Caste Conflicts in India

What Caste Conflict Is, and Where It Occurs

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• Caste conflict refers to conflict between two castes, or two clusters of castes, over specific contested issues — generally understood as a side-effect of the broader problem of casteism. Beyond casteism as such, caste conflict specifically arises when one caste attempts to dominate others, when higher castes exploit lower castes, when castes perceive rival castes as obstacles to their own mobility or political power, or when a caste finds itself unable to share in new economic opportunities or acquire the symbols of high status that other castes have secured.
• Sociologists including André Béteille, M.N. Srinivas, A.R. Desai, and Edmund Leach read caste conflict as, at root, a lower-caste attempt at social mobility — meaning conflict is not simply a breakdown of caste order but a mechanism through which caste order itself changes over time. The underlying driver is a group’s desire for greater space in social life, resisted by another group already occupying that space.
• Caste conflict is more frequently documented in rural areas but is by no means confined to them — urban caste-violence incidents have been reported from Gujarat and Maharashtra, while rural caste violence has been especially concentrated in Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Odisha, and Bengal, and politically inflected caste conflicts have surfaced in Tamil Nadu, Rajasthan, Karnataka, and Madhya Pradesh.

The Four Structural Sources of Caste Conflict

• Dominance of one caste over others. M.N. Srinivas’s concept of the dominant caste — a caste that combines numerical preponderance, economic and political power, and high ritual status, reinforced by education and occupational standing — explains why conflict clusters around specific localities: dominance is rarely total, and where a numerically large caste is ritually low (or a ritually high caste is economically weak), the mismatch itself becomes a source of tension. This dynamic does not extend to untouchable castes, who by definition are excluded from dominance altogether; conflict here instead arises when they refuse to continue performing unpaid or degrading services (removing dead animals, drumming at festivals, clearing leaf-plates after upper-caste feasts) — refusals that upper castes have historically met with violent reprisal, including arson and physical assault.
• Exploitation of lower castes by upper castes. The upper-caste project of consolidating and defending high social status generates a matching sense of deprivation and exploitation among intermediate and lower castes, whose own assertions of dignity or entitlement are read by the upper castes as illegitimate encroachment. Bihar has historically supplied the starkest documented examples — decades of caste carnage between forward castes (Brahmins, Bhumihars, Rajputs, Kayasthas) and both upper-backward (Yadavs, Kurmis, Koeris) and lower-backward castes, driven by economic grievance over land, wages, and the sabotage of poverty-alleviation schemes by landed upper castes; Jha’s analysis of these reprisals shows landlords responding to lower-caste assertion by dispossessing tenants of land and housing, denying access to common grazing and drinking water, and imposing complete social boycott.
• Barriers to mobility and political power. Srinivas identifies several classical routes by which individual castes have historically sought upward mobility — Sanskritisation, accumulating wealth, petitioning census officials to reclassify a caste’s recorded status, and organising formal caste associations — routes through which groups as varied as the Marathas, Reddis, Nairs, and Coorgs, and later intermediate and even tribal groups (Yadavs, Kurmis, and Koeris in Bihar; Patidars in Gujarat; Bhumij and Munda communities in eastern India) claimed Kshatriya status. Upper castes resented this appropriation of high-status symbols precisely because political independence had stripped away their earlier capacity to punish such claims through state authority, leaving assertions of “moral” authority — social ostracism, violence — as their remaining tool. After independence, what began as status-claiming through custom and mythology hardened into organised political pressure-group activity demanding tickets, ministerships, and administrative jobs, generating fresh rounds of caste conflict across Gujarat, Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Madhya Pradesh through the 1970s-90s.
• Competition for economic opportunity and status symbols. With political power passing to the people after independence, castes increasingly function as pressure groups competing for power and using it to benefit their own members. André Béteille’s observation that “competition for power and office requires a certain aggregation of segments, as individually they cannot compete in the struggle for power” explains why smaller caste segments have historically fused into single, larger caste categories to compete more effectively — as with the Kolis in Gujarat and the Yadavs in North India. Béteille also stresses that numerical strength alone is a weak basis for caste power without organisation: small tenants and landless labourers, despite their numbers, often cannot even secure the legal entitlements owed to them, which is precisely why some are drawn toward revolutionary organisations promising to fight for their rights and status — a dynamic implicated in caste carnages in states such as Bihar and Andhra Pradesh.

