Caste, Religion and Ethnicity in Indian Politics

Caste as Political Identity

It is often remarked that in India citizens do not so much cast a vote as vote their caste. The epigram captures a central truth of Indian electoral politics: caste remains one of the most powerful determinants of political behaviour, even after seven decades of democratic politics. Christophe Jaffrelot has described caste as the mosaic of Indian politics, while the twin idioms of Mandal and Kamandal are frequently invoked to sum up the two great mobilising currents of the last half century, the one rooted in social justice and caste arithmetic, the other in religious nationalism.

Conceptualising Caste: Jati, Varna and the Scholarly Debate

No European language possesses an exact equivalent for the Indian term jati. The Portuguese word caste, taken up by the colonial administrators, to describe the bewildering variety of birth-based groups that they encountered in India, and the term has since acquired a life of its own in social science. Louis Dumont treated the caste system as the Indian model of social stratification, one built on the opposition between purity and pollution, and contrasted it sharply with the western model of stratification based on class and equality. For Dumont, the whole society was encompassed by the religious principle of hierarchy, and the individual was always subordinate to the group.

The comparison between caste and class is instructive. In a class system, status is determined by merit, wealth or occupation, whereas in a caste system status is fixed by birth. Economic criteria classify people into classes, while the criterion of ritual purity and pollution organises castes. A class system is open, allowing individuals to move upward through their own effort, whereas a caste system is rigid and the individual cannot ordinarily escape the station assigned at birth. These contrasts, however, describe ideal types rather than living realities.

M. N. Srinivas challenged Dumont's perspective as too textual and Brahminical. In practice, he argued, there was considerable flexibility in the working of the caste system. Mobility was permitted, and he coined the term Sanskritization to describe the process by which lower castes adopted the rituals, customs and life-styles of higher, particularly Brahmin, castes in order to claim a higher status over two or three generations. Even untouchable communities such as the Jatavs of Agra were observed to Sanskritize their practices, although the introduction of reservations complicated the calculus by giving an incentive to maintain a lower-caste identity for the purpose of claiming benefits.

Srinivas also advanced the concept of the dominant caste. The term upper caste, he thought, was misleading, because in many villages power belonged not to the ritually highest caste but to the caste that combined numerical strength, ownership of land, and social and political influence. A caste became dominant, he suggested, when it possessed three characteristics: a substantial population, control over land, and a relatively high position in the local hierarchy. Such dominant castes mediated between the village and the wider political order and provided the natural leadership of rural society.

Caste in Independent India

Caste has existed in Indian society since ancient times, and some scholars have seen in the traditional order an alliance between religion and power, with Hinduism providing the ideological justification for a hierarchy that assigned each group its place. After independence, the Constitution did not abolish caste. It abolished untouchability, prohibited discrimination on grounds of caste, and simultaneously recognised caste as a legitimate basis for distributive justice, through reservations for the Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and, later, the Other Backward Classes. The state thus abolished caste as a principle of hierarchy while retaining it as a principle of redress.

The beginning of coalition politics after 1989 accelerated the regionalisation of the party system, and with it the political salience of caste. Indian society is commonly categorised into three broad groups: the upper castes, the Other Backward Classes, and the Dalits or ex-untouchable communities, with the Adivasis forming a further distinct category. It should also be noted that caste is not confined to Hindus. Muslims and Christians in India also possess caste-like communities, so that religion and caste overlap in ways that complicate any simple understanding of either identity.

Does Caste Strengthen Democracy?

Scholars are divided on whether caste has strengthened or weakened Indian politics. Rajni Kothari credited the success of Indian democracy, paradoxically, to caste. Caste, he argued, provided the basis for the mobilisation and integration of society into the democratic process; it gave the masses a vocabulary of politics and a structure of leadership through which they could participate. Instead of the old hierarchy being destroyed by democracy, democracy was domesticated by the traditional structures that already existed.

Kothari described three processes that show how politics has changed the nature of caste. The first is secularisation. Earlier, caste mattered for ritual purposes; today it matters primarily for political and economic purposes. Caste has been stripped of much of its transcendental meaning and converted into an interest group competing for resources. The second is integration. Although caste is usually treated as a force that divides society, democratic competition has pushed different castes towards negotiation, alliance and coalition-building. The AJGAR coalition, later expanded to MAJGAR, brought together Muslims, Ahirs, Jats, Gujjars and Rajputs, and was proposed as a political combination in the 1950s. The KHAM coalition, comprising Kshatriyas, Harijans, Adivasis and Muslims, was the formula through which Congress sought to reproduce its dominance in Gujarat. Muslim-Yadav coalitions later became the electoral axis of parties such as Samajwadi Party in Uttar Pradesh and Rashtriya Janata Dal in Bihar. The third process is consciousness. When caste enters politics, it develops a new, politicised consciousness. The lower castes, in particular, become aware of their numerical strength and translate it into political assertion.

