Identity, Expertise and Electoral Mobilisation: Karnataka's OBC Commissions and the Transformation of OBC Politics in a Regional Democracy

The paper examines how Karnataka Other Backward Classes (OBC) commissions have changed caste identity, professionalized knowledge and mobilisation in electoral politics in a regional democracy. The paper argues based on the connections between the Miller Committee (1918-19) and the Chinnappa Reddy Commission and the post-1995 Karnataka State Commission on Backward Classes that the agencies are not mere technical fact-finding units, but political institutions that stabilise and even disintegrate OBC identities by repackaging them. According to their forms of classification, survey exercises and quota prescriptions, commissions give state certified backwardness which parties translate into electoral politics, especially the majority/subaltern OBC blocs. The article has a mixed methodology as a combination of a documentary analysis of a commission report and legislation and the review of current scholarly research on caste politics and affirmative action. It also entails the secondary analysis of 2015 Socio Economic and Educational Caste (SEEC) Survey and the deliberations of the 32/51 per cent reservation change of OBCs.