for political organisation.

This logic produced the phenomenon of “vote banks,” where parties craft appeals and distribute promises to specific caste combinations. The Rashtriya Janata Dal in Bihar, the Samajwadi Party in Uttar Pradesh, and the Bahujan Samaj Party have historically relied on assembling particular caste alliances to win power. Caste pride and shared grievance became the glue holding these coalitions together.

Democratisation and its discontents 🔗

Caste-based identity politics has played a genuinely twin role. On one hand, it has democratised Indian society in important ways. It made it possible for historically oppressed groups to gain political freedom, recognition, and a share of power that was unthinkable before independence. The entry of OBCs into legislatures, universities such as the IITs and IIMs, and the civil services broadened the country’s professional and political elite and made it look more like the population it governs.

This was a real achievement. Communities that had been silenced for centuries found a voice, and the language of social justice became central to public debate. In this sense, caste politics deepened democracy by extending meaningful participation to those who had been left out.

The turn towards confrontation 🔗

At the same time, the mobilisation of caste has hardened social divisions and produced confrontational politics. When one group’s gain is perceived as another group’s loss, competition turns into conflict. The Mandal agitation showed how quickly reservation politics could polarise society along caste lines. Tensions also exist within categories, as numerically larger and more affluent sections of the OBCs are accused of cornering benefits meant for the most marginalised, fuelling demands for sub-categorisation.

The intensity of these conflicts reveals the darker edge of identity politics. Caste consciousness, once awakened for emancipation, can also be used to deepen rivalries, manufacture grievances, and reduce complex questions of justice to a contest over the distribution of seats and quotas. Balancing the demand for social justice against the aspiration for a caste-free, merit-based society remains an unresolved challenge for Indian democracy.

Caste politics in the present 🔗

The continuing power of caste is visible in the renewed debate over a nationwide caste census. In April 2025 the central government announced that the next national census, scheduled for 2027, would for the first time since 1931 enumerate caste data beyond the existing Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe categories. This followed earlier state-level surveys in Karnataka, Bihar, and Telangana.

The Bihar survey released in 2023 found that backward and extremely backward classes together make up more than 63 percent of the state’s population, a figure that immediately reshaped the bargaining over reservations and representation. Supporters argue that accurate data will allow affirmative action to be targeted at the most marginalised communities and enable fairer sub-categorisation within the OBCs. Critics warn that fresh caste enumeration could intensify mobilisation and shift the political conversation from historical injustice towards a raw contest over numbers and shares.

The caste census debate captures the enduring tension perfectly. It is at once a tool for delivering justice to the overlooked and a potential trigger for sharper social division. Decades after the Constitution sought to make caste irrelevant to citizenship, it remains central to how power is sought, won, and contested.

What do you think? Does caste-based mobilisation strengthen Indian democracy by giving voice to the historically excluded, or does it weaken the shared sense of citizenship that democracy depends on? And as the country prepares for its first caste census in nearly a century, can data be used to advance justice without deepening the very divisions it seeks to address?

References

1. https://www.constitutionofindia.net/articles/article-15-prohibition-of-discrimination-on-grounds-of-religion-race-caste-sex-or-place-of-birth/
2. https://www.constitutionofindia.net/articles/article-17-abolition-of-untouchability/
3. https://www.drishtijudiciary.com/ttp-constitution-of-india/abolition-of-untouchability
4. https://socialjustice.gov.in/
5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandal_Commission_protests_of_1990
6. https://books.google.com/books/about/Caste_in_Indian_Politics.html?id=AzRbqgyVHb4C
7. https://thediplomat.com/2025/05/whats-the-caste-census-that-indias-pm-modi-agreed-to-under-opposition-pressure/
8. https://ohrh.law.ox.ac.uk/how-a-caste-census-could-transform-indias-reservation-policies/