Is caste certificate still the real passport to winning elections in India? Yes, to a large extent, it still is.

The Constitution opened the door with clear intent: to break the ladder of centuries-old injustice and create a path toward social equality. Reservation was originally envisioned as a temporary measure, a crutch for upliftment, not a permanent barricade. The Constituent Assembly and Articles 15(4) and 16(4) saw it as a tool for backward sections, though no explicit sunset clause was added. The Supreme Court has repeatedly emphasised that reservations cannot continue indefinitely.

Read in Hindi: क्या भारत में चुनाव जीतने का असली पासपोर्ट आज भी जाति का प्रमाणपत्र है?

Yet politics weaponised it. The cold arithmetic of votes, instead of healing divisions, deepened them. What was meant to be a temporary bridge became a permanent frontline. Today, even educated urban voters often remain locked in the same caste slot as their grandparents. The only change is that mathematics has grown far more sophisticated, data-driven, and ruthless.

Initially, the vision was different. For reformers and Constitution makers, reservation was a surgical strike, one decisive intervention to clear the path for equality. The goal was never to make caste a permanent identity, but to gradually make it irrelevant. Politics, however, runs on a different language: here, arithmetic triumphs over ideals. Pain is converted into votes, and hope is harvested similarly.

Then emerged leaders who turned caste into a permanent political engine. They transformed raw caste anger into disciplined vote banks. This was electoral mathematics as much as it was a social movement.

Ram Manohar Lohia provided ideological sharpness to backwards-class politics with his call for “Pichhda pave sau mein saath”, 60 per cent share for the backwards classes. It was a proposal for social rebalancing, but on the ground, it quickly became another tool for vote consolidation.

In 1990, the VP Singh government implemented the Mandal Commission recommendations, granting 27 per cent reservation to Other Backwards Classes. North Indian politics was transformed overnight. The country polarised sharply, protests erupted, the government fell, but powerful new caste-based forces rose. Socialist and regional parties carved out their own caste constituencies.

The South tells a parallel story with the same core. In Tamil Nadu, the Dravidian movement institutionalised non-Brahmin politics. The state now has 69 per cent reservation, a decades-old social compact. Power has largely rotated within the same set of groups ever since.

In Karnataka, the Lingayat–Vokkaliga equation long determined who formed governments. HD Deve Gowda’s rise was a direct outcome of this arithmetic. These communities remain dominant forces even today.

Elections are now shaped less by ideology and more by detailed caste maps and microdata. Every serious party maintains granular caste-wise information: which community dominates which seat, who should get the ticket, and what targeted promises to make. In Uttar Pradesh, this plays out openly; Yadav-heavy areas favour one strategy, Dalit-dominant pockets another. Ideology frequently takes the back seat.

Communists envisioned class struggle as the answer, believing economic equality would dissolve caste. Reality proved otherwise. Their movements in Bihar and eastern Uttar Pradesh fractured along caste lines. Even in Kerala and West Bengal, where they had some success, caste never fully disappeared from social life. In daily Indian reality, marriage, land, relationships, opportunities, and caste remain very much alive. Class solidarity proved no match for concrete reservation benefits.

Today, the picture is unambiguous. Education has spread, cities have expanded, and job profiles have changed. Yet caste endures because it is tightly linked to tangible gains. A degree alone is often not enough; the caste certificate remains essential. For politicians, this is a perennial gold mine, fresh demands, fresh promises, and fresh polarisation before every election.

Even within the same caste, benefits are often cornered by a few sub-groups, leaving others marginalised. It has become a self-sustaining cycle: caste delivers votes → votes deliver power → power preserves caste. The story repeats endlessly.

The real question is not whether reservation is right or wrong. It is whether we treated it as a means to achieve social equality or turned it into a permanent encampment along the way.

The demand for a caste census arises from this very cycle. The national Census 2026-27, whose house-listing phase began on 1 April 2026, will, for the first time since 1931, include detailed caste enumeration (during the population enumeration phase). States like Bihar have already shown the way: their 2023 survey found that Extremely Backward Classes and Other Backward Classes together constitute over 63 per cent of the state’s population. Such data can inform better policy, but only if it is not misused solely for escalating reservation demands and deeper polarisation.

Indian democracy is still searching for a new politics, a new language, and a renewed social trust that can transcend caste. Until that emerges, the darkest ink on the ballot paper will continue to be caste.

Breaking this cycle will not be easy. But without breaking it, the dream of genuine social justice and a truly modern, forward-looking India will remain incomplete.