Gender, Religion and Caste: Class 10 Civics · Chapter 3

Imagine your class is holding a debate on the motion Gender, religion and caste should be kept out of politics. One team argues that these topics only divide people, so politics is better off ignoring them. The other team argues that silence lets old injustices carry on unnoticed. By the end of this chapter you should be able to judge which team has the stronger case, and where each one is right.

Earlier chapters showed that a democracy must make room for differences between groups. A difference in itself is no threat. The trouble begins when it hardens into a lasting division, with some groups placed above others. This chapter takes up three such differences in India: gender, religion and caste. For each one we ask two questions. What shape does the division take in our society? And when it enters politics, does it make our democracy stronger or weaker?

3.1 Gender and politics

Every society sorts people into men and women and then hands each group its own roles, rights and expectations. This gender division (लैंगिक विभाजन) is found in every country, yet for a long time the study of politics paid it little attention. Many people take it to be simply the way nature made things. It is not. No girl is born knowing how to roll chapatis, and no boy is born knowing how to fix a scooter. Such roles are learnt, from what families expect and from stereotypes repeated in films, advertisements and everyday talk. What is learnt can be unlearnt.

3.1.1 Public/private division

From early childhood many girls hear that running a home and raising children is their real job, while boys are told they must earn. In most Indian families this produces a sexual division of labour. Chopping vegetables, sweeping, laundry, and looking after babies and grandparents are seen as women's duties, whether they do the work themselves or supervise a paid helper. Earning a living is seen as the man's job.

Now look at who does these jobs when they are paid. At a wedding, the halwais and caterers stirring giant pots are mostly men, and the tailor who stitches your school uniform is usually a man too. So the issue is not ability: housework becomes 'women's work' only when it is unpaid and done at home. Nor is women's work limited to the home. Think of a farm worker transplanting paddy, a vegetable seller at the weekly haat, a nurse on night duty or a software engineer. Each may go home to a second shift of cooking and cleaning. Yet this double load is rarely counted or praised.

Kept at home, women were also kept out of public life, and they had to fight their way in. Until the 1890s no country let women vote in national elections, and in most places they could not stand for office either. Campaigners for women's suffrage, the right to vote, held marches and hunger strikes, and many were jailed (When women won the vote). Their demands soon widened to equal legal rights and the chance to study and enter professions. The more radical feminist movements also demanded equality inside marriage and the family: in who decides, who owns property and who does the chores.

Once women's equality became a political demand, laws and attitudes began to shift. Careers once closed to women opened up: Indian women today fly fighter jets, argue cases in the Supreme Court and lead research laboratories. The Nordic countries, such as Sweden, Norway and Finland, have gone furthest, with women holding close to half the seats in their parliaments and many top government posts.

Where women still lose out

India has made progress since Independence, but ours is still largely a male-dominated society shaped by patriarchy (पितृसत्ता). The disadvantages women face appear in data on schooling, work, pay, survival and safety:

• Education. Census 2011 found that 65.5 per cent of women could read and write, against 82.1 per cent of men. Your textbook quotes older figures of about 54 and 76 per cent. Girls often top board exams, so ability is not the problem. Yet when money is short, many families take daughters out of school or college first and keep paying for sons.
• Jobs and unpaid work. Few women reach the best-paid and most respected jobs. Women also put in long hours of work that earns nothing, as Fig. 3.1 shows, so much of their effort stays unseen.
• Pay. The Equal Remuneration Act, 1976 required equal pay for equal work; since November 2025 the same rule is part of the Code on Wages, 2019. Yet official wage data keep showing women paid less than men for the same kind of work, from harvesting crops to factory jobs.
• Survival. Where sons are preferred, some families have the sex of a foetus tested and abort girls, although a 1994 law, now called the PCPNDT Act, bans such tests. India's child sex ratio fell from 945 girls per 1,000 boys in 1991 to 927 in 2001 and 919 in 2011. In a few States it was below 850.
• Safety. Fear of harassment limits where many women can study, work or travel after dark, and for some the danger is at home. The Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act, 2005 offers legal remedies, but many cases go unreported.

How do we know how much unpaid work women do? In 2019 the National Statistical Office (NSO) carried out India's first all-India Time Use Survey. It asked people aged 6 and above how they had spent each of the previous 24 hours. Fig. 3.1 shows the gap it found. Most women spend about five hours a day cooking, cleaning and caring for the family. This work earns no wage, so it never appears in income figures, while more of men's work is paid and therefore visible. Your textbook describes an older survey from 1998–99, held in six States. It found the same pattern: women worked longer hours each day, but most of their work was unpaid.

