Most observers of Indian politics seem to agree that the Narendra Modi government’s decision to hold a caste census alongside the next population census is likely to be a turning point. There is sharp disagreement, however, on the direction politics is slated to turn. Some believe that the prime minister skilfully defused a key Opposition platform. That assessment is rebutted by those who argue that legitimising the politics of caste would only end up undermining the Bharatiya Janata Party’s own pan-Hindu support base. Which of the two views is more correct?
The simple answer is that politics does not follow any predetermined path. Yet we can still think through the possible impact by meditating on a close historical parallel. On February 1, 1985, in front of a troupe of Doordarshan cameras, the locks on the gates of the Babri masjid were opened to facilitate Hindu prayer rituals. Thus began a new era in Indian politics. The Modi government’s unshackling of the caste census agenda can be seen as the political equivalent of the Rajiv Gandhi government’s unlocking of the Babri masjid.
To employ the analogy properly, the Babri masjid episode needs to be placed in its proper political context. That means moving away from the distorted presentation of the event as merely a ‘balancing act’ — a reactive ‘Hindu appeasement’ following the ‘Muslim appeasement’ of upturning the Shah Bano verdict. That might well have been the immediate trigger. But preparations for opening the mosque had been well underway for at least a month preceding the Shah Bano verdict. The discussions involved the Congress central leadership, the then chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, Vir Bahadur Singh, and the Vishwa Hindu Parishad.
The Congress’s Babri manoeuvre tends to be judged in hindsight as a strategic blunder, sweeping away the party out of the key states of UP and Bihar. It unlocked the threads of the Congress’s social coalition to the benefit of poachers on the Right (BJP), which grabbed the upper castes, and the Left (Mandal parties), which took away the Muslims. So why did the Congress dive headlong into the Babri quagmire?
We shall come to the reason in a bit. But before that, let us clarify a basic point about political representation in India. Oftentimes, in political commentary and even in academic discussions, political cleavages around caste and religion are taken as a primordial given. Political parties, in this view, are seen to ‘respond’ to pre-formed political identities or organic group interests.
The reality is exactly the opposite. It is political parties that “define groups, produce interests, and forge identities” through “acts of representation” as the American political scientist, Lisa Disch, writes in a recent book. This generative role of political parties in fomenting cleavages has been, if anything, much more pronounced in India. To borrow from the title of a book from the political scientist, Pradeep K. Chhibber, India is a “democracy without associations”. Unlike European social democrats or Christian democrats, Indian political parties had little option of mobilising cleavages that had previously germinated within civil society institutions (such as trade unions or church institutions). Hence, Indian political parties had to undertake the task of proactively “making-constituencies” through mobilisation.
As Andrew Wyatt noted in a study of Tamil Nadu parties, Dravidian identities did not map onto any singular line of social division but were crystallised through political mobilisation. “Dravidian identity illustrates the way in which political identities can be forged,” wrote Wyatt. The same could be said of OBC or bahujan identities, or of an umbrella Hindu or Muslim identity, for that matter. All these identities reflect compounds of disparate castes and communities bound together only by overlapping narratives. Political demands, such as those around caste-based affirmative action or linguistic autonomy, did not bubble up spontaneously from the ground but followed upon decades of patient narrative-building and demand-articulation overseen by partisan elites. So did the demand for the Ram temple.
Now let’s address the question of what led the Congress Party into opening the locks of the Babri.
The Congress’s hegemonic bloc of the first two decades post-Independence had rested on vertical alliances between landed elites and rural masses. That had broken down after the Green Revolution and the mobilisation of upwardly mobile peasant groups around the cleavages of caste and linguistic identities. Since the 1970s, Indian politics came to revolve around four master cleavages: caste, class, language and religion. To refashion a hegemonic bloc, the Congress had to construct a core cleavage and co-opt/accommodate the other cleavages around it. The Congress under Indira Gandhi partly succeeded in doing so through constructing a class cleavage tied to her populist leadership. Around this broad pro-poor constituency, Muslims and Dalits were strung together through paternalistic appeals.
That hegemonic bloc was also imploded by the Emergency and its aftermath. The pro-poor constituency proved untenable due to the lack of any demonstrable results on poverty and inequality. In the 1980s, the Congress sought, yet again, to conjure up a hegemonic bloc, this time around a Hindu majoritarian core, opposed to ‘Sikh’ and ‘Muslim’ militancy. In 1983, Indira Gandhi claimed in Kurukshetra that “Hindu dharm [faith] is under attack from the Sikhs.” And in Kashmir, she warned of an approaching “Dharma Yudh (religious war)”, reminding the minorities of their “duties towards the country of their birth.” The 1984 Congress ‘sympathy’ wave post the anti-Sikh riots had sprung out from this Hindu majoritarian core.
The Congress, however, never found a way to establish an ideology which pulls together the cleavages of caste and language around the gravitational core of a Hindu identity. Unlike the BJP of today, the Congress never had the backing of an RSS-like civil society network which had penetrated into diverse regions and communities. By 1986, the mobilised cleavages of caste and language had decisively swung away from the Congress. These cleavages interlocked into popular constituencies for regional parties of Karnataka or Andhra Pradesh alongside Mandal and agrarian parties of North India. This is when the Rajiv Gandhi government made the momentous Babri gambit, a doomed play of political desperation.
Now let’s turn to the question of the caste census. Is it a similar act of political desperation doomed to failure? One can certainly observe a few similarities.
Firstly, the Modi government of 2025, like the Rajiv Gandhi government of 1986, has the look and the feel of a regime which has passed its peak. The intervening victories in state elections cannot wipe out the humiliating reversal of the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, nor indeed the new reality of coalition pressures.
Second, the BJP’s Hindutva bloc has proven inept in accommodating the linguistic cleavage, as the repeated lack of success in Bengal, Telangana, Tamil Nadu and Kerala demonstrate. The high-handed politics of governor raj and ED/income tax raids on opponents has seeded regional backlash, not co-option. Meanwhile, the loss to the Samajwadi Party in UP last year showed that the Hindutva draping no longer smothers out caste cleavages. The tactical co-option of caste through social engineering — descriptive representation via well-publicised lists of placeholder MLAs and ministers — can only go so far.
Thirdly, similar to the disillusionment of the Rajiv Gandhi era, the Modi regime presides over a spiritually hollowed-out economic model in the sense that it is incapable of sparking any hope for upward mobility or a better future amongst the vast majority. Three decades after liberalisation, every other survey captures a mood of cynicism among the majority of respondents who claim that the economy only works for the rich and big business, that unemployment is at a very serious level, and that their economic condition has stagnated.
Rajiv Gandhi foresaw a surging Ram temple mobilisation and rushed to stake his personalistic claim of ownership over it. Modi wants to do the same with the ascendant caste census discourse. In the former case, the BJP not only held on to its issue ownership but also benefited from the legitimacy provided by the then ruling establishment. Would the Congress and other Opposition parties similarly benefit from the legitimisation of ‘their’ agenda? To do so, at this juncture, they have to construct a counter-hegemonic bloc, which fuses together the cleavages of caste and class around a set of convergent demands. Just as the BJP married Hindu nationalism with a middle-class identity, the INDIA bloc could merge its subaltern caste bloc with a non-elite class identity set around an aspirational, future-oriented narrative. All of this is easier said than done. So the political field remains wide open.
Asim Ali is a political researcher and columnist