Emerging dimensions of caste politics in India
A new politics on caste is knocking our doors, so, as a society, it is time for an intellectually open conversation on caste, and what must be done to accommodate various concerns
The discourse on the politics of caste in India seems stuck in the binary of supporting or opposing caste-based reservations. There is no middle space here. Why does the discourse leave no room for genuine debate? First, caste remains the primary marker in India, shaping the opportunities that a person receives or is denied in life in multiple ways. Despite 70-plus years of Scheduled Caste (SC) and Scheduled Tribe (ST) reservation and 30-plus years of Other Backward Classes (OBC) reservation, these communities remain under-represented in every field. The reserved seats in government jobs and educational institutions do not get filled. And, even when present in legislatures in accordance with the Constitution’s mandate, these communities are under-represented in ministerial positions and rarely get important portfolios. That India needs an affirmative action architecture to empower its historically marginalised communities is thus a no-brainer. However, believing that reservation is the only solution indicates a poverty of imagination on this question.
Second, reservation can only provide the desired result when there are effective laws to protect the reserved categories from discrimination, policies to economically improve their life chances, and political discourse that increasingly reduces social prejudices (among and within various caste groups). It may also produce some negative externalities, as might have happened in India, in which, within-caste-group inequalities are higher than between-caste-group inequalities, worsening over the past few decades. Research by Shareen Joshi, Nishtha Kochhar, and Vijayendra Rao finds that in Bihar, inequality is largely driven by variation “within jatis”.
A decomposition analysis shows that the levels of economic inequality between the general categories and SCs are lower than such inequalities within these groups. Thus, we need a census that records the educational and economic status of each jati, not just broad caste groups. However, this exercise must also consider what we plan to do with such granular data, and how we plan to resolve inconsistencies with the popular perception that the data might throw up. The politics of social justice needs to be married with a conversation on economic inequalities.
Third, the OBC reservations marked the end of the first phase of reservation politics in post-independent India. However, within its womb, it carried the seeds of later mobilisations. The demand for the sub-categorisation of beneficiaries within each category (reflected in the recent Supreme Court verdict upholding such sub-quotas), dominant agrarian communities to be included within reserved categories, and politics around excluding the creamy layer of the OBCs (and now the Supreme Court’s observation on the exclusion of creamy layer for SC and ST reservation) are the markers of the second phase. The third phase of reservation politics has already begun with quota benefits to economically weaker sections (EWS) and political mobilisation around conducting a caste census. In some ways, the mobilisation around social groups in India is a result of political competition on two nodes — the first along the axis of Hindu nationalism, and the second along that of region-specific caste identity. And political entrepreneurs will continue to exploit these dominant cleavages as meta-narratives to mobilise the electorate. Every round of successful mobilisation on one axis is likely to produce counter-narratives.
Fourth, the two largest national parties have had a rather ambiguous relationship with the question of caste while they both rhetorically advocate in favour of social justice politics. It was only during the Mandal moment of the 1990s that they realised there was no running away from the caste question. The Congress, despite extending the benefits of reservation in higher education to OBCs in 2006, did not win any new segments of supporters within the community. The party’s social coalition across the Hindi heartland significantly narrowed with the rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) since 2014. Now that the party, under Rahul Gandhi, is aggressively advocating for the caste census, it is natural for Congress detractors to ask the party to act on the caste survey conducted by the Siddaramaiah government in Karnataka. Is the party willing to intellectually and organisationally mobilise resources on this, or is it merely a rhetorical strategy to corner the BJP?
Fifth, the ruling BJP finds itself in the same position as the Congress was at the Mandal moment. By organisationally tapping into the aspirational tendencies within certain OBC, SC, and ST communities, the party’s social engineering politics helped it to gain traction in the 1990s across Northwest India. The rise of Narendra Modi on the national stage helped it make serious inroads among these communities. But, in 2024, the party suffered serious losses among these groups, especially in Uttar Pradesh. The upcoming assembly elections in four states will indicate whether the party’s social coalition is intact or the unravelling has begun.
There are indeed some electoral risks for the BJP with the emerging political discourse on the caste question, but as the party in power, it has an opportunity to set the agenda of this conversation rather than just react to it. The dice has been rolled; politically, it is now the BJP’s turn to bite the bullet. The Congress’s ambivalent position in the 1990s on OBC reservations and its aftermath is a good lesson to remember.
A new politics on caste is knocking our doors, so, as a society, it is time for an intellectually open conversation on caste, and what must be done to accommodate various concerns. We must move beyond binaries and virtue signalling, as it will have nothing but disastrous consequences.
Rahul Verma is fellow, the Centre for Policy Research (CPR), New Delhi.The views expressed are personal