The tricky business of playing the castes card

It is among the oldest fault lines cleaving Indian society, yet the impact of caste on the world's largest democratic exercise is insufficiently understood.

- Dhrubo Jyoti

Caste norms remain among the most potent forms of mass mobilisation, even as regional, gender and class variations increasingly add complexity to bloc-based analysis.

2024 will see the clash of two forms of caste-based mobilisation at the hustings. The Opposition, led by the 28-party Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance (INDIA), is attempting a reboot of 1990s-style politics with its bid for a nationwide caste census. In itself, this is a big step for the Congress, which spent decades resisting calls from the heartland for reservations for other backward classes (OBCS), doggedly refusing to move forward with the first backward classes commission report, and sitting on the Mandal Commission report for years before Janata Dal founder VP Singh, as head of the short-lived National Front coalition government, implemented it in 1990.

Heading into a general elections now, the Opposition's hope is that the promise of a caste census - such an exercise has only been conducted in Bihar so far, and it showed that OBCs formed 63% of the state population, prompting the government to expand reservations in that state to 75% will help erode a chunk of the BJP's support among OBCs and SCs, because implicit in the promise of a caste census is the promise of a hike in the quantum of reservation.

But beyond symbolism, the electoral dividends of such a strategy remain unclear.