Rudolph and Rudolph captured this transformation in a celebrated formula, speaking of the modernisation of tradition and the traditionalisation of modernity, capturing the mutual adaptation of the old social order and the new political order. Jaffrelot has called caste-based political mobilisation India's silent revolution, because it has transferred power, without dramatic upheaval, from the upper castes to the middle and lower castes. Yogendra Yadav has spoken of a democratic upsurge, in which the participation of the lower classes and castes has deepened the social base of Indian democracy. Lalita Chandrashekhar, in her article on the emancipatory power of caste politics, argues that caste-based mobilisation has narrowed the gap between formal democracy and substantive equality by giving the historically excluded a stake in the political order. For all these writers, caste-based mobilisation ensures that Indian democracy does not remain merely a topsoil of elite competition.

The opposing view is no less articulate. C. P. Bhambri holds that caste politics is harmful in the long run, because it communalises politics, diverts attention from class and economic issues, and fragments the poor into competing ascriptive groups. Ashutosh Varshney, in his book Battles Half Won, argues that caste-based mobilisation has not necessarily resulted in material improvement for the lower castes; political representation has not always translated into economic and educational progress, and the gains remain uneven across regions and communities.

Andre Beteille drew attention to the ambiguities of the constitutional settlement: the Constitution struck down untouchability while stopping short of abolishing caste itself, preserving the institution while removing its most brutal feature. Kanchan Chandra, in her work on ethnic politics, points out that where political patronage is distributed on the basis of caste, it is difficult to imagine a caste-free politics; the logic of democratic competition itself perpetuates caste identities as long as governments allocate benefits through caste categories.

OBC Politics and Mandalisation

The Other Backward Classes are the intermediate castes lying between the upper castes and the Dalits, and they have become, by dint of their numbers, the most decisive force in Indian politics. Under the constitutional scheme, it is the President who is authorised to notify the castes and communities known as socially and educationally backward classes, though the definition has never been precise. Marc Galanter, in his book Competing Equalities, suggests that the OBC category is a loose and expanding conception, the boundaries of which have been drawn differently by different Commissions and states. Jaffrelot has explained the rise of OBC politics in both north and south India in his study of the silent revolution, showing how numerically powerful intermediate castes captured political power through democratic means.

OBC politics is older and more mature in the south than in the north. The composition of southern society differed from the north: in the south, the only significant upper caste was the Brahmin, and the non-Brahmin castes could therefore unite against a single, identifiable ritual elite. Leaders such as Jyotiba Phule with the Satyashodhak Samaj, E. V. Ramaswamy Naicker with the Self-Respect Movement, and Shri Narayan Guru with his movement for social reform among the Ezhavas, prepared the ground for the assertion of Dravidian identity and the creation of autonomous non-Brahmin parties in Madras. In the north, by contrast, there were multiple upper castes, and the backward classes could not so easily counter their combined dominance. Movements such as the Arya Samaj and the Shuddhi movement had, moreover, spread a stronger influence of Vedic religion. Faced with Brahminical hegemony, the northern backward castes adopted Sanskritization as their strategy of mobility, and remained for a long time within the Congress umbrella rather than forming autonomous parties. Hence the late arrival of the OBCs as an autonomous political force in the north, an event symbolised by the Mandal agitation of 1990 and described as the Mandalisation of Indian politics.

Dalit Politics: Co-option, Autonomy and Radicalism

The mobilisation of Dalits goes back to the pre-independence years and represents an assertion of the ex-untouchable communities against their historical exploitation. Three broad strategies can be distinguished. The first is co-option, the strategy of the Congress era, in which Dalit leaders such as Babu Jagjivan Ram preferred to work within the dominant party and secure positions and benefits through it. The second is autonomy, the strategy associated with Ambedkar, who insisted that while the Dalits should pursue constitutional methods, they must remain an independent political force and not be absorbed into any party dominated by the upper castes. The success of this approach is exemplified by Mayawati, who built the Bahujan Samaj Party into a formidable political force in Uttar Pradesh. Ajay Bose, in his biography of Mayawati, argues that her politics represents the fullest realisation of the Ambedkarite model of autonomous Dalit assertion. The third strategy is radicalism, inspired by the Marxist idea of struggle and revolution, though Ambedkar himself rejected the Marxist frame as inadequate to the specific reality of caste.

The contemporary Dalit movement has acquired a new edge. Writing in the context of the Bhima Koregaon incident, scholars have described a New Dalit Challenge, in which the younger generation of Dalits no longer contents itself with formal constitutional recognition. It rejects the managerial style by which the upper castes sought to co-opt Dalits into the symbolic order without any real shift in power or resources. The new Dalits are building cultural and political counter-hegemony, moving beyond the politics of mere survival to challenge the writing of history and the terms of public memory. C. P. Bhambri, while welcoming the growth of Dalit consciousness, has counselled that the Dalit movement must form alliances with progressive and secular forces if it is to transform the structures of inequality rather than merely capture shares of power.