3.1.2 Women's political representation

Who decides which problems a government tackles first? Mostly the people sitting in legislatures and cabinets. If nearly all of them are men, issues such as unequal pay or safe transport for women can slip down the list. That is why women's movements argue that women must hold power themselves, and the clearest measure of that is how many women we elect.

Here India still has a long way to go. The 2019 Lok Sabha election sent 78 women to the 543-member House, or 14.4 per cent, the highest share till then. In 2024 the number dipped to 74, or 13.6 per cent (Fig. 3.2). In the State assemblies the share is lower still: about 9 per cent on average around 2023, according to PRS Legislative Research. Your textbook, using older data, gives 14.36 per cent for 2019 and under 5 per cent for the assemblies. Worldwide, women held about 27.5 per cent of seats in national parliaments on 1 January 2026, as counted by the Inter-Parliamentary Union. So the Lok Sabha's share is roughly half the world average. Men also dominate councils of ministers; even governments led by women have usually had few women ministers.

Can the law force a change? India tried it first in villages and towns. The 73rd and 74th Amendments (1992) reserved at least one-third of the seats in panchayats and municipalities for women, along with one-third of the posts of panchayat heads. Twenty-one States and two Union Territories have since raised the share to one-half in panchayats. The result is striking. According to the Ministry of Panchayati Raj, about 14.5 lakh women were serving in 2025, roughly 46 per cent of some 31 lakh elected panchayat members. Your textbook, using older data, counts over 10 lakh women in rural and urban local bodies.

For nearly three decades women's groups campaigned to extend the quota to the Lok Sabha and the State assemblies. In September 2023 Parliament passed the Nari Shakti Vandan Adhiniyam (Women's Reservation Act), formally the Constitution (106th Amendment) Act, 2023. It reserves one-third of the seats in the Lok Sabha, in every State Legislative Assembly and in the Delhi Assembly for women. Within the seats already reserved for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, one-third also go to women of those groups. It does not cover the Rajya Sabha or the State Legislative Councils.

The reserved seats begin only after the first Census taken after the Act, and a fresh delimitation of constituencies based on it. The reservation is to last 15 years, a period Parliament can extend, and the seats reserved for women are to rotate after each later delimitation, as Parliament decides by law. As of 2026 no election had yet been held under the Act, so follow the news to see how and when it is put into effect.

So the debating team that wanted gender kept out of politics has a problem. Votes for women, equal-pay laws and reserved seats all came because women's unequal treatment was made a public, political question. Here, bringing a social division into politics helped a disadvantaged group. Could any of these gains have come if the issue had stayed behind closed doors?

3.2 Religion, communalism and politics

Religion is a division of a quite different kind. In many Indian towns you can pass a temple, a mosque, a church and a gurdwara on a single street. Most countries today are home to several faiths, even though religion does not divide every society the way gender does. Disputes need not even be between faiths: in Northern Ireland, Catholic and Protestant Christians were locked in conflict for decades.11Northern Ireland is part of the United Kingdom. From the late 1960s until the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, conflict there between mainly Protestant unionists and mainly Catholic nationalists cost more than 3,500 lives. Religion also enters politics far more openly than gender usually does.

Not every link between religion and politics is a problem. Consider three examples:

• Mahatma Gandhi held that politics should never be cut off from religion. For him, 'religion' meant the moral code shared by every faith, such as truth and non-violence, not the rituals of any one faith. He wanted that code to guide public life.
• Human rights organisations want the government to take extra care that communal riots do not break out and that religious minorities stay safe.
• Women's groups point out that the family laws of all religious communities are unfair to women in some way, and want the government to make them fairer.

None of these three is alarming, even though each brings religion into public life. A democracy can welcome moral ideas from any faith, can let believers organise around shared needs, and can even let the state reform a practice that harms people. The line is crossed only when one religion is favoured over others. Fig. 3.3 turns this into a single test question.

3.2.1 Communalism

So when does religion in politics turn harmful? It does so once a nation is defined by a single faith, so that citizens of other faiths become outsiders. It also does so once politics becomes a contest of 'our religion against theirs'. Watch for three warning signs. One religion's beliefs are held up as superior to the rest. One group's demands are made against another group. Government power is used to put one faith above the others. Using religion in politics like this is communal politics (सांप्रदायिकता).

That is why the communal idea is mistaken at its root. Each of us has many identities at once: a religion, but also a language, a region, an occupation, a gender and an economic class. Which one matters most depends on the question at hand. Suppose all followers of a faith are rallied behind one banner on questions that have nothing to do with faith, such as jobs or prices. That drowns out everyone in the community who thinks differently. In a democracy, all of them deserve a hearing.

