Write short note: Caste mobilisation in North India. (2004)
Caste mobilisation in the north came late and arrived through the state rather than through social reform. Where the south had an anti-Brahmin movement from the early twentieth century that captured power by the 1960s, the north’s transfer of power to the lower castes belongs to the 1990s — which is why Christophe Jaffrelot (India’s Silent Revolution, 2003) calls it silent, and dates it to the Mandal moment.
The backward-class track
- The Kalelkar Commission (1953) was shelved; the Mandal Commission, appointed in 1979 and reporting in 1980, recommended 27 per cent reservation for Other Backward Classes.
- Implementation in August 1990 provoked upper-caste “merit” counter-mobilisation and was upheld, with a 50 per cent ceiling and a creamy-layer exclusion, in Indra Sawhney (1992).
- Its sociological effect mattered more than its arithmetic: it turned caste from a stigma into a resource claim and reorganised party politics around OBC blocs.
Parties and leaders
- In Uttar Pradesh the Samajwadi Party built a Yadav–Muslim base, while Kanshi Ram moved from BAMCEF (1971) to DS-4 (1981) and the Bahujan Samaj Party (1984), giving Dalits a party of their own; Mayawati became chief minister four times, and in 2007 won a majority through a “social engineering” coalition that added Brahmins to the Bahujan core.
- In Bihar, the Lalu Prasad years turned OBC assertion into a language of dignity for Yadavs and Kurmis; the later state governments answered the resulting internal inequality by carving out Extremely Backward Classes and a Mahadalit category.
- Paul Brass read such mobilisation instrumentally — elites select and objectify an identity because it commands state resources — while M. N. Srinivas’s dominant caste explains why landholding middle castes, not the poorest, led it.
The present phase
Dominant peasant castes now agitate for backward status themselves: the Jat agitation in Haryana in February 2016 and repeated Gujjar mobilisations in Rajasthan. Sub-categorisation has become the central question: the Justice G. Rohini Commission, appointed in 2017, submitted its report on OBC sub-categorisation in July 2023 after finding that a quarter of OBC communities had taken almost all reserved seats and posts, while some 983 communities had none. The Bihar caste survey of 2023, which counted OBCs and EBCs together at 63.13 per cent of the state’s population, converted this into a mass demand for enumeration.
Conclusion
North Indian caste mobilisation transferred political power without redistributing land or capital. Its next phase is therefore internal — a contest over who within the backward and Dalit categories has actually benefited, fought with survey data rather than street slogans.