India is edging toward a renewed anti-Mandal churn because, despite social justice being a far-fetched dream, its categories have hardened into dogma. Ambedkarite constitutionalism and Mandal-era OBC mobilisation are not interchangeable inheritances. Ambedkarite politics rests on a civilisational indictment. Untouchability constituted juridical and ritual exclusion embedded in everyday practice. The Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe safeguards respond to stigma, violence and structural denial of personhood. Their constitutional legitimacy derives from historically demonstrable degradation that reproduced itself across generations irrespective of income or occupation. These protections are foundational to the moral architecture of the Republic.
Mandal politics emerged from a different register. The Mandal Commission, whose recommendations were implemented by VP Singh in 1990, was an experiment in redistributive federalism. Its conceptual premise was social and educational backwardness among intermediate castes. Bihar under Karpoori Thakur was its early laboratory, before it was implemented nationally. It was political chemistry, not civilisational reparation.
Backwardness, constitutionally conceived as dynamic, has hardened into permanent political identity that is naturalised by birth. A category intended to mark transitional distance from development now anchors claims to perpetual entitlement. Electoral competition increasingly rewards certification of disadvantage rather than demonstration of mobility.
Empirical indicators complicate the permanence of blanket backwardness. Data from the All India Survey on Higher Education show that OBC enrolment rose from approximately 27% in 2014-15 to over 37% by 2021-22, exceeding mandated quotas in several institutions. Department of personnel and training data indicate OBC representation in Group C central government services consistently approximates the 27% reservation benchmark. In states such as Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, dominant OBC clusters have occupied the chief ministerial office for a substantial portion of the past three decades. In Maharashtra, Maratha elites continue to command significant control over cooperative and rural institutional networks even while pressing for backward designation.
This demonstrates consolidation within specific dominant sub-groups. Absence of granular disaggregation within the OBC category allows internal elite capture to masquerade as collective deprivation. Without data-driven review, backwardness becomes an insulated political asset rather than a developmental metric.
Regional patterns are consistent. The Rashtriya Janata Dal and Janata Dal (United) embedded caste arithmetic into governance architecture in Bihar. Samajwadi Party institutionalised Yadav consolidation in UP. Dravidian formations converted backward-class mobilisation into durable regime structures in Tamil Nadu. Representational democratisation occurred.
Simultaneously, leadership frequently circulated within entrenched familial circuits.
More troubling is the rhetorical annexation of the SC/ST moral narrative by dominant OBC actors seeking equivalent civilisational legitimacy while their histories are analytically distinct. Mandal requires its own ideological vocabulary grounded in measurable disadvantage rather than borrowed moral gravitas.
Transformation of the public sphere intensifies these tensions. Platforms such as social media have democratised caste articulation, be it OBC pride, Dalit assertion, Brahmin self-identification, anti-OBC invective, anti-upper caste denunciation. This symmetry of visibility does not guarantee equality of outcome. But it does ensure that assertion invites counter-assertion at unprecedented speed.
In such an environment, aggressive perpetuation of backwardness claims by politically dominant sub-groups has already begun to generate reciprocal identity consolidation among non-OBC constituencies and will continue to amplify proportionally. When recognition appears asymmetrical, defensive solidarities crystallise. Even among upper-caste Indians who consciously distanced themselves from caste identifiers for decades, a sociological reflex of re-articulation is visible. Identity hardens when structural equilibrium perceptually shifts.
The early 1990s provided a foretaste. Mandal agitations convulsed campuses and cities. Today’s digital accelerants would magnify such unrest exponentially. A renewed anti-Mandal mobilisation would be networked, instantaneous and more difficult to contain.
This is not an argument against affirmative action. It is an argument against conceptual inertia. Social justice retains legitimacy when tethered to periodically reviewed, transparently measured disadvantage and when mobility dilutes entitlement across generations.
India’s external anxieties command attention. Its internal fault lines demand rigour. A republic that refuses to interrogate categories through which it distributes justice may eventually discover that those very categories distribute unrest.
Shubhrastha teaches Electoral Sense Making at the School of Global Leadership, Gurugram. The views expressed are personal