Communalism shows up in politics in several forms, from the quiet to the deadly (Fig. 3.4):

1. Everyday beliefs. Casual remarks such as 'people of that faith are all like this', or a quiet sense that one's own religion is the best, are everyday communalism. Because such ideas are everywhere, many of us carry them without realising it.
2. A quest for dominance. Prejudice can grow into a political goal: power for one's own community over the others. If the group is a majority, it wants majoritarian rule; if it is a minority, it may want to break away and set up a separate political unit.
3. Mobilisation on religious lines. Leaders try to herd the followers of one faith into a single political camp. Their tools are holy symbols, the backing of religious figures, stirring emotion and fear. In elections this shows up as special appeals aimed at one religion's voters, at the expense of the rest.
4. Communal violence. At its ugliest, communalism leads to riots and massacres.

3.2.2 Secular state

Having lived through Partition, the members of the Constituent Assembly knew how dangerous communal politics could be. They chose to build India as a secular state (धर्मनिरपेक्ष राज्य) and wrote that choice into several provisions you met in Class 9 (Fig. 3.5):

• No official religion. The Indian state does not adopt or favour any faith. Compare the countries in Table 3.2.
• Freedom of religion (Article 25). Every person may profess, practise and spread any religion, or follow none at all.
• No discrimination (Article 15). The state may not discriminate against any citizen on grounds of religion, or of caste, sex, race or place of birth.
• Intervention for equality (Articles 17 and 25). The state may step into religious matters to secure equality within communities. Untouchability is abolished, and Hindu temples of a public character can be opened to every caste.

Two more provisions complete the picture. No one can be made to pay a tax for promoting a particular religion (Article 27), and the word secular was added to the Preamble in 1976.

So secularism in India is not one party's opinion that might change with the next election. It is built into the foundations of the Republic, which is why communalism endangers not one group but the idea of India as a country of equal citizens. Laws alone cannot defeat it. A secular Constitution gives citizens the tools. The real work happens in daily life, when people refuse to forward a hateful rumour or laugh at a stereotype, and in politics, when voters turn away from appeals to religious division.

3.2.3 Social and religious diversity of India

How do we know the religious make-up of India? The Census of India, normally held every ten years, visits every household. Enumerators record each person's religion in that person's own words, and an answer such as 'no religion' is written down as given. So we have reliable figures on how large each community is and how its share has changed (Fig. 3.6).

Between 1951 and 2011 India's population more than tripled, and every community grew. Yet each community's share moved by only a few percentage points. Some people believe that the Muslim share will soon overtake the others, but the evidence does not support this. Projections made for the Sachar Committee (report 2006), which your textbook cites, expected that share to rise by only about 3 to 4 per cent of the population over 50 years. So the overall balance between communities is unlikely to change much.

The Census also counts two broad social groups, each made up of hundreds of communities named in lists issued under the Constitution. These lists are called Schedules, hence the name. The Scheduled Castes (often called Dalits) are castes that the old Hindu social order pushed outside the caste ladder and treated as 'untouchable'. The Scheduled Tribes (often called Adivasis) are communities that traditionally lived in forests and hills, largely apart from the rest of society. Census 2011 counted 16.6 per cent of Indians as Scheduled Castes and 8.6 per cent as Scheduled Tribes.

No Census since Independence has counted the Other Backward Classes (OBCs), so their share is only estimated: about 41 per cent in a National Sample Survey of 2004–05. Add SCs and STs, and roughly two Indians in every three belong to one of these three groups. This may soon change: the next Census, with 1 March 2027 as its reference date, is to record caste, the first full count of castes since 1931.

3.3 Caste and politics

Look back at the debate. On gender, bringing the division into politics has mostly helped; on religion, communal politics has mostly harmed. Caste is the case where the honest answer is 'both'.

3.3.1 Caste inequalities

Gender and religious divisions exist all over the world, but caste is a division found only in India. In many countries a blacksmith's son once became a blacksmith too, so passing work down the generations is common enough. Caste took this habit to an extreme. Birth fixed a person's place on a ladder of castes, a caste hierarchy, and rituals and religious rules made that place seem sacred and permanent. Three rules held each caste together. Its members did the same kind of work, married only among themselves, and did not share meals with castes thought to be 'lower'. Communities pushed below the ladder altogether were made to suffer untouchability, which you read about in Class 9.

Reformers and leaders such as Jotiba Phule, B. R. Ambedkar, Periyar E. V. Ramasamy and Gandhiji worked for a society free of caste inequality (Fighting caste inequality).

