Caste has never simply been a social hierarchy in India. It has also functioned as a powerful tool of political organisation. When different caste groups recognise that their numbers, grievances, and aspirations overlap, they often come together to bargain for power, representation, and economic resources. These coalitions are what political scientists call caste formations, and understanding them is essential to making sense of how electoral politics actually works across much of the country. From the agrarian backward-caste alliances of the colonial period to Kanshi Ram’s sweeping Bahujan movement, caste formations reveal how identity gets converted into collective political action.
Table of Contents
What are caste formations?
Caste formations are strategic alliances between different caste groups that unite to pursue shared political and economic goals. They are different from the politics of a single caste acting alone. A formation deliberately stitches together multiple jatis under one banner so that their combined numerical strength becomes too large for parties and governments to ignore.
The logic is straightforward. A single caste rarely commands enough votes to decide an election on its own. But when several castes with similar interests, often peasants, labourers, or historically marginalised communities, pool their support, they create a vote bank that can swing outcomes. This bargaining power then translates into demands for reservations, government jobs, land rights, and political tickets.
Caste as a political resource
The political scientist Rajni Kothari offered the most influential explanation of why this happens. In his classic work Caste in Indian Politics, he argued that democracy did not destroy caste; instead, it changed caste’s role. Rather than caste corrupting politics, politicisation of caste took place, where caste began to organise itself for secular interests like power and employment rather than remaining confined to its traditional role defined by purity and pollution.
Kothari described this as a multi-stage process. In the early years after independence, political power was concentrated among a few dominant castes. Competition within those castes produced factionalism, and over time the lower castes became mobilised and began asserting themselves. Caste, in other words, became an organisational foundation that politicians could build upon, and ordinary people could use to claim a share of power. This framework helps explain why caste formations are not relics of the past but a recurring feature of competitive democracy.
Pre-independence caste formations
The roots of organised caste politics stretch back to the colonial period, when backward castes who were locked out of land, education, and government service began organising to demand a place in public life.
The Triveni Sangh
One of the earliest and most significant examples was the Triveni Sangh, a caste coalition formed in the Shahabad district of Bihar in the 1930s. The name was drawn from the symbolic confluence of three rivers, reflecting the union of three prominent backward castes: the Yadavs, the Kurmis, and the Koeris (Kushwahas).
The formation grew out of three separate caste associations, the Yadav, Kurmi, and Koeri Kshatriya Sabhas, which came together in Shahabad to create an umbrella organisation floated by the dominant strata of the backward castes. Their goals were concrete. They pressed to end the practice of begar, or forced unpaid labour, and demanded reservations in government employment, where they were almost entirely unrepresented. Leaders from the Sangh even moved a resolution in the Bihar and Orissa Legislative Council seeking reserved posts in the provincial civil service.
The Triveni Sangh’s strategy rested on a simple insight: by combining the numerical strength of three large agrarian castes, they could create a force that mainstream parties could not dismiss. Its formation was significant enough that the Indian National Congress established its own backward class federation around the same time to counter it. Although the Sangh eventually weakened, it planted the idea that backward castes could organise independently and bargain collectively, a lesson that would echo for decades.
AJGAR
Another important pre-independence concept was AJGAR, an acronym for the Ahir, Jat, Gujjar, and Rajput communities. This proposed agricultural alliance was first floated by Sir Chhotu Ram, a rural leader in pre-independence Punjab and the surrounding regions, who argued that these four landowning peasant communities shared common interests and could form a decisive bloc if united.
The deeper logic of AJGAR was that these communities, despite differences in ritual status, occupied a similar position in the rural economy as cultivators and landowners. By framing them as a single social and racial group, leaders hoped to override caste rivalries with shared class interests.
AJGAR’s most famous political application came after independence, when Chaudhary Charan Singh used the theory in 1970s Uttar Pradesh as part of his peasant-centred politics to break the Congress party’s dominance. Charan Singh built his career as the undisputed leader of the peasantry, and the AJGAR idea gave intellectual shape to his attempt to weld agrarian castes into a durable vote bank. The fragility of this alliance, however, has been evident in later decades, as relations between Jats and Muslims in western Uttar Pradesh have repeatedly fractured and realigned around events like communal riots and farmer protests.
Post-independence caste formations
If pre-independence formations were largely regional and agrarian, the post-independence period produced more ambitious projects that sought to unite the marginalised across the country. The most transformative of these was the movement built by Kanshi Ram.
