In Rajasthan, Hindutva Governance Turns to Caste as a Shield Against Elite Dominance

In early December 2025, the education minister of Rajasthan, Madan Dilawar, ignited a controversy when he sought to mark December 6 – the day the Babri Masjid was demolished in 1992 – as “Shaurya Diwas” in state-run schools. For a moment, it seemed the recasting of the event as “Heroism Day” might become official.

Then the order was abruptly rescinded, but not before the uproar laid bare a familiar pattern: using a public figure from a non-elite caste background – the education minister belongs to the Khatik community, designated a Scheduled Caste in Rajasthan – to issue communal statements.

This statement is not unusual but part of a tactic to redirect public attention away from more uncomfortable questions: who truly controls power in Rajasthan, who shapes institutions and who benefits economically from the rise of Hindutva?

On December 6, 2025, Tararam Gautam, a Dalit author, also controversially claimed on a podcast that “Rajput identity originated from giving daughters to Mughal rulers”. The statement is not only historically false but deeply derogatory to women and the Rajputs.

What links Dilawar’s Babri remark and Gautam’s narrative is its political functions. Both leaders' remarks operate as proxy interventions, designed to inflame sentiment among marginalised groups. Meanwhile, the dominant power structure never comes under scrutiny.

Rajasthan today offers one of the clearest examples of how Hindutva governs, and it is not only through communal polarisation but through caste-calibrated narrative management. In this narrative, Muslims are the most visible enemy. Rajputs are increasingly transformed into internal villains. And Dalit and Other Backward Class (OBC) voices are deployed as messengers of controversy.

Meanwhile, those entrenched within institutions that control or signify social, political and economic power – in which members of elite castes and their networks dominate – rule silently, above the turbulence.

From history wars to power distribution

Much of the public discourse on Rajasthan remains stuck in historical quarrels: Rajput versus Mughal, temple versus mosque, medieval loyalty versus betrayal. These disputes generate heat, but they also perform a strategic function. They redirect the public gaze away from present-day power distribution.

Look, instead, at contemporary institutions. In Rajasthan’s university system, the Brahmins occupy a striking share of vice-chancellorships – 11 out of 32 state-run universities, despite being a small fraction of the population (State Higher Education Department data, 2024).

In the Chief Minister’s Office, over one-third of deputed officers are Brahmins (CMO staffing list, 2024). Among district police chiefs, the officers belonging to the elite castes dominate again. Interestingly, the Rajputs belong among the twice borns, or Savarna, in the traditional Hindu caste hierarchy, and are popularly regarded as possessing "warrior" traits. However, there is only one Rajput and not a single Muslim district superintendent of police in the state.

These are not random statistics. They determine whose knowledge becomes syllabus, whose culture receives state patronage, whose religious boards receive funding and whose grievances move through the administrative pipeline quickly. The aggressive promotion of Parshuram institutions, Vipra boards and Sanskritic festivals – alongside selective cow protection enforcement and dietary policing – shows that Rajasthan’s Hindutva governance is not only communal, it is structurally Brahminical.

Also read: Who Counts, Who Knows, Who Decides but Caste?

The ideological direction of this consolidation flows from the organisational spine of Hindutva, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). Its leadership has repeatedly invested in Rajasthan as a strategic state – electorally, but also administratively and culturally. For instance, crucial coordination meetings of the RSS were held in Jodhpur in September 2024.

Symbolically, too, there is a subtle change in who is projected as "hero". Rajasthan under Hindutva increasingly celebrates Maratha-Peshwa figures while displaying guilt toward its syncretic Rajput-Muslim history.

Capital without noise

Going by the traditional dictums of caste hierarchy, Brahmins represent – and are entitled to control – institutional authority, while it is the mercantile communities, such as the banias, who weild access to capital. In Rajasthan’s mining belts, solar parks, cement production zones, education ventures and infrastructure corridors, the presence of members of mercantile castes is unmistakably in favour of prominent mercantile communities, and corporate houses, too, are owned by the traditional trading communities (RIICO and Energy Department allotment data, 2023–25).

Also read: The More India's Elite Claims to Be Caste-Mukt, the Less We Should Believe Them

Deregulation in land conversion, minerals, electricity distribution and logistics has tilted the playing field decisively toward big capital. At the same time, Muslim artisan and trading communities – tailors, meat traders, small manufacturers, handicraft workers – have faced sustained economic stress amplified by communal targeting (Rajasthan Urban Livelihood Survey, 2024).

