The recent debate over the ‘creamy layer’ within Scheduled Castes (SC) and Scheduled Tribes (ST), coupled with allegations of caste discrimination at IIT Bombay, has once again thrust caste into the national spotlight.
But it has also exposed one of India’s biggest myths that caste is the exclusive burden of Hindu religion.
For decades, Left-leaning intellectuals, pseudo-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,’ the Leftists could simultaneously keep Hindu votes divided while consolidating minority communities into obedient vote banks.
Meanwhile, Dalits within Islam and Christianity, in effect, have been written out of the story, as if they experience absolutely no discrimination.
The reality is that Islam and Christianity, while often presented as egalitarian, ‘caste-free’ religions, are equally riddled with caste hierarchies.
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 and Arzals and are 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 Ashrafs. Which means upper-caste Muslims comprising just 15% got 85% of the community representation.
The 17th Lok Sabha (2019) shows that out of 25 elected Muslim MPs, only about 7 belonged to Pasmandas, the other 18 were upper-caste Ashrafs.
Looks like Muslims have a ‘creamy layer’ problem too, like the Dalits have, where the upper-caste Dalits are hogging everything from political power to reservation.
Even at Aligarh Muslim University (AMU), in 2019, upper-caste Muslims comprised 88.35% of the faculty, whereas the lower caste was only 4.81%. Why doesn’t anyone talk about reservation for Dalit Muslims here?
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.
It is no different among Christians in India either. Despite its rhetoric of being a religion 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 and assert 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.
Every major religion in India is casteist. Ironically even within the most oppressed Dalits there are hundreds of sub-castes!
Consider this 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 have 32 sub-castes. What does this say about us Indians?
That we are a country addicted to stratification but then complain about why we are not Indians first.
Caste is India’s civilisational curse, not Hinduism’s alone. Pretending otherwise is not secularism, it is selective blindness.
If we are serious about tackling caste, we must admit that it is not confined to temples but also sits quietly in mosques, churches and monasteries.
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 for them.
As long as we are a nation obsessed with caste and sub-caste, we’ll remain a sub-standard nation. Period.
P.S.: Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, Chairman of the Drafting Committee of our Constitution, said, “I do not want our loyalty as Indians to be affected by our religion, our culture or our language. I want all people to be Indian first, Indian last and nothing else but Indians.”
Few dreams have been betrayed more thoroughly than this.
It has been systematically destroyed by politicians with every passing election.
It has been shattered by pseudo-liberals and pseudo-nationalists with their hypocrisy in debating social issues.
It has been culled by opportunistic intellectuals shaping our young impressionable minds in Government Universities.
Here we all are culpable in ruining India and so today we remain casteist first and Indians last.
e-mail: vikram@starofmysore.com
This post was published on September 26, 2026 7:30 pm