Kanshi Ram and the Bahujan vision
Kanshi Ram was a social reformer and politician who devoted his life to the political mobilisation of the Bahujans, a term covering Dalits, backward classes, and minorities who together formed the majority of the population but remained outside the structures of power. Working as an employee in a government laboratory in Pune, he came to believe that genuine change required the oppressed to capture political power themselves. His famous formulation was that political power is the master key that could unlock social transformation.
Rather than launching a political party straight away, Kanshi Ram built his movement in deliberate stages, each designed to address the limitations of the last.
BAMCEF
His first major organisation was BAMCEF, the All India Backward and Minority Communities Employees’ Federation, formally launched in 1978. BAMCEF brought together educated, salaried employees from Scheduled Caste, Scheduled Tribe, OBC, and minority backgrounds. It was neither a political party nor an agitational body. Instead, it functioned as an intellectual and organisational backbone, appealing especially to a relatively well-off, urban class of government servants.
The strategy here was distinctive. Kanshi Ram understood that a movement needed resources, educated cadres, and a financial base before it could challenge entrenched power. BAMCEF supplied exactly this, creating a network of committed, capable individuals who could fund and lead a broader struggle.
DS4
Kanshi Ram also recognised that a movement confined to government employees could never transform society at large. To reach ordinary people, he launched the Dalit Shoshit Samaj Sangharsh Samiti, or DS4, in 1981. This was the mobilisation wing of the project, carrying the message of Bahujan unity into villages, towns, and working-class neighbourhoods across North India.
DS4 placed particular emphasis on the struggles of students, youth, and women, and it experimented with what was called “Limited Political Action,” contesting local elections in Delhi and Haryana to test the waters. Its method relied on large rallies, repetitive and accessible messaging about historical injustice, and extended cadre camps for ideological training. The movement was also cultural, using songs and shared symbols to forge a sense of common identity among scattered communities.
From formation to party
The culmination of this layered strategy came in 1984, when Kanshi Ram dissolved DS4 and founded the Bahujan Samaj Party. The transition was not without friction; the move to a fully political wing caused strain within BAMCEF, which split in 1986. Yet the result was a disciplined political force that turned scattered social grievances into electoral power, eventually bringing his protégé Mayawati to the office of Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh four times. This progression, from a federation of employees to a mobilisation platform to a political party, remains one of the clearest illustrations of how a caste formation can be deliberately engineered into lasting political influence.
Why caste formations keep evolving
The journey from the Triveni Sangh to the Bahujan Samaj Party shows that caste formations are not static. They constantly adapt to changing social and political contexts. An alliance built for one purpose, such as Charan Singh’s AJGAR coalition, can dissolve when circumstances shift, while new formations emerge to meet fresh demands.
Several factors drive this constant reshaping. Reservation policies and the implementation of the Mandal Commission recommendations gave backward castes new incentives to organise. Economic changes altered which communities felt aggrieved and which felt empowered. And competitive electoral politics rewards leaders who can assemble winning combinations of castes, encouraging perpetual experimentation with new alliances.
It is also worth noting the limits of these formations. Critics, including the sociologist M.N. Srinivas, questioned whether caste unity is as solid as it appears, pointing out that every caste is internally differentiated and that apparent solidarity can be partial or even illusory. Formations often struggle precisely because the castes within them have competing interests, which is why so many alliances prove temporary.
What do you think?
What do you think? Do caste formations strengthen democracy by giving marginalised groups a real voice in power, or do they entrench division by making caste the permanent currency of political bargaining? And as economic and social conditions continue to change, which caste alliances do you expect to gain or lose relevance in the years ahead?
References
- https://www.cse.iitk.ac.in/users/amit/books/kothari-1973-caste-in-indian.html
- https://egyankosh.ac.in/bitstream/123456789/66641/1/Block-5.pdf
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triveni_Sangh
- http://pmml.nic.in/downloadSeries/360
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AJGAR
- https://www.deccanherald.com/archives/ajit-singh-makes-crafty-moves-2185197
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanshi_Ram
- https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/comment/kanshi-rams-enduring-legacy/
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BAMCEF
- https://maktoobmedia.com/opinion/from-social-justice-to-social-transformation-the-political-vision-of-kanshi-ram/
- https://ijrar.org/papers/IJRAR22B1877.pdf
Leave a Reply