"Caste continues to be a decisive variable in state-level electoral politics despite its diminishing salience in national discourse." Examine with reference to the Jat/non-Jat divide in Haryana.

National campaigns increasingly run on welfare delivery, nationalism and leadership appeal, yet state arenas remain organised around caste coalitions. Haryana's Jat/non-Jat cleavage shows that caste has been reconfigured, not retired.

Caste as a decisive state-level variable

• Numbers translate into dominance: Jats form roughly a quarter of Haryana's population but have supplied a majority of its Chief Ministers, giving the community influence well beyond its share [1].
• Counter-mobilisation: after the 2016 Jat agitation for OBC status, a consolidated bloc of Backward Classes and upper castes became the winning arithmetic, culminating in a third consecutive state mandate in 2024 [1][4].
• Recruitment as proxy battleground: government jobs are scarce and high-value, so allegations about a favoured "particular class" in appointments (Haryana, August 2026) instantly read as caste signalling [1].

Why national salience appears to decline

• National discourse speaks the language of beneficiaries, not castes — schemes, security and leadership displace explicit caste appeals.
• Caste therefore migrates into coded vocabulary and into institutional arenas: reservation classification under the NCBC (Article 338B) [2], and state power to frame their own backward-class lists after the 105th Constitutional Amendment, 2021 [3].

Extent and limits

• Caste is decisive but not sufficient: agrarian distress, unemployment and recruitment transparency now compete with identity, and Opposition parties deliberately pivot from caste to jobs [1].
• Indra Sawhney (1992) ceilings and creamy-layer tests constrain how far dominant-caste quota demands can be conceded, pushing mobilisation into electoral rather than legal channels.

Caste has thus changed form — from open appeal to coded coalition-building — while retaining decisive weight in states. The durable answer lies in expanding non-state employment, transparent merit-based recruitment, and evidence-based backwardness assessment through the NCBC and state commissions, so representation grievances are settled by data rather than by mobilisation. That, and not the fading of caste rhetoric, would mark genuine social justice.