Identity has become an important phenomenon in the modern politics in India. Discuss.

Indian politics after 1990 reorganised itself around who people are rather than what they own, and identity became the principal idiom of mobilisation.

The forms it takes. Caste, most visibly, but also religion, language, region, tribe and gender, each producing its own parties, movements and demands.

Why it grew.

• Mandal. The implementation of the Mandal Commission's OBC reservation in 1990 converted caste from a social fact into an organised political constituency, and produced the parties that dominated north India thereafter.
• Democratic deepening. Yogendra Yadav's second democratic upsurge — rising turnout among the poor, Dalits and OBCs, who vote at higher rates than elites, unlike most democracies.
• Reservation and enumeration. Constitutional recognition of SC, ST and OBC categories makes group identity the route to entitlements.
• Federal reorganisation. Linguistic states from 1956, and later Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Uttarakhand and Telangana, made regional identity a viable political scale.

The balance sheet is genuinely two-sided. Identity politics has produced real representational gains and a more plebeian political class, which Christophe Jaffrelot called a silent revolution. It has also fragmented electorates, encouraged competitive victimhood, narrowed policy debate into distributional claims among groups, and, in its religious form, threatened the equal citizenship that made the earlier gains possible.