Religion & Communalism

Religion enters the political arena in India in two very different ways. On the one hand, the Constitution guarantees freedom of conscience and the right to practise any religion and establishes a secular state. On the other hand, religion has repeatedly been mobilised as a political force, sometimes as a legitimate assertion of group identity and sometimes in the pathological form of communalism. The relationship between religion and politics in India must therefore be studied at three levels: the constitutional principle of secularism, the sociological reality of a deeply religious society, and the political exploitation of religious sentiment.

The Constitutional and Philosophical Framework

India is a land of immense religious diversity: every major religion of the world, Hinduism, Islam, Christianity, Sikhism, Buddhism, Jainism, Zoroastrianism and Judaism, has followers within its territory, and it is this religious pluralism that gives the Indian experiment its distinctive character. The Indian state is secular, in the sense that it has no official religion and treats all religions with equal respect. This is not, however, the same as the western model of secularism, in which the state is strictly separated from religion. In India, the state protects minority religions through special provisions, and it interferes in the affairs of the major religions in order to reform them, for instance by abolishing untouchability, permitting the entry of all castes into temples, and regulating religious endowments. Indian secularism has thus been described as a positive and reformist secularism, distinct from the negative and separatist secularism of the west.

Jawaharlal Nehru was the strongest advocate of secularism in the constituent assembly and in independent India. His secularism rested on western liberalism, on the faith in rational science, and on a conviction that religion should be a private matter of the individual. He was nevertheless aware that India could not survive as a nation unless it treated its numerous religious communities with equal concern. The opposite perspective came from Mahatma Gandhi, whose secularism was rooted in the Hindu tradition of religious tolerance, expressed in the formula that all religions are equal, that God is one though the ways of reaching him are many. Gandhi did not wish to privatise religion; he wished instead to spiritualise politics, drawing moral energy from religion while rejecting the intolerance that had grown around it.

B. R. Ambedkar, in turn, criticised the traditional structures of Hindu society itself. His secularism was not merely a matter of state neutrality but demanded an attack on the religiously sanctioned caste hierarchy, which he regarded as the chief obstacle to the political unity of the Indian nation. Ambedkar's adoption of Buddhism in 1956 was itself a political act, a rejection of the religion that had legitimated the degradation of his people. His approach suggests that a secular state cannot simply ignore religion where religion has been used as a weapon of oppression.

S. Radhakrishnan also defended the strong religious basis of Indian secularism on the ground that it was not godless. For the early constitutional framers, then, secularism meant the freedom of religion for all communities, a common civil code as an ideal of the future, and equality before the law without discrimination on grounds of religion.

Theories and Debates on Indian Secularism

Writers in the West have sometimes doubted whether India is truly secular. One influential position is that of Donald Eugene Smith, who wrote India As a Secular State, arguing on the basis of US separation of church and state that India's secularism is incomplete and defective, because the Indian state does not maintain a hard wall of separation between religion and politics. Indian critics have generally argued that Smith's yardstick is inappropriate, since no single model of secularism can be transported mechanically from one country to another.

Ashish Nandy offers a sweeping critique of westernised secularism from the traditionalist standpoint. Secularism, he argues, is a western liberal weapon of the elite, a faith of the modernising middle class, which has rendered the Indian masses vulnerable by weakening their traditional religious faith. He advocates a shift from secularism to faith, from reason to the religious tolerance embedded in the folk traditions of India, and he believes that the real guarantee of tolerance lies not in state neutrality but in the everyday tolerance of Indian religious traditions. Gandhi is the hero of this narrative, the westernised Nehru its villain.

T. N. Madan also argues that secularism cannot serve as the shared credo of Indian society because the majority of Indians are deeply religious, and the secular state has failed to capture the imagination of the masses. Since religion is not a private matter for most Indians but a way of life, the project of making religion a purely private affair is sociologically unrealistic.

A contrasting defence of secularism comes from Rajeev Bhargava, who has developed the idea of principled distance. The Indian model, he argues, is not a wall of separation but a principled distance: the state is allowed to intervene in religious affairs for the sake of equality and freedom, to prevent discrimination of one community by another, to protect individual rights, and to reform religions where they violate constitutional values. At the same time the state is not to be identified with any religion nor is it to promote any religion. Bhargava enumerates three models of secularism: the American model of strict separation, the French model of anti-religious secularism, and the Indian model of principled distance, which he regards as the most appropriate for a deeply plural society. He has defended multiculturalism by arguing that the state must sometimes recognise group-differentiated rights so that communities, not merely individuals, can enjoy equal freedom, as in the exemptions given to minority educational institutions under Article 30.

Romila Thapar has provided a historical reading of Indian secularism. She distinguishes between religions with a prophet and religions without, and argues that Buddhism, Jainism and the bhakti movements of the medieval period provide the historical basis of a secular and tolerant culture. In her view, communalism is not a remnant of the ancient past but a modern phenomenon, produced by colonial policies of enumeration and by competitive politics in post-colonial India.

