Caste alliances emanate from secular and political factors and do not spring from primordial identities. Discuss.

Primordial identity versus political resource

• A primordial reading treats caste as given blood, occupation, and ritual rank that automatically produce political friendship; the KHAM, AJGAR, or MY coalitions of different decades already refute automatic friendship.
• Secular here means non-sacred calculation: vote share, booth transfer, and who gets tickets, not temple theology.
• Political factors include first-past-the-post arithmetic, federal cabinets, Mandal-era OBC assertion, and the need to cross 50 percent in a fragmented electorate.
• Rudolph and Rudolph described caste associations as modern interest groups; Kothari called the Congress system a coalition of castes. Both point to organisation, not to origin myths, as the engine.

Indian illustrations

• Gujarat’s KHAM (Kshatriya, Harijan, Adivasi, Muslim) was a Congress electoral design, not a kinship federation from the Puranas.
• Charan Singh’s AJGAR (Ahir, Jat, Gujjar, Rajput) and later farmer politics in western Uttar Pradesh were status and land bargains among intermediate castes.
• Mandal (1990) turned OBC into a political majority project; parties then allied Yadav with Muslim (SP’s MY), or Dalit with upper caste (BSP–BJP 2017 in Uttar Pradesh), which primordial theory cannot predict.
• Dravidian coalitions in Tamil Nadu used anti-Brahmin language but ran on jobs, language pride, and welfare—secular goods packaged in caste talk.
• Alliances break: BSP leaving BJP, or Jat-Muslim tension after a riot, shows that the bloc is a contract, not a family.

Critical discussion

• Leaders still speak the primordial idiom—honour, hurt, sacred food—because that language turns out the vote; the source of the alliance can be secular while the speech is primordial.
• Endogamy and neighbourhood segregation remain primordial-looking facts that parties harvest; politics does not invent caste from zero.
• Hindutva and some social-justice fronts both essentialise community even as they stitch cross-caste fronts; the statement is therefore a thesis about genesis of alliances, not a claim that caste has become class.
• A fair discussion accepts the statement for coalition-making, and adds that primordial identities are the raw material and the slogan, even when the glue is power.