From a system of inherited hierarchy to a modern instrument of social control, economic exclusion and political mobilisation
By Ramphal Kataria
“India abolished untouchability in law, but it has not yet abolished the social imagination that makes caste possible.”
Caste was supposed to disappear from the life of a modern India. The Constitution promised equality. Untouchability was abolished. Discrimination on grounds of caste was prohibited. Reservations were introduced to compensate for centuries of exclusion. Education, industrialisation, urbanisation and democratic politics were expected to weaken the inherited boundaries of birth.
Yet caste has survived all of them.
It has changed its vocabulary rather than disappeared. It has moved from the village well to the university hostel, from hereditary occupation to the labour market, from social hierarchy to electoral arithmetic, and from openly enforced exclusion to more subtle forms of humiliation, isolation and gatekeeping. A young person may leave the traditional occupation of his or her caste, enter a university, become a doctor, engineer, bureaucrat or professor, and still carry a social identity that others read before they read the person's qualifications.
The uncomfortable question for India in 2026 is therefore not whether caste exists. It plainly does. The question is why a republic whose constitutional project was explicitly directed towards equality has allowed caste to become simultaneously a social identity, an economic disadvantage, an administrative category and a powerful instrument of political mobilisation.
The answer lies partly in the nature of caste itself. It is not simply a division of occupations. It is a system of graded social status reproduced through endogamy, inherited identity, social distance and unequal access to resources. Ambedkar described caste not as merely a division of labour but as a division of labourers—a system that fixes social possibilities by birth. His larger argument was that political democracy cannot survive indefinitely on the foundations of social inequality.
That warning remains unfinished business.
Caste was never merely an occupation
The history of caste is considerably more complicated than the simplified four-fold varna model often presented as India's timeless social structure. Scholars have pointed out that varna and the enormous variety of jatis cannot simply be treated as identical categories. Padmanabh Samarendra's work on colonial census operations argues that the modern administrative conception of caste was significantly shaped and hardened through nineteenth-century processes of enumeration and classification.
This does not mean that caste was invented by colonialism. Hierarchical and endogamous social formations existed long before the British. But colonial enumeration, administrative classification and later electoral politics gave these identities new institutional forms and political meanings.
The traditional social order attached status, occupation and social relationships to birth. The jajmani system created networks of reciprocal service and dependence within villages, but reciprocity did not mean equality. Its economic arrangements were embedded in a hierarchy in which certain communities performed occupations considered impure or inferior and had limited access to dignity and social power.
Modernisation disrupted that economic foundation.
Industrialisation, mechanisation, migration, markets and education weakened the old hereditary occupational structure. A son of a traditional artisan could become an engineer; the child of an agricultural labourer could enter government service; someone from a historically excluded community could become a professor or administrator.
But something crucial happened.
The occupation could change faster than the identity.
Caste ceased to be the occupation one performed but remained the identity through which one could be socially located.
That distinction is central to understanding contemporary India.
The Constitution attacked caste at its legal foundations
The makers of the Constitution understood that political freedom without social equality would produce an incomplete democracy. Article 14 guarantees equality before the law. Article 15 prohibits discrimination on grounds including caste while expressly permitting special provisions for historically disadvantaged groups. Article 16 guarantees equality of opportunity in public employment while allowing affirmative action for inadequately represented backward classes. Article 17 abolishes untouchability.
The constitutional project therefore contained two apparently contradictory imperatives that are actually complementary.
The first was to abolish caste discrimination.
The second was to recognise caste disadvantage in order to remedy its consequences.
That distinction matters.
Reservation was not conceived as a celebration of caste. It was a mechanism of corrective justice. If society had distributed education, land, occupations, dignity and public opportunities unequally for generations, simply declaring everyone equal on the day of Independence could not make the accumulated advantages and disadvantages disappear.
Article 46 directs the State to promote with special care the educational and economic interests of weaker sections, particularly Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, and protect them from social injustice and exploitation. The Protection of Civil Rights Act, 1955 subsequently gave statutory force to the prohibition of untouchability.
The constitutional state therefore did not merely promise formal equality. It attempted to move towards substantive equality.