Communalism: Concept and Causes

Communalism holds that religious communities are the fundamental units of Indian society and that their interests are opposed to one another. A communalist believes that the followers of a religion form one community with common secular interests, that these interests are in conflict with the interests of other religious communities, and that the state must be organised so as to favour the interests of one's own community. Communalism can take the gentle form of belief in cultural tradition, the aggressive form of mobilisation against another community, or the extreme form of demanding a separate nation on grounds of religion.

Various explanations have been offered for its persistence. Politically, communal violence is seen as the exploitation of religious sentiments by politicians and parties for electoral gain. Sociologically, communalism is traced to the urbanisation and modernisation of Indian society, in which rootless migrants in cities cling to community identity as a source of security. Economically, communal riots have often been linked to competition between communities for jobs, markets and housing. Each explanation captures a part of the truth: communalism is simultaneously a political instrument, a social pathology of rapid change, and a response to economic insecurity.

Hindutva and the Debate on Hindu Nationalism

The most consequential expression of religious politics in modern India is Hindutva, the ideology that India is essentially a Hindu nation. Savarkar is regarded as the father of Hindutva, which he distinguished from Hinduism as a faith. For Savarkar, a Hindu was one who regarded India as both fatherland and holy land, and by this test Muslims and Christians, whose holy lands lay outside India, could not be fully members of the nation. M. S. Golwalkar, the second Sarsanghchalak of the RSS, carried the doctrine further, arguing that non-Hindus in India must either adopt Hindu culture, or remain subordinate, and that minorities possessed no right to preserve their separate identity.

The RSS, founded in 1925 by K. B. Hedgewar, is the organisational engine of this ideology, and its political wing, the Bharatiya Janata Party, has brought Hindutva to the centre of Indian politics. The Vishwa Hindu Parishad and the Bajrang Dal form the broader family of organisations associated with this current.

The relationship between Hindutva and fascism has been much debated. Christophe Jaffrelot argues against a simple equivalence. He notes that the RSS draws its inspiration from the organicist ideas of thinkers such as Arthur de Gobineau and Houston Stewart Chamberlain, and its conception of the nation resembles the organic nationalism of the German tradition. At the same time, Jaffrelot resists labelling Hindutva as fascist in the strict sense, because the RSS did not, in its early decades, seek to overthrow the state by force, and it has historically preferred a strategy of grassroots social work and cultural consolidation to outright insurrection. In his recent writings, however, Jaffrelot has noted a shift: the RSS has moved towards a more statist orientation, seeking to capture the state, and its street-level organisations have grown substantially. His conclusion is that the RSS is moving in a fascist direction even if it cannot yet be equated with European fascism. The ideological heart of the debate can be summarised in two opposing readings: one sees in Sangh ideology a dangerous majoritarian nationalism; the other sees a legitimate cultural nationalism defending an authentic Indian tradition against the westernising elite.

Ethnicity & Regional Identity

With the close of the Cold War, ethnicity moved to the centre of world politics, becoming the most frequent source of political conflict across the globe. India, with its extraordinary diversity of languages, religions, tribes and regions, has been both a laboratory and a warning for the study of ethnicity. The challenge before the Indian state has been to accommodate the aspirations of its many ethnic groups within a single constitutional framework.

Conceptualising Ethnicity

The term ethnicity is used to describe a collective consciousness shared by a group on the basis of common descent, language, religion or history. A group can be said to possess ethnicity when its members are conscious of their distinctive identity and seek to defend or advance it politically. The boundaries between ethnic groups are not always fixed; they can be sharpened or blurred by political circumstances.

A useful distinction is drawn between homogeneous and multi-ethnic nations. A homogeneous nation is a cultural or natural nation, in which the boundaries of the state and the nation coincide, as in countries where a single language and a single culture predominate. A multi-ethnic nation, by contrast, is a political nation, a state that contains many cultural groups which must be held together by a shared political identity and by constitutional arrangements. India is emphatically a multi-ethnic and political nation; its unity is a political achievement, not a cultural given.

James Manor, in his book Ethnic Politics in India, has suggested that ethnicity in India can be described along four markers. The first is religion, which can act as an ethnic marker when a religious community develops common political interests. The second is language, the most powerful and most institutionalised ethnic marker in India, since the Constitution itself recognises major languages and states are organised largely on linguistic lines. The third is race, a term used loosely to refer to physical and descent-based distinctions. The fourth is caste, which functions in India as a kind of ethnic identity because it combines descent, occupation and a recognised group name. Each of these markers can become the basis of political mobilisation, and they frequently overlap: a single movement may combine linguistic, religious and caste grievances.

