Caste-Based Mobilisation

Caste-based mobilisation denotes the conversion of caste—a ritual and endogamous social order codified in classical varna and jāti hierarchies—into an instrument of collective political action. Its modern legal and institutional scaffolding rests in the Constitution of India, which simultaneously abolished untouchability (Article 17), prohibited caste discrimination (Articles 15 and 16), and authorised the state to make special provisions for the "socially and educationally backward classes" and for the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Articles 15(4), 16(4), 46, 330, 332, 334, 338, 340, and 341). Article 340 specifically empowered the President to appoint commissions to investigate backward classes, the authority under which the First Backward Classes Commission (Kalelkar, 1953) and the Second (Mandal, 1979) were constituted. The reservation architecture this created transformed caste from a purely social marker into a legally recognised category around which numerical interests could be organised, claimed, and contested.

Procedurally, mobilisation proceeds through identifiable stages. First, a caste or cluster of cognate jātis is consolidated into a self-conscious community, frequently through caste associations (the early-twentieth-century Justice Party in Madras, the Kerala Pulaya and Ezhava sabhas, the Jat and Yadav mahasabhas). Second, this consolidation is amplified by what M. N. Srinivas termed the "vote bank"—the deliverable electoral bloc that parties court with targeted promises. Third, demands are formalised: inclusion in the Other Backward Classes (OBC) schedule, sub-quotas, ministerial berths, or recognition in the decennial enumeration. Fourth, the group enters bargaining with parties and the bureaucracy, translating numerical strength into reservations, candidate nominations, and welfare allocations. The unit of mobilisation is typically the jāti rather than the abstract varna, because jāti maps onto marriage networks, local dominance, and tangible electoral arithmetic.

Variants of this process differ by region and aim. Horizontal mobilisation aggregates several middle-ranking peasant castes into a broad backward-class front, as the Samajwadi and Rashtriya Janata Dal parties attempted across the Hindi belt. Vertical or Dalit mobilisation, articulated through B. R. Ambedkar's legacy and parties such as the Bahujan Samaj Party, seeks the assertion of Scheduled Caste dignity and a reordering of social power rather than mere quota expansion. A countervailing strand is the demand by relatively prosperous landed castes—Jats, Patidars, Marathas, Kapus—for OBC status, which inverts the assumption that the mobilising group is socially subordinate. Each variant interacts differently with the Mandal Commission legacy and the constitutional ceiling on reservations.

Named contemporary instances illustrate the dynamic. The implementation of the Mandal Commission report by Prime Minister V. P. Singh in August 1990 extended 27 percent reservation to OBCs in central government services and triggered nationwide agitation. The Patidar agitation led by Hardik Patel in Gujarat (2015) and the Maratha Kranti Morcha marches across Maharashtra (2016–2018) demanded backward-class status for dominant landed communities; Maharashtra's resulting SEBC Act granting Maratha reservation was struck down by the Supreme Court in Jaishri Laxmanrao Patil v. State of Maharashtra (2021). Bihar's caste-based survey, released by the Nitish Kumar government in October 2023, re-energised demands for a national caste census, which several opposition parties adopted as a 2024 campaign plank and the Union government subsequently agreed to include in the forthcoming decennial census.

Caste-based mobilisation must be distinguished from adjacent concepts. Communalism organises around religious identity rather than caste, and the two can cut across each other—a single jāti may span Hindu and Muslim members. Identity politics is the broader genus; caste mobilisation is one Indian species alongside linguistic and regional sub-nationalism. It also differs from class-based mobilisation: Marxist analysts long argued that caste fragments the proletariat, whereas mobilisers such as Kanshi Ram countered that caste itself is the operative axis of deprivation. Finally, "Sanskritisation"—Srinivas's term for a lower caste's emulation of upper-caste ritual practice to raise status—is the inverse strategy of seeking dignity through assimilation rather than through assertive numerical claim-making.

Edge cases and controversies remain live. The Supreme Court's Indra Sawhney v. Union of India (1992) upheld OBC reservation but fixed a 50 percent ceiling and introduced the "creamy layer" exclusion of affluent OBC families—a doctrine the Court extended to Scheduled Castes in promotions debates and revisited in State of Punjab v. Davinder Singh (2024), which permitted sub-classification of SCs. The 103rd Constitutional Amendment (2019) created a 10 percent Economically Weaker Sections quota outside the caste framework, upheld in Janhit Abhiyan (2022), partially decoupling backwardness from caste. The accuracy of the Mandal Commission's reliance on 1931 census data, and the persistent demand for a fresh caste enumeration, expose the data deficit underlying every claim.

For the working practitioner, caste-based mobilisation is the central explanatory variable in Indian electoral behaviour, welfare delivery, and federal bargaining. Desk officers and analysts must read state politics through the prism of dominant-caste coalitions, OBC consolidation, and Dalit assertion to forecast government formation and policy direction. For the UPSC aspirant, the subject straddles GS-I (Indian society, social empowerment) and GS-II (governance, reservation jurisprudence), demanding fluency in both the constitutional provisions and the sociological vocabulary of Srinivas, Ambedkar, and Rajni Kothari, whose work on the "politicisation of caste" remains the foundational analytical text.