Proxy warfare

The most under-analysed feature of today’s politics is who is chosen to speak up. Communal temperature is frequently raised not by elite-caste ideologues or business leaders, but by non-elite-caste figures.

When Dilawar speaks against Muslims, the narrative becomes “Dalit anger.” When Tararam Gautam attacks Rajput history, the debate becomes “subaltern critique”. In both cases, those who weild political and economic powers remain away from the public gaze. Public outrage flows horizontally among the marginalised and non-ruling caste groups rather than vertically, towards the centres of power.

This proxy strategy achieves three outcomes: First, it projects Hindutva as a non-Savarna movement. Second, it replaces structural accountability with community-to-community hostility. Third, it allows the historical injustices of caste to perpetuate unnoticed.

Dilawar fires at Muslims. Tararam fires at Rajputs. The system above them remains undisturbed.

Manufacturing the “other”

Rajasthan’s Muslims are overwhelmingly local communities – Rajput or Dalit converts and artisan groups who historically lived within the same social world as Hindu Rajputs.

That barrier has been systematically dismantled. Through sustained Sanskritisation and Kshatriyaisation narratives, Muslims are recast as foreign intruders. Simultaneously, Rajputs are portrayed as compromised warriors who allegedly betrayed a monolithic “Hindu civilisation”. Both histories are flattened into ideological caricatures.

Indeed, once Muslim "othering" stabilised, having become widespread and 'commonsensical', rhetoric about Rajputs began to intensify, as the sharp edge of Hindutva searched for a new source of polarisation, this time along caste lines. And it is the OBC-led political platforms that led the charge, dismissing the Rajputs as feudal remnants, even as Prithviraj Chauhan, Anangpal Tomar – were aggressively claimed as OBC icons (public statements by Gujjar and Jat organisations, 2022-24).

Also read: 400 Years After His Death, Why Maharana Pratap Still Rules the Rhetoric in Rajasthan’s Politics

The contradiction is not accidental. It strategically diverts attention from what can only be called Brahmin-Bania control.

Why Maharana Pratap thrives

In Kota, a 600-year-old cenotaph of Rao Surajmal Hada was demolished by the Kota Development Authority last year, without prior public consultation. Recently in Rajsamand, in a city founded by Raj Singh Sisodia, the road bearing his name was quietly renamed. These are not isolated administrative acts. They signal a systematic dismantling of Rajput political memory on the ground, even as one carefully selected Rajput – Maharana Pratap – is elevated into a controlled national icon.

Hindutva’s singular fascination with Maharana Pratap performs political work. Firstly, it erases the collective legacy of diverse Rajput dynasties – the Pratihara, Chauhan, Parmar, Rathore, etc. Second, by implication, it frames Rajputs other than the maharana as collaborators of Muslims. Third, it distracts from the ongoing Rajputisation of communities through politics, where Kshatriya figures are redistributed in response to claims from subaltern communities.

Cinema as the final amplifier

The film Afwaah (Rumour, 2023, dir. Sudhir Mishra) placed Rajputs at the centre of anti-Muslim violence while erasing real-life rescuers like Madhulika Singh of Karauli. Narrative inversion became cinematic fact.

That pattern has now been nationalised through The Taj Story (2025, dir. Tushar Amrish Goel), starring Paresh Rawal and written by Tushar Goel and Saurabh Pandey. The film appropriated Rajput figures to slander Mughal history, collapsing centuries of complexity into a single Hindutva spectacle. Both histories are stripped of nuance and repurposed as ideological weapons.

On both ends of the caste spectrum, the most disadvantaged, the middle, and the elite, this misrepresentation is not to be taken lightly. It is organised narrative production meant for mass political consumption, and it poses a threat to communitarian relations.

It also clarifies that the central danger of Hindutva in Rajasthan is not communal violence alone – it is the new social order being quietly engineered beneath the noise about assertion/resilience. Power and wealth rise upwards, or is retained in hands that were allowed by tradition to weild either.

Meanwhile, conflict is pushed downwards among Muslims, Dalits and OBCs, with Rajputs undermined as part of the process. What unfolds here is not a regional anomaly. It is Hindutva’s working prototype for governing India.

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