Ethnicity and the Indian State: Four Perspectives

Prof. S. D. Muni has argued that ethnicity is not by itself a challenge to the territorial integrity of India, because the identity markers of Indian ethnic groups are not tied to a claim of exclusive territory. Language groups in India are dispersed and intermingled, and no major group is concentrated in a single region to the exclusion of others. The threat to territorial integrity, in his view, comes not from ethnicity but from the political manipulation of ethnic identities by parties and state elites.

Four broad perspectives explain the relationship between ethnicity and democracy in India. The first, associated with Rudolph and Rudolph, Atul Kohli and Rajni Kothari, stresses the coexistence of modernity and tradition. Democracy enters a traditional society and unleashes ethnic mobilisation, but this is not necessarily destructive: the old forms are modernised and the new political forms are domesticated, producing a distinctly Indian pattern of democratic politics. The second perspective is that of Charles Taylor, who looks at ethnic movements as assertions by marginalised communities, a politics of recognition through which groups excluded from power demand respect and representation. The third is the state-centric view of Neera Chandhoke, who argues that the attempts of the state to homogenise the population, through actions such as ethnic mapping and the standardisation of language and culture, make people conscious of their ethnicity and provoke resistance. The fourth is the instrumentalist reading of Prof. S. D. Muni: ethnicity is not the spontaneous choice of the people but the preference of political parties and elites, who find it convenient to mobilise voters along ethnic lines. Similar views are expressed by other writers who see the leaders of ethnic movements as rational actors using identity as a political resource.

Can Democracy Accommodate Ethnicity?

In an essay titled Can Democracies Accommodate Ethnic Challenges?, Atul Kohli asks whether democratic institutions are capable of absorbing ethnic conflict. His first observation is that democracy in a traditional society leads to the mobilisation of people along ethnic lines, as the traditional elites, fearful of losing their privileges to upwardly mobile lower groups, whip up ethnic sentiment to preserve their position. His second observation is that democracy is itself part of the problem, but it is also the only durable solution: the repression of ethnic demands does not resolve them, while democratic accommodation, however slow and imperfect, can gradually integrate ethnic groups into the political order. His third observation is that accommodation works only when the leadership at the centre is willing to make concessions and to use the state apparatus to mediate between groups.

The Sarkaria Commission, which examined centre-state relations, drew an important conclusion: ethnic movements are never purely ethnic. There is always an overlapping layer of political and economic grievances, and an ethnic movement is likely to be sustained only where political exclusion and economic deprivation reinforce cultural identity. The management of ethnic conflict therefore requires political devolution, economic development and cultural recognition in combination.

Regionalism, Linguistic States and the Demand for Autonomy

India's ethnic diversity has found its most concrete political expression in regionalism. The states of India are, for the most part, linguistic states, created after the States Reorganisation Act of 1956 and the subsequent reorganisation of Punjab and parts of the south. The linguistic reorganisation of states was followed by the creation of new states within the north-east, and, after long movements, of Telangana in 2014. The demand for states is best understood not as a threat to national unity but as a claim within the constitutional framework, an assertion by a linguistic or cultural group that its identity deserves recognition in the form of autonomous political space.

Regionalism can take several forms. It can be a movement for the creation of a new state, as in the Telangana and Vidarbha movements. It can take the form of regional parties, which contest elections on a platform of regional development and pride, such as the Dravidian parties of Tamil Nadu, the Telugu Desam Party, and the regional parties of the north-east. India is thus a union of states in which federalism and linguistic diversity are not merely legal arrangements but expressions of the ethnic pluralism of the society. The successful accommodation of linguistic and regional identities within the Indian Union stands in contrast to the experience of several multi-ethnic states that fragmented along ethnic lines, and it rests on the constitutional principle that no single culture or language can dominate the public life of the union.

Reservations Policy

Reservation, or affirmative action, is the most consequential instrument through which the Indian state has sought to correct the historical disadvantages of caste. The constitutional scheme does not treat equality as a merely formal idea. It permits the state to make special provisions for the advancement of the Scheduled Castes, the Scheduled Tribes and the socially and educationally backward classes, and it accommodates group rights alongside individual rights.

The Constitutional Architecture of Reservations

The relevant provisions are spread across the Constitution. Article 15(4) empowers the state to make special provision for the advancement of any socially and educationally backward classes of citizens or for the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes, and Article 15(5), added by the 93rd Amendment, extends this to admission into educational institutions, including private aided and unaided institutions, with an exception for minority institutions established under Article 30. Article 16(4) permits the state to make provision for the reservation of appointments or posts in favour of any backward class of citizens which, in the opinion of the state, is not adequately represented in the services of the state. Article 16(4A), inserted by the 77th Amendment, allows the state to make provision for reservation in matters of promotion for the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes.

In the political sphere, Articles 330 and 332 reserve seats for the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes in the Lok Sabha and in the Legislative Assemblies of the states, and Article 243D makes similar provision for the panchayats. The ceiling on these reservations, originally fixed for ten years by Article 334, has been extended repeatedly by constitutional amendment and currently stands until the year 2030.

