The Rise of Identity Politics in India: Caste, Religion, Language, and Ethnicity

India chose a liberal democratic path at independence, built on individual rights and equal citizenship. Yet the most powerful forces shaping its politics have rarely been individual interests. Instead, group identities based on caste, religion, language, and ethnicity have driven how people vote, how parties campaign, and how the state itself is organised. This is the world of identity politics, where belonging to a community becomes the basis for political claims. Understanding why this happened, and how the state itself became a participant rather than a neutral umpire, is key to understanding contemporary Indian democracy.

What is identity politics? 🔗

Identity politics refers to political activity organised around the shared experiences of a particular social group. Instead of mobilising people purely on the basis of economic class or political ideology, it brings them together on the basis of who they are, defined by markers such as caste, religion, language, gender, or ethnicity. The central idea is that people who share an identity also share common experiences of discrimination or marginalisation, and therefore have a collective interest in organising politically.

The discourse on identity is often described as a distinctly modern phenomenon. In a large, impersonal society, identity offers what scholars have called a sense of belonging and community. As a political project, it attempts to recover dignity and recognition for groups that were historically excluded. The strategy is striking: groups assert the very markers that were once used to discriminate against them, turning a stigma into a source of solidarity and political strength.

There are broadly two ways to understand how an identity forms. One sees identity built around a single attribute such as language, religion, or caste; the other sees it formed through several attributes working together. In practice, Indian identities rarely stay neat. A person is simultaneously a member of a caste, a religion, a linguistic community, and a region, and these layers constantly overlap and pull in different directions.

Why identity politics took root in India 🔗

India is often described as one of the most diverse societies in the world. It is home to thousands of languages and dialects and six major religions, alongside countless caste and ethnic communities. These deep social cleavages create what scholars call “multidimensional fault lines,” and politicians have long found it effective to appeal to group identity rather than to abstract ideology.

The colonial inheritance 🔗

The roots of modern identity politics lie partly in colonial rule. The British administration viewed Indians primarily through the lens of religion and caste, and used these categories to govern. The creation of separate electorates pitted Hindus and Muslims against each other and hardened a sense of communal identity that had not existed in the same rigid form before. The census, by counting and classifying people into fixed categories, also gave caste and community a new political significance. By the time the British left, the logic of dividing people by community was deeply embedded in Indian public life.

The state as an active participant 🔗

A crucial point is that the post-independence Indian state did not simply inherit these identities; it actively created and maintained structures that define and recognise people in terms of certain identities. The Constitution recognises Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, and other backward communities for the purpose of protection and uplift. States are organised along linguistic lines. Special provisions protect tribal areas. Each of these decisions, however well-intentioned, gives official weight to a particular identity and makes it politically relevant.

This involvement has two faces. On one side, recognition has empowered communities that were historically excluded, giving them representation and a route to socio-economic mobility. On the other, by making identity the basis for rights and resources, the state turned identity into a valuable political asset, something worth organising around and fighting over.

Caste: from social hierarchy to political resource 🔗

Caste is perhaps the most studied dimension of Indian identity politics. After independence, the link between caste and politics allowed previously oppressed groups to gain recognition and a share of power. At the same time, it raised awareness of caste’s potential as political capital. Parties began treating caste as an indispensable tool for mobilising voters, and caste groups began seeing elections as a viable path to power and resources.

The Mandal moment 🔗

No single event illustrates the politicisation of caste better than the Mandal Commission. Established in 1979 and headed by B.P. Mandal, the commission was tasked with identifying India’s socially and educationally backward classes. Its 1980 report estimated that Other Backward Classes made up around 52 percent of the population and recommended 27 percent reservation for them in government jobs and education.

When Prime Minister V.P. Singh announced implementation in 1990, the decision triggered violent protests across northern and western India, including self-immolations and a fierce upper-caste backlash. Yet the long-term effect was transformative. The Supreme Court upheld the OBC reservation in the landmark Indra Sawhney judgment of 1992, while introducing the “creamy layer” concept to exclude the better-off within OBC communities.

The rise of caste-based parties 🔗

The Mandal moment turned OBC castes from a social category into a potent political force. Numerically strong but politically marginalised middle castes suddenly found themselves at the centre of political discourse. This fuelled the rise of regional parties built explicitly around backward-caste and Dalit identities, particularly in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, such as the Samajwadi Party, Bahujan Samaj Party, and Rashtriya Janata Dal. Caste became central to electoral arithmetic, with parties forming alliances and distributing tickets carefully to balance caste equations. Given the sheer number of OBC voters, few parties can afford to take a stand against reservation today.