Competing Theoretical Readings of Caste Conflict

• The cultural/culturist perspective (Dumont, Bougie, Coomaraswamy) treats caste as a hierarchical institution in which every caste’s status is clearly and consensually specified — implying that caste conflict, on this account, should have been historically absent, since everyone in principle accepted their place in a shared normative order.
• M.N. Srinivas and Yogendra Singh directly contradict this culturist picture, pointing to how Brahminical superiority was historically challenged by Kshatriyas, Vaishyas, and Shudras respectively through the emergence of Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism — new religious movements that demonstrate conflict has been a source of genuine dynamism within India’s supposedly settled orthogenetic culture, not an aberration from it. Caste-conflict intensity rose further during the medieval period as intermediary castes gained Mughal patronage, pursued secular mobility, and claimed Kshatriya status, provoking resistance from established Kshatriya lineages who refused to concede superiority to these newer claimants.
• André Béteille distinguishes two dimensions of caste conflict — inter-caste and intra-caste — whose relative intensity varies across time and space, and argues that Indian caste conflict has historically shifted from being predominantly identity-centric (about status and recognition) toward being increasingly interest-focused (about material resources and political power).
• Field studies supply concrete texture to these theoretical claims: Stevenson documented Dalit communities in South India fighting each other over rights to specific ritual symbols (such as who could wear a turban on ceremonial occasions); Oscar Lewis found Jats and Rajputs in western Uttar Pradesh locked in conflict over dominance and superiority; F.G. Bailey’s study of Bissipara documented caste conflict pursued simultaneously for both ritual and secular superiority.
• T.K. Oomen traces the 1960s-70s emergence of caste associations — the All India Kshatriya Mahasabha, the Dalit Panthers, and various backward-class mobilisations in South India — as efforts at vertical integration across sub-castes, homogenising people around a broader supra-caste identity; Srinivas terms this process the “varnisation” of caste. Ghurye, by contrast, reads this same consolidation as double-edged — providing a rhetorical justification for caste conflict even as it simultaneously undermines the project of national integration. S.C. Dube connects the Green Revolution-driven prosperity of farmers in western Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, and Haryana to a parallel consolidation of intermediary castes seeking political power, a dynamic Edmund Leach calls “caste-grades coming together” and F.G. Bailey calls “assimilation of caste clusters.”
• T.K. Oomen’s broader thesis frames caste conflict, in the end, as fundamentally about the lower castes’ search for equality against higher-caste resistance and protest: once the values of justice, equality, and democracy are introduced into a traditionally hierarchical society, people cease to passively accept exploitative old arrangements, organise formally, claim new status, and enter into conflict to secure it.

Contemporary Caste Conflict: Atrocity, Assertion, and the Political Register

• Sukhadeo Thorat’s empirical study of anti-Dalit violence (2001-02) found that atrocities against Dalits were concentrated in Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu, Uttar Pradesh, Haryana, and Madhya Pradesh — states with genuinely different economic profiles, suggesting the common thread is not simply poverty but a shared Brahminic cultural ideology of superiority cutting across regional and economic variation. Thorat further found that such atrocities go substantially unreported by police and escape public scrutiny, evidence that Dalits continue to face isolation, discrimination, and segregation even within a formally democratic state; his account of contemporary Dalit organising — increasingly channelled through civil-society institutions rather than dependence on money power or muscle power — frames caste conflict today as a sub-altern struggle for a space in democratic India that was historically denied.
• Rudolph and Rudolph read much of contemporary caste conflict as a “politics of bargaining,” in which each caste allies with its immediately adjacent castes above and below to build a coalition strong enough to withstand rivals; Anand Chakravarti’s field research similarly documents caste factions actively seeking support from neighbouring caste groups either to achieve political success or to resist domination and violence from competing groups.
• Anand Chakravarti additionally observes that despite decades of political democratisation, land-owning dominant castes retain hegemonic control at both micro (village) and macro (state) levels — a finding echoed in Upendra Baxi’s study of Delhi’s medical profession, where Dwija (twice-born) castes, though only around 18% of the population, occupied roughly 80% of professional positions, illustrating how caste dominance reproduces itself through occupational and institutional access long after formal legal equality is achieved.
• D.L. Sheth describes a parallel process of “classization” (or secularisation) of caste, driven by two linked mechanisms: de-ritualisation (caste identity increasingly detached from ritual purity/pollution practice) and politicisation (caste identity increasingly organised around electoral and resource competition) — a shift that helps explain why caste consciousness persists robustly even as its overtly religious justification weakens. As one political observer close to this dynamic put it, caste consciousness and prejudice already present among the masses are turned by politicians into full-blown caste passions for electoral advantage.
• Dalit capitalism — a term coined by activist Chandra Bhan Prasad — treats entrepreneurship and market participation (organised through bodies like the Dalit Indian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, DICCI, founded 2005) as a route to Dalit upliftment and emancipation. Critics of this framework argue it merely seeks equal space for Dalits within an inherently exploitative capitalist order rather than pursuing comprehensive transformation of political, economic, and cultural relations, and that it does little for the poorest Dalits, since it remains largely disconnected from questions of mass pauperisation, landlessness, and displacement by mega-projects — problems that widening economic inequality under liberalisation has, if anything, sharpened.
• Caste conflict continues to surface in ordinary institutional life well beyond dramatic rural violence: reported cases include caste-based discrimination in mid-day-meal preparation and serving (Dalit cooks removed from duty, children made to wash utensils separately), caste-based social boycotts by extra-judicial caste panchayats (which prompted Maharashtra’s Prohibition of Social Boycott Act, 2015 — the first state law of its kind), fabricated caste certificates, and litigation over caste-restricted recruitment (such as the challenge to caste-based eligibility for the President’s Bodyguard). These cases illustrate that caste conflict today operates as much through bureaucratic, institutional, and legal channels as through open rural violence.