Article 335 declares that the claims of the members of the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes shall be taken into consideration, consistently with the maintenance of efficiency of administration, in the making of appointments to services and posts. The mandate of efficiency places a limit on the extent to which reservations can dilute administrative standards. Educationally, the reservation in higher education for the Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and Other Backward Classes amounts to half of the seats in the central institutions, with internal sub-quotas for further disadvantaged groups within each category.

Constitutional and Statutory Bodies

The original Article 338 provided for a Special Officer for the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes, charged with investigating all matters relating to the safeguards provided for them and reporting to the President. The office had little power, and in 1978 the government replaced it with a non-statutory multi-member commission. A constitutional status was finally given in 1990, when the National Commission for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes was established as a body capable of protecting the interests of the two groups.

The 89th Constitutional Amendment Act of 2003 split this single body in two. Article 338 now establishes the National Commission for Scheduled Castes, and Article 338(A) establishes a separate National Commission for Scheduled Tribes. The composition of each commission is modest: a Chairperson, a Vice-Chairperson and three full-time members, of whom one is required to be a woman.

Article 338(5) and Article 338(A)(5) enumerate the functions of the two Commissions. The Commissions must probe and track every matter connected with the safeguards extended to the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes by the Constitution or by any other enactment. They inquire into specific complaints of deprivation of rights and safeguards. They participate in, and advise on, the planning process of the socio-economic development of the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes, and they assess how far the development of these groups has advanced under the Union and the states. They are bound to lay before the President annual and other reports on the operation of the safeguards, to suggest the measures that the Union or a state ought to adopt for giving real effect to them, and, in addition, to perform such other duties as the President may assign. The Commissions possess, for the purpose of investigating complaints, the powers of a civil court: they may summon witnesses, require the production of documents and receive evidence on affidavit.

An analogous body for the backward classes came much later. The National Commission for Backward Classes was originally constituted by an Act of Parliament in 1993, following the Supreme Court's direction in the Indra Sawhney case, and it was reconstituted by a new Act in 2018. The 102nd Constitution Amendment Act of 2018 raised the Commission to constitutional status, and Article 338(B) now provides for a National Commission for Backward Classes with a Chairperson, a Vice-Chairperson and three other members. Its functions mirror those of the NCSC: to examine and watch over the safeguards for the socially and educationally backward classes, to look into grievances, to tender advice on planning their socio-economic development, to report to the President, and to recommend measures for giving effect to those safeguards.

The Protection of Civil Rights and the Atrocities Act

Beyond reservations, the state has armed itself with penal legislation to combat caste discrimination. The Protection of Civil Rights Act of 1955 makes the practice of untouchability a punishable offence, and the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act of 1989 creates a special regime of protection and punishment. The Atrocities Act prohibits a long list of offences against members of the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes: forcing them to eat or drink offensive substances, parading them naked, sexually assaulting women, forcing them to leave their houses or villages, and a variety of humiliations and exploitations. Acts constitute atrocities under the Act only when they are committed by a person who is not a member of the Scheduled Castes or Scheduled Tribes against a person who is. The offences are cognisable, so no warrant is required to arrest an accused person, and the punishment ranges from a minimum of six months to five years. Public officials who neglect the implementation of the Act expose themselves to punitive action, and the state is obliged to ensure the rehabilitation of victims.

The Act has been contentious. Critics point to the filing of false cases to settle personal disputes, to the misuse of the Act in minor disagreements, and to the harassment of government officials through mandatory arrest provisions. In March 2018, the Supreme Court, moved by these concerns, introduced safeguards against automatic arrest under the Act, requiring preliminary inquiry and prior approval for the arrest of public servants. The judgment provoked nationwide protests by Dalit and Adivasi communities, who felt it had blunted the law; Parliament responded by passing the 2018 Amendment to nullify the safeguards. The Supreme Court later acknowledged that its 2018 judgment had strayed into the legislative field and essentially restored the operation of the Act.

The Great Debate: Mandal, Creamy Layer and the 103rd Amendment

The most explosive chapter in the history of reservations is the Mandal story. The Second Backward Classes Commission, chaired by B. P. Mandal, reported in 1980 that the Other Backward Classes constituted approximately 52 percent of the population, and it recommended 27 percent reservation for them in central government services. The recommendation gathered dust for a decade, until Prime Minister V. P. Singh announced its implementation on 7 August 1990. The announcement triggered an unprecedented wave of self-immolations and protests by upper-caste students, in what came to be known as the Mandal agitation, and it permanently transformed the vocabulary of Indian politics around the terms Mandal and Kamandal, the latter symbolising the counter-mobilisation of religious nationalism around the Ram Janmabhoomi movement.

