Identity politics refers to political action in which the primary basis of mobilisation is a shared identity — caste, religion, language, region, race, gender, sexuality or indigeneity — rather than a shared economic position or an abstract programme of reform. Its characteristic claim is not simply for a larger share of resources but for recognition: for the public affirmation of a group's worth, culture and history, and for institutional arrangements that acknowledge difference instead of demanding assimilation into a supposedly neutral norm.
The term describes both a practice and a diagnosis. As practice, it is the everyday grammar of democratic competition in plural societies. As diagnosis, it names a historical shift — away from the class-centred politics of unions and left parties, towards movements whose grievance is misrecognition, stigma and cultural subordination as much as material deprivation.
Recognition and redistribution
Charles Taylor argues that human identity is dialogically formed: we become who we are through the regard of others, so the withholding of recognition is a real injury, not a symbolic one. A liberalism that refuses to notice difference may therefore entrench the majority's culture under the guise of neutrality.
Nancy Fraser presses the harder question. Injustice, she argues, has two irreducible dimensions — the economic, remedied by redistribution, and the cultural, remedied by recognition — and remedies for one can undercut the other. Affirming a group's distinct identity may valorise the very category that must be abolished if inequality is to end, a difficulty she calls the redistribution–recognition dilemma. Iris Marion Young takes a different route, defending group-differentiated representation on the ground that the supposedly universal citizen has historically been male, propertied and dominant.
Why it rose
Identity politics is closely bound to the new social movements of the later twentieth century — feminist, ecological, anti-racist, indigenous, sexuality-based — which organised outside factory and party, used cultural rather than industrial repertoires, and drew heavily on the educated middle strata. Its rise was helped by the exhaustion of state socialism, the retreat of universalist welfare politics under liberalisation, and the growth of a rights discourse that made group claims legible to courts and constitutions.
The Indian experience
India is arguably the world's largest laboratory of the phenomenon. Rajni Kothari supplied the founding insight: modern politics did not dissolve caste, it politicised it. Caste associations became vehicles of mobilisation, bargaining and upward claim, and politics became casteised even as caste became politicised — a two-way traffic that disproved the modernisation assumption that ascription would simply fade.
The consequences unfolded across decades. The Mandal Commission's implementation in 1990 consolidated OBC assertion and produced a durable bloc of lower-caste parties in the Hindi belt, a process Christophe Jaffrelot terms India's silent revolution. Dalit assertion, drawing on Ambedkar's legacy, moved from the Republican Party through Dalit Panther radicalism to the Bahujan Samaj Party's bid for state power in Uttar Pradesh, and to cultural politics around Ambedkar statues, jayantis and literature. Religious identity was mobilised on a mass scale by the Ram Janmabhoomi movement, while minority politics turned on personal law, reservation and security. Linguistic and regional identity produced the reorganisation of states, the anti-Hindi agitations in Tamil Nadu, Dravidian party dominance, and the demands that yielded Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Uttarakhand and Telangana. Tribal identity underwrote Fifth and Sixth Schedule protections, autonomous councils and the Forest Rights Act, 2006. Gender entered as a cross-cutting axis, with the women's movement contesting both state indifference and the patriarchies internal to community claims — a tension exposed vividly by the Shah Bano controversy.
The critique and the defence
Critics make three charges. Fragmentation: dividing the electorate into identity blocs weakens the solidarities needed for redistributive politics and invites competitive outbidding. Essentialism: identity claims tend to assume groups are homogeneous, silencing internal dissent — Dalit women's critique of both caste and feminist organisations is the sharpest Indian instance. Elite capture: the benefits of recognition often accrue to a group's better-placed layer, which is precisely the argument behind sub-categorisation and the creamy-layer exclusion.
The defence is that these movements respond to real historical injury. Untouchability, exclusion from education, land dispossession and linguistic humiliation were not class phenomena in disguise; they were organised through identity, and cannot be undone by ignoring it. Empirically, identity mobilisation in India has widened elite recruitment, raised turnout among the poor and forced distributive concessions — outcomes hard to dismiss as merely symbolic.
For the UPSC answer
Open by distinguishing identity politics from class politics, then immediately introduce the recognition–redistribution axis with Taylor and Fraser — that pairing turns a descriptive answer into an analytical one. Build the Indian body around Kothari on the politicisation of caste and one concrete sequence such as Mandal-and-after or Dalit assertion, naming dates and institutions rather than gesturing at trends. Handle the critique honestly, using Dalit women's dual critique to illustrate essentialism, and then give the defence its due by noting that identity mobilisation has demonstrably broadened political participation. A balanced conclusion — that identity claims in India must be judged by whether they enlarge or narrow substantive equality — works for both essays and Paper II answers.
References & further reading
- Kothari, R. (1970). Caste in Indian Politics. Orient Longman.
- Young, I. M. (1990). Justice and the Politics of Difference. Princeton University Press.
- Taylor, C. (1994). ‘The Politics of Recognition’, in Multiculturalism. Princeton University Press.
- Fraser, N. (1995). ‘From Redistribution to Recognition? Dilemmas of Justice in a Post-Socialist Age’. New Left Review, 212.
- Jaffrelot, C. (2003). India’s Silent Revolution: The Rise of the Lower Castes in North India. Permanent Black.
- Mahajan, G. (1998). Identities and Rights: Aspects of Liberal Democracy in India. Oxford University Press.