But legislation can prohibit discrimination more easily than society can eliminate prejudice.
The unfinished work of the post-Independence state
The record of successive governments after Independence cannot be reduced either to failure or success.
The Indian state has done much: constitutional safeguards, reservations, scholarships, welfare programmes, protective legislation, political representation and institutions such as the National Commission for Scheduled Castes have created opportunities that were historically denied.
Education has expanded enormously. The representation of historically excluded groups in universities and public institutions has increased. The old assumption that knowledge and public office belonged naturally to particular social groups has been substantially challenged.
But the state has been far less successful in dismantling the social and economic foundations from which caste inequality derives.
The contradiction was visible from the beginning. The new republic wanted to create a casteless modern society while simultaneously having to recognise caste in order to correct caste-based disadvantage. Susan Bayly's historical account describes this post-1947 tension: the state sought a modern, casteless India while continuing to use caste categories in policies intended to remedy historical disability.
The problem was aggravated wherever formal equality was mistaken for substantive equality.
A child born into a family possessing land, educated parents, books, private schooling, coaching, professional networks and financial security does not enter an examination hall with the same accumulated social resources as a first-generation learner from a historically excluded community.
To say this is not to deny merit.
It is to ask how merit itself is produced.
Merit is never created in a social vacuum
The language of merit becomes particularly revealing in educational institutions.
Who had access to good schools?
Who could afford coaching?
Who had a room in which to study?
Who grew up surrounded by people who had already entered universities, government services and professions?
Who could survive a failed examination without the failure becoming an economic catastrophe?
These differences are not academic abstractions. Research has repeatedly demonstrated that caste continues to intersect with educational, occupational and economic outcomes.
Research on educational inequality has found that affirmative action contributed to narrowing some educational gaps, particularly at the primary level, but inequalities remained much more persistent at the college level.
Economic research is even more disturbing. Thorat and Madheswaran find that caste inequality in consumption is strongly associated with differences in asset ownership, higher education and access to salaried employment. Their analysis also finds a significant contribution of discrimination to wage differences between Scheduled Castes and higher castes.
More recent work similarly finds that caste gaps persist even within comparable economic classes and that caste continues to mediate economic outcomes and life chances.
Caste, therefore, cannot simply be reduced to poverty.
Class matters, but caste continues to shape class.
When the classroom reproduces the hierarchy
This becomes most painful in higher education.
The university is supposed to be the place where inherited identities lose their power. Instead, research increasingly documents situations in which caste travels with the student into the classroom, laboratory, hostel and faculty room.
A study of Dalit and Adivasi students in an elite higher-education institution documented discrimination, alienation and exclusion, including regulatory and gatekeeping mechanisms operating in academic and non-academic spaces.
A 2025 study by Anurag Kumar, based on qualitative accounts of Dalit scholars, documents stereotypes, subtle discrimination, prejudice, humiliation and the role of faculty in reproducing unequal experiences. It also examines the relationship between discrimination, psychological trauma and student suicides.
This does not justify the sweeping accusation that every faculty member or university administrator is casteist. It does establish something more important: institutional arrangements can reproduce caste disadvantage even without every individual consciously intending to discriminate.
That distinction is essential.
A professor may believe himself or herself to be neutral while treating a student's social background as evidence of inadequate merit. A scholarship recipient may be subtly reminded that admission came through reservation. A student may be stereotyped as academically weak before his or her work is evaluated. A complaint may be treated as a personality conflict rather than examined as a possible institutional problem.
Discrimination does not always announce itself.
Sometimes it appears as indifference.
Sometimes as isolation.
Sometimes as lower expectations.
Sometimes as the repeated demand that the marginalised student must prove that he or she deserves to be there.
“The most sophisticated form of caste discrimination is not always exclusion from the institution; it is making a person feel that admission itself was an act of charity.”
The tragedy of student suicides
Student suicide is a national crisis, not exclusively a caste issue. The NCRB recorded 14,488 student suicides in 2024, up from 13,892 in 2023 and 8,934 in 2015. Student suicides accounted for 8.5% of all recorded suicides in 2024.
These figures must not be casually converted into a claim that caste caused all student suicides. NCRB itself records multiple causes, including family problems, illness, examination failure, relationship issues and professional or career difficulties.