The implementation of the Mandal recommendations was challenged before the Supreme Court, and in the landmark judgment of Indra Sawhney v. Union of India (1992) a nine-judge bench upheld the constitutional validity of the reservations while imposing two crucial conditions. First, the total reservation in any cadre must not ordinarily exceed fifty percent of the seats. Second, the benefit of reservation must not extend to the creamy layer, that is, those members of a backward class whose parents have already risen to a certain level of income or social position; such persons are treated as having ceased to be backward. The judgment also directed the government to create a permanent statutory body for the backward classes, a direction that ultimately resulted in the NCBC and, later, its constitutionalisation.

The latest chapter is the Constitution (One Hundred and Third Amendment) Act, 2019, which introduced reservation for the economically weaker sections of society. Articles 15(6) and 16(6) now permit the state to make special provision for the economically weaker sections, over and above the existing reservations, up to ten percent of the seats in educational institutions and jobs. The amendment, by extending reservation beyond the categories of caste, marks a significant conceptual shift in Indian affirmative action, and its validity with respect to the fifty percent ceiling and to the exclusion of the reserved categories has been upheld by a Constitution bench of the Supreme Court in 2022, though the debate over its implications for the logic of caste-based reservation continues.

Three standing criticisms attend the reservation policy. The first is the merit argument: that reservation dilutes administrative and academic standards and is unfair to candidates who are excluded on the basis of their birth. The second is the capture argument, most associated with the concept of the creamy layer: that the benefits of reservation have been cornered by the better-off within each backward group, leaving the most disadvantaged, such as the Dalit sub-castes, untouched. The third is the efficiency argument, grounded in Article 335, that the state cannot sacrifice the efficiency of administration beyond a point. Defenders of reservation reply that equality of opportunity is meaningless without equality of condition, that the backwardness of the lowest groups is structural and not individual, and that reservation has succeeded, however imperfectly, in creating a visible middle class among the historically excluded, which is the necessary precondition for fuller equality.

Minority Rights

Minority rights form the third pillar of the Indian approach to identity politics. If caste-based policy addresses the inequalities of the social order, and secularism addresses the place of religion in public life, minority rights address the protection of groups that are numerically small and, often, socially vulnerable. The Indian Constitution grants minorities cultural and educational rights, and a National Commission for Minorities oversees the working of these safeguards.

Who are the Minorities?

The United Nations Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities defined minorities as non-dominant groups which, while possessing stable ethnic, religious or linguistic characteristics differing from the rest of the population, show a will to preserve their identity. In India, the central government has notified five religious communities, Muslims, Sikhs, Christians, Buddhists, Parsis and Jains, as minorities, though the specification of minorities at the state level falls to the state governments. The history of Indian minorities is a history of movement and settlement: migration, conquest, imperial rule, refugee movements caused by partition and, more recently, globalisation have all contributed layers to the minority population.

Minorities have been victims of persecution in many parts of the world, from the Jews under Hitler to the Rohingyas in Myanmar and the Uyghur Muslims in China, a reminder that the protection of minorities is a universal concern rather than a peculiarly Indian one. Within India, the record is more mixed. A UN report on the freedom of religious belief in India, written by the Pakistani scholar Asma Jahangir, praised the legal protections available to minorities in India, but also drew attention to the poor implementation of laws at the state level and to attacks by majority fundamentalists on Christians and other minority communities. The report illustrates the gap that can open between the constitutional text and the administrative reality.

The Constitutional Framework of Minority Rights

The Constitution protects the rights of minorities through several clusters of provisions. Article 29 guarantees to any section of citizens residing in the territory of India or any part of it, having a distinct language, script or culture of its own, the right to conserve the same, and it prohibits denial of admission into educational institutions maintained by the state or receiving state aid on grounds only of religion, race, caste, language or any of them. Article 30 confers on all minorities, whether based on religion or language, the right to establish and administer educational institutions of their choice, and it prohibits the state, in granting aid to educational institutions, from discriminating against any institution on the ground that it is under the management of a minority. The Supreme Court has held that the right under Article 30 is absolute in respect of the administration of minority institutions, subject only to reasonable regulation for academic standards and discipline. Minority institutions are exempt from the reservation regime, except that they may not discriminate in admission on grounds of religion where the institution is a minority institution, a distinction drawn in cases such as St. Stephen's College and TMA Pai Foundation.

In the political sphere, the Constitution provides for the representation of the Anglo-Indian community through nomination of its members to the Lok Sabha and the state assemblies. More broadly, the protection of minority rights is reinforced by Articles 25, 26, 27 and 28, which guarantee freedom of conscience and religion, the right to manage religious affairs, and freedom from compulsory religious instruction. Article 30 must be read together with the principle of secularism: because the state is equally distant from all religions, it cannot favour or disfavour any community in the provision of public goods, and the special rights of minorities are not a violation of equality but a necessary means of securing equal citizenship in a plural society.

