Pottepaka Sandeep Kumar 
While presenting the Union budget 2024, finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman stated that the government will focus on “four new castes”: women, poor, youth and farmers. It was very similar to what she had said during the presentation of the interim budget this year. A government’s budget usually lays down the policies and programmes for the upcoming fiscal year. However, one cannot miss the implicit Hindutva design in the latest budget aimed at recasting caste, as we have always known. This redefining upends caste from being a varna-based hierarchical system to one that is loosely based on economic considerations, which would help the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) in its long-drawn plan to homogenise Hindu society. If successful, this will have far-reaching implications for India’s social, economic and political realms.
The idea of ‘new castes’ was first brought to the fore by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in 2019 following Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)’s re-election. “From now on, India will have only two castes: one is poverty, and the other is people who are committed to removing poverty,” Modi had said. What began as a political point in 2019 has now got an official imprimatur from the BJP when it incorporated this into the national budget. In fact, this is in line with the demand of RSS to review caste-based reservations. This view of caste was the underlying reason behind the Modi government’s decision to extend reservations to economically weaker sections (EWS).
Also read: EWS Quota: Why Poverty Alone Can’t Be a Basis for Reservation
At a political level, the BJP sees a potent strategy in redefining caste to blunt the successful social justice politics being espoused by the opposition camp. The INDIA bloc, in its attempt to counter the Hindutva politics, had tried to foreground the issue of caste in the Lok Sabha elections, by talking about caste census and the rising number of atrocities against Dalits and tribals. That the opposition had been able to restrict the BJP below the majority mark has given the ruling party all the more reason to aggressively push its ‘new castes’ strategy and to accelerate the politics of Hindu homogeneity.
To push its newfound strategy into governance frameworks, the BJP is relying on stealth tactics.
Stealth in the context of governance and legislation refers to the manipulation of existing rules or creating opaque laws to achieve certain objectives without attracting public scrutiny or backlash.
Canadian legal scholar Richard Albert says this is done through “subversion of formal amendment rules, the deliberate establishment of a convention, and the implementation of alternative techniques to modify legal documents”. These are precisely the tactics the BJP has been employing to push its agenda through official means.
The objective of the BJP’s latest strategy is two-fold: First, through this process of de-casteification or replacing caste with categories such as gender, income levels and working/non-working class, the ruling party wants to give a fillip to the RSS’s ideology of Hindutva, which believes in Brahmanical hegemony. Second, the BJP-RSS aims to counter the efforts of opposition parties, which have been trying to mobilise the masses through a renewed focus on caste as a rallying point. The opposition’s efforts to some extent have already exposed the patronage of BJP-RSS to upper castes.
This new language of caste, therefore, cannot be seen as just another political ploy for merely electoral considerations but a deeply thought-out strategy by the BJP-RSS combine to fundamentally alter the discourse in our society.
Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty
Undermining of caste-based identity politics
The preamble of the Indian constitution envisions a free state that ensures justice in social, economic, and political realms. However, 75 years after independence, these aspirations remain elusive, with social democracy still a distant dream. Addressing entrenched structural inequalities and caste-based marginalisation is crucial for parties in power. Recognising caste explicitly is a must and cannot be side-stepped with discussions on poverty, gender, class or farmers. Therefore, the latest budget’s introduction of four new castes fundamentally contradicts the constitutional goals of justice, for replacing caste with class undermines the intentions of constitution framers.
One must not forget that many attacks perpetrated against marginalised sections are because of their caste, not class. According to the National Crime Records Bureau’s 2022 statistics, Dalits remain highly susceptible to caste-based atrocities. A total of 57,582 cases of crime were registered against Scheduled Castes (SCs) in 2022, marking a 13.1% increase from 2021’s 50,900 cases.
Similarly, crimes against Scheduled Tribes (STs) showed a significant rise, with 10,064 cases registered in 2022, a 14.3% increase from 8,802 cases in 2021. The NCRB data further highlights that 1,347 cases of rape and 1,022 cases of assault on tribal women were recorded in 2022, underscoring the severe violence faced by these communities due to their castes.
Also read: The RSS Plan to Eradicate Caste Is Outdated and Skirts the Real Issues of Today
Substitution of caste with catch-all phrases like poverty lends legitimacy to the proprietor groups who attack lower castes when they begin to assert themselves for self-respect.
The success of caste-based parties in the 1990s democratised the Indian republic. Anti-caste struggles and Mandal politics spurred a silent political revolution, improving the representation of OBC castes in employment and education. However, statistics show a significant underrepresentation of OBC and SC castes in government departments and as university professors.
The latest budget’s accent on ‘four new castes’, therefore, undermines the aspirations of caste-based identity politics, where caste is central to democratisation. Using class to represent India’s social structure fails to address the specific needs and realities of caste-based marginalisation.
It is pertinent to recall that on November 11, 2023, Prime Minister Modi assured Dalit sub-categorisation at a meeting organised by Madiga Reservation Porata Samithi (MRPS). The idea behind sub-categorisation for reservation purposes is to ensure equitable representation of the quota among various Dalit sub-groups. However, the latest strategy of the BJP to reinvent caste by substituting it with poverty raises doubts over the Dalit sub-categorisation promise made by PM Modi. The Union budget thus contradicts the need for specific sub-classification, crucial for social democracy. A leader focused on economic stratification rather than addressing caste-based inequalities may struggle to fulfil the expectations of the Madigas, whose support was the key to BJP’s successes in Telangana and Karnataka.
Both Janata Dal (United) and Telugu Desam Party (TDP), whose support is necessary to the survival of the Modi government, must critically assess the BJP’s newfound strategy on caste. For that matter, JDU has been successful in conducting caste census and shining light on how caste results in socio-economic disparities. Meanwhile, TDP, which relies heavily on SCs and OBCs for electoral success, has implemented Mandal policies in local bodies to support caste-based representation.
It is important to be seen if JDU and TDP by endorsing the budget and its introduction of ‘new castes’ have moved away from their own quest for social democracy. Questions will be asked if JDU and TDP would conform to the BJP’s latest narrative on caste.
Political parties, regional or national, which are opposed to BJP’s Hindutva politics must see through the BJP’s stealth tactics to fundamentally alter political discourse by reinventing caste, as we have always known. It is crucial for those who claim to uphold the constitution and its principles to resist the Hindutva approach of reclassification and instead support the constitutional vision of social democracy, by identifying caste for what it is.
Pottepaka Sandeep Kumar (@Sandeepottepaka) is a Hyderabad-based independent researcher. His research interests include Middle East geopolitics, caste politics and public policy. He is a former member of the International Public Policy Association.