Come election season in India, especially State Assembly elections, one ugly truth inevitably rises to the surface: Caste politics.
With the Bihar polls looming, the conversation has turned unexpectedly revealing. A long-held myth is being shattered, the myth that caste is a ‘Hindu problem’.
For decades, Left-leaning intellectuals, secularists and vote-bank politicians have projected caste as an exclusive Hindu disease.
This was not accidental. By singling out Hinduism as the exclusive carrier of the caste virus, they could simultaneously keep Hindu votes divided while consolidating minority communities into obedient vote banks. Meanwhile, Dalits within Islam and Christianity were, in effect, written out of the story.
Now, the reality that Islam and Christianity, while often presented as egalitarian, ‘caste-free’ religions, are equally riddled with caste hierarchies is coming forth. The Bihar election is exposing this most dramatically within the Muslim community.
Among Muslims, caste stratification is hardly new. The Ashrafs, such as Syeds, Sheikhs, Pathans, etc., have long claimed superiority, their prestige rooted in ‘foreign’ lineage.
Everyone else is considered Muslims of ‘Indian origin,’ such as the Ajlafs, Arzals and Atrafs and relegated to the lower rungs, lumped together as Pasmandas.
The Pasmandas constitute the majority of India’s Muslims, yet they have remained almost invisible in positions of power. A 2005 study showed that out of 400 Muslim MPs elected till then, 360 were Ashraf.
Which means a population that is just around 15 percent of the Muslim community in India got 85 percent of the community representation.
Even in Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) in 2019 shows that upper-caste Muslims comprise 88.35 percent of the faculty, whereas the lower caste is only 4.81 percent.
This imbalance sparked political awakening in Uttar Pradesh, where lower-caste Muslims launched their own political outfits as early as 1994, forming the All-India Backward Muslim Morcha (AIBMM), which united 40 Pasmanda organisations.
In 2019, Pasmanda Muslims even discussed forming an independent national party. And in Bihar today, many Pasmandas are openly gravitating toward the BJP and JD(U), realising that decades of loyalty to upper-caste Muslim leadership in secular parties yielded them little but crumbs.
If Islam’s caste fault lines are coming into political focus now, Christianity’s have long been visible but conveniently ignored. Despite its rhetoric of equality, caste segregation thrives within Indian churches.
Take Trichy, Tamil Nadu. In one Catholic cemetery, a wall literally divides the burial grounds: Dalit converts to Christianity are buried on one side, upper-caste converts on the other.
Matrimonial ads in Christian magazines, until recently, specified caste preferences. In Kerala, Knanaya Christians, like Ashrafs among Muslims, proudly claim foreign descent — from Middle Eastern Jewish converts — asserting caste superiority over other Christians.
The violence is real, too. In 2018, Kevin Joseph, a Dalit Christian, married Neenu Chacko, a woman from a higher-caste Christian family. Her relatives responded by murdering Kevin in an honour killing!
No wonder, like how Pasmanda Muslims started a political outfit, Dalit Christians too started a movement called ‘Dalit Christian Liberation Movement’.
This group even sought an audience with Pope John Paul II when he visited India to inform him about the oppression they were facing in the Church!
Clearly, equality before God has not translated into equality before men. Caste, clearly, does not vanish with baptism. Why then do our ‘secular’ voices ignore these stories? Because…
The caste question is politically useful only when it fractures Hindu society. To acknowledge caste within Islam or Christianity would mean confronting the reality that oppression exists across religions, and they will have to confront their own vote banks.
Every major religion in India is casteist. Muslims, Christians, Hindus, Buddhists and Jains all have devised their own hierarchies.
Even within communities most oppressed by caste — the Dalits and Adivasis — there are hundreds of sub-castes.
Consider the absurdity: The Scheduled Castes have 101 sub-castes. The Scheduled Tribes have 50 sub-castes and the Other Backward Classes have 199 sub-castes!
Apart from this, Muslims have 124 sub-castes, Brahmins have 120 sub-castes and Jains: 32 sub-castes. What does this say about us Indians?
That we are a country addicted to stratification. We slice and dice ourselves into ever-smaller fragments, then complain about why we are not Indians first.
If we are serious about tackling caste, we must admit that it is not confined to temples but also sits in mosques, churches and monasteries.
Caste is India’s civilisational curse, not Hinduism’s alone. Pretending otherwise is not secularism; it is selective blindness.
Perhaps it is time for our intellectual class to drop the selective outrage and confront caste honestly — everywhere it lurks, not just where it is politically convenient.
Until then, we’ll just be a nation condemned to live forever as a federation of castes, arguing over superiority while marching in the same place. A sub-caste filled nation shall forever remain a sub-standard nation. Period.
e-mail: vikram@starofmysore.com
This post was published on September 13, 2025 6:30 pm