But caste cannot be removed from the discussion either.
Parliamentary data on deaths in elite institutions have shown a disproportionate representation of students belonging to socially disadvantaged communities among suicide victims. Between 2019 and 2023, 31 students died by suicide in IITs; according to data reported to Parliament, 17 belonged to SC, ST, OBC or minority communities. Comparable data for NITs and AIIMS also showed substantial representation of students from these communities.
The death of Rohith Vemula in 2016 transformed the national conversation about caste and higher education. Whatever one's interpretation of the precise legal and institutional circumstances surrounding his death, the episode exposed a profound question: what happens when an institution responds to a student's vulnerability primarily as an administrative problem?
Recent scholarship has argued that caste discrimination and structural inequality can be obscured when the distress of Dalit students is treated exclusively as an individual mental-health problem.
This is not an argument against mental-health support. Quite the opposite.
A humane university must provide psychological care and examine the institutional conditions producing distress.
The numbers tell only part of the story
The University Grants Commission reported 1,160 caste-discrimination complaints from 2019–20 to 2023–24 across 704 universities and 1,553 colleges. Annual complaints rose from 173 in 2019–20 to 378 in 2023–24. Of these, 1,052 were recorded as resolved.
The increase requires caution.
It could indicate more discrimination. It could also indicate greater awareness, better reporting mechanisms or greater willingness to complain. The figures cannot by themselves establish that discrimination has increased by 118%.
There is another problem: reporting is not the same as prevalence.
Many students may never complain because the accused may be a professor who controls their academic future, a supervisor who determines their thesis, or an administrator who controls hostel, scholarship or disciplinary processes.
Consequently, the official number of complaints should be treated as a measure of reported institutional experience, not the total amount of caste discrimination.
The UGC itself now requires institutions to maintain mechanisms for complaints relating to caste discrimination, including committees, complaint registers and action against officials or faculty where incidents come to notice.
The real test is not whether a committee exists.
It is whether a student trusts it.
Caste is now written on the face — and sometimes in the file
The paradox of modern India is that caste has lost much of its old economic function while acquiring new administrative and political lives.
A person's occupation may no longer reveal caste. A software engineer and a civil servant may share the same office. A doctor may live in an apartment where nobody knows the traditional occupation of his community.
Yet caste may still be asked for in admission forms, scholarship applications, recruitment, political representation and welfare programmes.
There is a legitimate tension here.
If caste is ignored completely, caste disadvantage becomes invisible to public policy.
If caste is recorded everywhere without simultaneously building a social project to transcend caste, identity can become permanently institutionalised.
This is why the debate must move beyond the simplistic claim that reservation either "causes" caste or "destroys" caste.
Reservation exists because caste discrimination exists.
Its continuation therefore tells us something uncomfortable about the society that still requires it.
The objective cannot be to make disadvantaged people invisible. It must be to create a society in which caste eventually ceases to determine life chances.
From social identity to electoral instrument
Democracy changed caste in another fundamental way.
Under the old order, caste gave people a place in a hierarchy.
Under universal adult franchise, caste acquired a vote.
The transformation was enormous.
Communities that had historically been subjects of social hierarchy became political constituencies. They could organise, bargain, demand representation and challenge established elites.
This political mobilisation has had an emancipatory dimension. Dalit and backward-caste movements have challenged exclusion and brought previously marginalised communities into political institutions.
But there is another side.
Christophe Jaffrelot's work shows how caste identities have been reshaped through political strategies, electoral competition and public policy. Caste identities are not simply inherited social facts; they can be politically reconstructed and given new meanings in struggles over power and resources.
Thus caste has become a language of mobilisation.
Political parties court caste groups.
Caste associations hold conferences.
Community organisations demand representation.
Leaders appeal to caste solidarity.
Political arithmetic calculates voting blocs.
Meetings are organised around community identity.
Candidates are selected with caste equations in mind.
None of this is peculiar to one political party. It is a feature of competitive electoral politics across different regions and periods.
The danger begins when political mobilisation stops being a route to equality and becomes a mechanism for perpetuating permanent social segmentation.