Caste today is not what it was a century ago. Reformers deserve part of the credit; the rest goes to deep changes in how Indians live and work. A farm labourer's son who moves to Surat for factory work, or a potter's daughter who becomes a teacher, shows occupational mobility. Urbanisation crowds people of every caste into the same trains, offices and housing colonies. Schooling has spread, and big landlords no longer rule villages as they once did. Together these forces have loosened the old hierarchy. The law pushed in the same direction: the Constitution outlawed caste discrimination and opened the way for policies, such as reservations, meant to repair past injustice.

Yet caste has not vanished, as the 'What persists' list shows. Think of a race in which some runners were made to start late for centuries: removing the rule does not put them level at once. Families whose ancestors were allowed to read and write moved easily into modern schools and salaried jobs. Families whose ancestors were forbidden to learn had to start from scratch. This head start helps explain why 'upper' castes are over-represented in the urban middle class, and why caste and economic status still go together.

Caste inequality today

Why should caste affect income at all? Because for centuries it controlled who could own the main resources of the time. Castes branded 'untouchable' could not own land, and only the 'twice-born' castes were allowed an education. Such rules are illegal now, and today there are wealthy and poor families in every caste, something rare a generation or two ago. But inherited gaps in land, education and contacts close slowly, and new inequalities have been added to the old ones. Official poverty data show the result (Fig. 3.7).

• Living standards follow the old ladder. Measured by average monthly spending, groups line up in the old order. 'Upper' castes are at the top, OBCs in the middle, and Dalits and Adivasis at the bottom.
• Poverty is concentrated at the bottom. Poor families exist in every group. But in rural India in 2011–12 the poverty rate among STs (45.3 per cent) was nearly three times that among 'Others' (15.5 per cent), with SCs and OBCs in between.
• Wealth is concentrated at the top. 'Upper' castes appear among India's richest households far more often than their share of the population would suggest. Dalits and Adivasis appear far less often.

(Your textbook shows older National Sample Survey data, for 1999–2000, which reveal the same pattern.)

3.3.2 Caste in politics

Casteism (जातिवाद) is communalism's twin. Swap 'religion' for 'caste' and the reasoning is the same. Everyone born into a caste is supposed to want the same things, and nobody outside it can share those wants. It fails for the same reason too. A landless labourer and a wealthy contractor of the same caste rarely agree about wages. And caste is only one of the identities that shape how a person votes.

Caste enters politics in several ways:

• Tickets and cabinets. Before giving a ticket, a party looks at which castes live in the constituency and how many votes each might bring. When ministers are chosen, leaders try to make sure that several castes and tribes see 'one of their own' in the cabinet.
• Caste on the campaign trail. Speeches and posters may stir caste pride or grievance, and some parties come to be identified with particular castes.
• Every vote counts the same. Under universal adult franchise a landless labourer's vote weighs exactly as much as a landlord's, so leaders have had to court every group. Castes long treated as inferior discovered that they, too, could make governments listen.

Does this mean caste decides every election? The evidence says no (Fig. 3.8):

1. In no Lok Sabha constituency does a single caste make up a clear majority of the voters, so a winner must draw votes from several castes and communities.
2. No party collects every vote of any caste. Calling a caste a party's vote bank only signals that many of its voters tend to back that party.
3. Where a caste is believed to be strong, rival parties often all field candidates from it, so its votes split. Elsewhere, plenty of voters find no candidate of their caste on the ballot.
4. Governments are voted out, and sitting MPs and MLAs lose their seats, again and again. If every caste always voted the same way, results would hardly ever change.

What else sways a voter? Ask people why they voted as they did. You will hear about the price of cooking gas, a new road or a broken promise, a leader they admire or distrust, and a party their family has always supported. Within one caste, a farmer and a shopkeeper, or a grandmother and her college-going grandson, may weigh these things differently and vote differently. Caste is one factor among many, and often not the deciding one.

3.3.3 Politics in caste

The arrow also points the other way. Once caste groups start competing for votes and power, they have to behave like political players, and that changes them. In short, caste does not so much capture politics as get politicised by it (Fig. 3.9). Three changes stand out:

• Bigger groups. To count for more, a caste welcomes related sub-castes, even ones it once kept at a distance, under a common name.
• Alliances. No caste is large enough to win alone, so caste leaders must strike deals with other castes and communities, which means sitting down and bargaining with them.
• New categories. Labels such as 'backward' and 'forward' castes, each grouping many castes together, are products of modern politics, not of the old caste order.

So, is caste in politics good or bad? It depends on how it is used. For communities shut out of power for centuries, organising as Dalits or OBCs has been a route to a seat at the table. Far more of their members now sit in panchayats, assemblies and ministries, and their movements keep pressing for dignity, land and fair opportunities. But a politics that sees only caste can bury common problems such as poverty, development and corruption, and can turn rivalry between castes into tension and even violence. Caste in politics: two sides sets out the two sides.