The Sachar Committee and the Condition of Muslims

The most detailed official examination of the condition of India's largest minority is the Sachar Committee Report on the Socio-Economic Status of Minorities, presented in 2006. The Committee discovered that Muslims, the largest minority community, were significantly backward relative to the general population in education, employment and living conditions. Its statistics were stark: nearly 25 percent of Muslim children in the age group of six to fourteen years had either never attended school or had dropped out; only four percent were graduates, and of every twenty graduates only one pursued a post-graduate degree; and Muslims were represented at barely 1.3 percent in the Indian Foreign Service, 3 percent in the Indian Administrative Service, 4 percent in the Indian Police Service and 4.5 percent in the Railways. These figures exposed the distance between formal citizenship and substantive opportunity.

The Committee also inquired into the causes of Muslim backwardness. Muslim communities, it observed, often reside in compact localities and prefer to avail of facilities within those localities, especially for the education of the girl child. Many families remain shy of venturing into unfamiliar settings and confine themselves to madrasas. Muslim settlements tend to be in unhygienic areas with low living conditions, and a preference for self-employment is reinforced by the constraints of the labour market. A psychological fear of alienation from the rest of society inhibits integration, with poor educational outcomes and low formal employment following as a consequence. Many do not avail of banking and insurance services because of religious scruples against interest, and the Committee recommended that they should be connected to the financial system through mechanisms such as Islamic banking.

The National Commission for Minorities

The institutional watchdog for minority rights is the National Commission for Minorities. Its origins lie in a proposal of the Ministry of Home Affairs in 1978, animated by the feeling that the existing arrangements for protecting minority interests were inadequate. The Commission was eventually constituted under the National Commission for Minorities Act of 1992, and it is a multi-member body with one chairperson, one vice-chairperson and five members drawn from the minority communities. The first states to experiment with minorities commissions were Uttar Pradesh, which formed one in 1960 under the Congress government of Dr. Sampurnanand, and Bihar, which established a multi-member Minorities Commission in 1971.

The functions of the Commission are broad. It is charged with assessing the progress of the minorities under the Union and the states, watching over the working of the safeguards contained in the Constitution and in the statutes of Parliament and the state assemblies, and dealing with individual complaints regarding the deprivation of rights and safeguards of minorities; to conduct studies, research and analysis on issues relating to the socio-economic and educational development of minorities; and to advise on any other matter referred to it by the central government. For the discharge of these functions, the Commission possesses the powers of a civil court in respect of summoning and enforcing the attendance of persons, examining them on oath, requiring the discovery and production of documents, receiving evidence on affidavit and requisitioning records from any court or office.

The Commission has been criticised from two directions. One set of criticisms concerns its constitutional and legal weakness: it has been recommended that the Commission should be given constitutional status on par with the National Commissions for the Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and Backward Classes; that its powers of investigation should be strengthened; that it should have the power to inquire into complaints rather than merely look into them; and that consultation with the Commission should be mandatory for the Union and state governments in matters concerning minority development. The response of the government to these recommendations has been lukewarm. A second set of criticisms concerns the politics of the institution: because its members are nominated, the Commission tends to perform under the political identity of the day; and in practice it has been confined largely to the political concerns of one community, the Muslim minority, to the relative neglect of other notified groups.

The Commission has also engaged with the digital age. Along with the Digital Empowerment Foundation, it has proposed a satellite-based support system to bring minority institutions into the mainstream of modern education, and an emphasis on e-governance to create strong connections between the government, the minorities and the majority community. In a conference organised with the Foundation, the Commission strongly discouraged the use of the word minority itself, highlighting the positive connotation of being a community with distinct cultural assets rather than a numerically weak group, and signalling a shift towards a more empowering vocabulary of cultural identity.

The Protection of Minority Rights: An Assessment

The Indian experiment with minority rights stands in tension between two opposing models. The first is homogenisation, the unity of uniformity, in which the state expects minorities to assimilate into the majority culture, the melting pot model. The second is multiculturalism, the unity in diversity of the salad bowl, in which the state recognises the special position of minorities, protects their distinct institutions, and allows them to preserve their identity while participating in the common political life. India has chosen the second, but it has not chosen it completely. The Constitution recognises the special rights of minorities, and the state has established institutions such as the National Commission for Minorities, the Minorities Welfare departments, the Maulana Azad Education Foundation and the National Minorities Development and Finance Corporation to channel resources towards the notified communities. At the same time, the political mainstream has repeatedly polarised elections around majority-minority lines, and communal violence remains a recurring feature of Indian life.

The constitutional and institutional design for minorities is therefore judged by two standards: the protection of the right to be different, and the creation of conditions for equal participation. By the first standard, India's record is broadly reassuring, with its guarantees of cultural and educational autonomy; by the second, it is uneven, as the Sachar Committee's findings and the reports of the National Commission for Minorities themselves testify. The future of minority rights in India will depend on whether the state can move from the passive tolerance of diversity to an active guarantee of equal citizenship to every community.