A party may speak the language of social justice while converting communities into vote banks. Another may invoke merit while ignoring accumulated social privilege. A third may mobilise a dominant caste around the fear of losing status. Each strategy can keep caste politically alive even while claiming to oppose caste discrimination.
The result is a cruel circularity:
politics needs caste because caste provides organised constituencies; caste remains politically powerful because politics continually organises around it.
The paradox of caste politics
This paradox should not lead to the conclusion that caste-based political mobilisation is inherently illegitimate.
For historically oppressed groups, collective identity has often been the route through which political voice became possible. A community that was invisible as an individual can become politically consequential when organised collectively.
Ambedkar himself understood the importance of political representation.
The problem is different: whether political representation ultimately helps people escape caste hierarchy or merely rearranges who controls the hierarchy.
A society cannot be emancipated if its citizens are repeatedly instructed to approach the State first as members of caste blocs and only second as equal citizens.
The objective of democracy should therefore be representation without permanent social imprisonment.
Caste and the economy
The persistence of caste is particularly damaging because it produces economic consequences.
Historically excluded communities suffered from restrictions on land, education, occupations, markets and social mobility. The destruction of traditional occupations through industrialisation did not automatically compensate those communities for the loss of the limited economic security embedded in those occupations.
Research by Thorat, Madheswaran and others documents continuing caste-based differences in employment, wages and occupational distribution. Their work identifies discrimination as one contributor to unequal labour-market outcomes.
Deshpande and Sharma's research on self-employment also examines earnings gaps between SC/ST and non-SC/ST businesses, showing that caste disadvantage extends beyond formal employment into entrepreneurship.
Caste therefore becomes economically self-reproducing.
Lower inherited assets reduce educational opportunities.
Lower educational opportunities affect occupational choices.
Occupational segregation affects income.
Lower income restricts asset accumulation.
Limited assets affect the next generation.
And the cycle begins again.
This is why caste cannot be eliminated merely by telling people not to practise caste discrimination.
A social hierarchy becomes durable when prejudice and economic structure reinforce one another.
What has not been done enough
The Indian state has legislated against caste discrimination, but legislation alone cannot destroy the social reproduction of caste.
Several areas remain unfinished.
Land and productive assets remain unequally distributed. Educational quality varies enormously between social groups and regions. Private-sector discrimination is harder to monitor than discrimination in government employment. Housing segregation persists in many places. Marriage remains overwhelmingly endogamous. Manual and sanitation labour continue to carry strong caste associations. Universities have struggled to create genuinely inclusive institutional cultures.
Most importantly, the State has often treated caste as a welfare category rather than confronting its deeper social reproduction.
A scholarship can help a student enter a university.
It cannot by itself change how classmates perceive that student.
A reservation can open the door.
It cannot guarantee dignity after entry.
A law can criminalise untouchability.
It cannot automatically eliminate the social prejudice that produced it.
This is where constitutional morality must become institutional morality.
What should an anti-caste state actually do?
The answer cannot be another slogan.
First, universities must move from nominal grievance mechanisms to genuinely independent systems in which students can complain without fear of academic retaliation.
Second, faculty recruitment and institutional leadership need greater social diversity. Representation is not the sole measure of equality, but institutions dominated by a narrow social group are less likely to recognise experiences outside their own.
Third, caste-discrimination complaints should be independently monitored, with transparent reporting on complaints received, action taken and time taken for disposal.
Fourth, student counselling must be integrated with institutional accountability. A distressed student needs a counsellor, but the institution must also examine whether discrimination, isolation, harassment or exclusion contributed to the distress.
Fifth, anti-caste education should not be reduced to ceremonial celebrations. Ambedkar, Phule, Periyar and Savitribai Phule and anti-caste thinkers must be studied as part of India's intellectual history rather than confined to commemorative occasions.
Sixth, economic policy must address the material foundations of caste inequality—land, assets, education, employment, entrepreneurship and access to capital.
Seventh, political parties and civil society organisations should be judged by whether their caste mobilisation expands citizenship or merely consolidates vote banks.
And finally, India needs a much more honest conversation about marriage.