The State’s Response and the Caste Census Question

• Constitutional and legal responses to caste-based exploitation have evolved substantially since independence: reservation policy for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes in education, employment, and legislatures; the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989; and a body of judicial doctrine treating caste discrimination as a distinct constitutional wrong. This framework has itself become a live site of caste conflict in a different register — over how reservation benefits should be internally distributed.
• The Supreme Court’s 2024 ruling in State of Punjab v. Davinder Singh held that states may sub-classify Scheduled Castes for reservation purposes to direct benefits toward the most disadvantaged sub-groups within the SC category, overturning the Court’s earlier 2005 position (E.V. Chinnaiah) that had treated all Scheduled Castes as a single homogenous class for this purpose. Several states — Punjab, Bihar, Tamil Nadu, and, most recently, Andhra Pradesh (which has committed to implementing district-wise SC sub-categorisation from 2026) — have moved to act on this ruling, reflecting a live, ongoing conflict within the Dalit political category itself over which sub-castes have actually benefited from decades of reservation.
• The 2022-23 Bihar Caste-Based Survey, whose results were released in October 2023, reignited the long-dormant national demand for a caste census as part of the decennial Census — the survey’s findings on the numerical strength of specific backward and extremely backward caste groups directly shaped subsequent Bihar reservation legislation, portions of which were struck down by the Patna High Court in 2024 for breaching the 50% reservation ceiling, a ruling now under Supreme Court challenge. This dispute is a direct, contemporary illustration of the “politics of bargaining” and status-claiming dynamics traced by Rudolph and Rudolph and by Srinivas decades earlier — caste groups using demographic data itself as a fresh weapon in the ongoing conflict over political and economic share.

Casteism: The Underlying Disease

• Kaka Kalelkar defines casteism as “an overriding, blind, and supreme group loyalty that ignores the healthy social standards of justice, fair play, equity, and universal brotherhood” — a definition that captures why casteism functions as the underlying condition of which specific caste conflicts are episodic symptoms.
• Casteism is sustained by several structural mechanisms: the endogamous organisation of caste and sub-caste, which confines marital ties (and thus emotional and material loyalty) to a narrow circle and discourages broader identification; a desire to enhance caste prestige, which channels members’ favour disproportionately toward caste-fellows; improvements in transport and communication, which have paradoxically strengthened caste organisation by making it easier for geographically dispersed caste members to coordinate; urbanisation, which — counterintuitively — often deepens rather than dissolves caste-mindedness, since rural migrants entering an unfamiliar city naturally gravitate toward caste-fellows for support; and the caste group’s own powerful hold over its members as a source of assistance during crisis.
• The consequences of casteism, per this literature, include the erosion of national feeling (loyalty to caste displacing loyalty to the wider community), a structural tension with democracy itself (since caste is founded on inequality while democracy assumes equality of opportunity, generating friction at every stage from candidate selection to cabinet formation), moral degeneration through nepotism, and the systematic neglect of merit and efficiency wherever caste rather than competence governs selection. M.N. Srinivas captured the paradox at the heart of this persistence: caste “is so tacitly and so completely accepted by all — including its most vocal critics — that it is everywhere the unit of social action.”
• Proposed remedies recur across multiple thinkers, converging on a common core: education about the dangers of casteism (Srinivas), encouragement of inter-caste marriage (Ghurye, Iravati Karve), minimising unnecessary invocation of caste identity in public life, promoting economic equality to narrow the material gap that sustains caste prejudice (Karve), and — for Prabhu — a slower, more attitudinal process of shifting internal conduct and belief, in which cultural media (he specifically cites cinema) can play a constructive role. Srinivas himself argued that much of the caste system’s exclusionary force could be diluted through adult franchise, five-year economic planning, expanded education, and the continued advance of backward classes, gradually narrowing the cultural gap between higher and lower castes.