Religion: faith, community, and political mobilisation 🔗

Religious identity is another powerful axis of mobilisation. India is a multi-religious society with a Hindu majority and significant Muslim, Christian, Sikh, Buddhist, and Jain populations. While the Constitution enshrines secularism, defined in the Indian context as equal respect for all religions, religion has repeatedly entered the political arena.

Communalism, the belief that religious communities have fundamentally opposed interests, is not an ancient reality but is largely traced by scholars to colonial divide-and-rule strategy and the institutionalisation of separate electorates. Events such as the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992 and subsequent communal riots have repeatedly shown how religious identity can be mobilised for political ends. Hindu identity has been organised through movements emphasising cultural nationalism, while Muslim, Sikh, and Christian communities have organised to safeguard their rights.

Religion’s role is not purely divisive, though. It has also served as a resource for justice and mass mobilisation, as when leaders during the freedom struggle drew on religious idioms to build a broad-based movement. The result is a landscape where religious identity is constantly negotiated, performed, and contested, and where the separation of religion from politics remains extremely difficult.

Language: identity that redrew the map 🔗

Language is the one identity that literally reshaped India’s geography. After independence, demands grew for states organised around linguistic communities, especially in the south. The turning point came when Potti Sreeramulu died after a hunger strike in 1952, leading to the creation of Andhra for Telugu speakers in 1953, the first linguistic state.

The government appointed the Fazl Ali Commission, formally the States Reorganisation Commission, to examine the question. It accepted language as a basis for reorganisation but firmly rejected the slogan of “one language, one state,” insisting that the unity of India remain the primary consideration. Following its recommendations, the States Reorganisation Act of 1956 redrew the political map and created 14 states and 6 Union Territories along largely linguistic lines.

This reorganisation is generally seen as a success that accommodated regional aspirations within a single federal framework, allowing language to become a tool of integration rather than disintegration. Yet it also gave linguistic identity permanent political weight. Regional parties built their appeal around linguistic pride, most visibly in Tamil Nadu, where Dravidian parties grew out of anti-Hindi and anti-caste movements. Recent debates, including criticism from a Tamil Nadu Governor that linguistic reorganisation created “second-class citizens” among minorities, show the issue remains alive.

Ethnicity: autonomy, belonging, and the Northeast 🔗

Ethnic identity politics is most visible in India’s Northeast, a region of eight states home to around 200 indigenous communities, each with its own struggle for recognition. Here, identity politics has often been framed in binary terms: tribal versus non-tribal, hills versus plains, sons of the soil versus immigrants. These divisions, with roots in colonial exclusion, fed protracted movements ranging from demands for autonomy to outright secession.

The state responded with constitutional tools. The Sixth Schedule created Autonomous District Councils with legislative and administrative powers in tribal areas of Assam, Meghalaya, Tripura, and Mizoram. Such measures aimed to institutionalise self-governance, but many communities found them inadequate, leading to continued mobilisation. Scholars such as Sanjib Baruah describe these as a form of “ethno-nationalism,” where cultural markers are mobilised to claim political space. A persistent challenge is managing competing claims among groups with overlapping territorial claims, which means identity politics often does not disappear even after a new state is created.

How identities intersect 🔗

The most important feature of Indian identity politics is that these categories do not operate in isolation. They constantly intersect. A linguistic movement may also carry a caste or religious dimension; an ethnic movement may overlap with religious affiliation; caste mobilisation can be absorbed into a broader religious appeal. One reason communalism endures is that religious identities overlap with other cleavages such as caste, class, and region. To build a unified religious bloc, internal caste and sectional differences are often deliberately set aside in favour of a single, homogenous identity.

This intersection makes Indian politics fluid and unpredictable. The same voter can be appealed to through caste in one election and religion in the next. Parties continuously craft and recraft coalitions of identities to assemble a winning majority, which is why identity remains such a durable feature of the political landscape.

The double-edged legacy 🔗

Identity politics in India carries both promise and peril. On the positive side, it has deepened democracy by bringing historically excluded groups into the political mainstream, expanding representation and giving voice to those long denied it. On the negative side, it can entrench divisions, reduce complex policy debates to questions of community loyalty, and at its extreme, fuel violence and separatism. The state’s own role in recognising identities means it cannot stand fully outside this process; its policies continuously shape which identities matter and how intensely.

What do you think? Has the recognition of group identities by the Indian state strengthened democracy by including the marginalised, or has it weakened the ideal of equal individual citizenship? And as caste, religion, language, and ethnicity continue to intersect, can a liberal democracy ever fully move beyond identity-based politics, or is some form of it inevitable in a society as diverse as India’s?

References

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