Ambedkar identified inter-caste marriage as a powerful instrument for breaking caste endogamy. The continuing dominance of caste considerations in marriage demonstrates that the institution survives not simply through political speeches or government forms but through family structures and everyday social choices.
The final test is fraternity
India's constitutional vocabulary contains three ideas that cannot be separated: liberty, equality and fraternity.
Equality without fraternity can become administrative.
Fraternity without equality can become sentimental.
Liberty without either can become the privilege of the already powerful.
Ambedkar understood that democracy is not merely a method of electing governments. It is a mode of associated living.
That is why the persistence of caste is not merely a social problem affecting one community.
It is a test of Indian democracy itself.
NCRB data show that 55,698 crimes against Scheduled Castes were registered in 2024, down 3.6% from 57,789 in 2023. The decline should not be mistaken for the disappearance of caste violence; these are registered cases, and official crime statistics cannot capture unreported discrimination.
The continuing scale of reported violence, the persistence of economic disparities, documented discrimination in higher education and the political mobilisation of caste identities together reveal a society in which caste remains institutionally consequential.
The tragedy is not simply that caste has survived modernity.
It is that modernity has sometimes given caste new institutions through which to survive.
The caste system no longer needs every person to perform the occupation of his ancestors.
It only needs society to continue believing that birth tells us something fundamental about a person's worth, relationships, political loyalty or entitlement.
That belief is the real enemy.
The answer, therefore, cannot be to demand that historically oppressed citizens stop identifying themselves while leaving the structures that produced their disadvantage untouched. Nor can it be to celebrate every caste identity as an instrument of empowerment and leave society permanently fragmented.
The objective must be harder and more ambitious:
to make caste politically unnecessary, socially irrelevant and economically powerless—without making the history of caste injustice invisible.
India does not need to forget caste in order to overcome it.
It needs to understand it so thoroughly that birth finally loses its power to determine destiny.
“The ultimate annihilation of caste will not occur when caste names disappear from forms; it will occur when a person's birth ceases to predict his dignity, education, occupation, income, marriage, political voice or chances of belonging.”
That is the unfinished promise of the Constitution.
And that is why caste remains one of the most consequential unfinished tasks of Indian democracy.
References
1. B.R. Ambedkar, Annihilation of Caste (1936) — the central intellectual framework for understanding caste as graded inequality, endogamy and a barrier to fraternity. The uploaded source provides the principal arguments and historical context.
2. Constitution of India, Articles 14, 15, 16 and 17 — equality, prohibition of caste discrimination, affirmative action and abolition of untouchability.
3. Protection of Civil Rights Act, 1955 — statutory prohibition and punishment of practices arising from untouchability.
4. Padmanabh Samarendra, “Census in Colonial India and the Birth of Caste,” Economic & Political Weekly, 2011.
5. Christophe Jaffrelot, “The Politics of Caste Identities,” Cambridge University Press.
6. Susan Bayly, Caste, Society and Politics in India from the Eighteenth Century to the Modern Age, Cambridge University Press.
7. Ashwini Deshpande, The Grammar of Caste: Economic Discrimination in Contemporary India, Oxford University Press.
8. Sukhadeo Thorat, S. Madheswaran and B.P. Vani, Scheduled Castes in the Indian Labour Market, Oxford University Press, 2023.
9. Bagesh Kumar, “Discrimination in Indian Higher Education: Everyday Exclusion of the Dalit–Adivasi Student,” Contemporary Voice of Dalit.
10. Anurag Kumar, “Unequal Spaces: An In-depth Analysis of Caste Discrimination in Indian Universities,” Contemporary Education Dialogue, 2025.
11. Vignapana Komanapalli and Deepa Rao, “The Mental Health Impact of Caste and Structural Inequalities in Higher Education in India.”
12. University Grants Commission, data on caste-discrimination complaints in higher educational institutions, 2019–20 to 2023–24.
13. National Crime Records Bureau, Crime in India 2023/2024 and Accidental Deaths & Suicides in India.
14. Ministry of Education, Government of India, national-level information on student suicides and NCRB methodology.
15. National Commission for Scheduled Castes / Government of India, constitutional safeguards relating to Scheduled Castes.
