English only · Odia translation in progress

Chapter 9: Blood and Soil — Tribal Politics, Caste, and Identity in Odisha

On January 2, 2006, roughly a thousand tribal villagers gathered at Kalinganagar in Jajpur district to stop Tata Steel from building a boundary wall on land they said had been taken without proper compensation. By the end of the day, thirteen tribals and one policeman were dead. The police had opened fire. The tribals had come with bows and arrows.

Eighteen years later, in June 2024, Mohan Charan Majhi — a Santal from Keonjhar, a mining-heavy tribal district barely a hundred kilometers from Kalinganagar — was sworn in as Odisha’s first tribal Chief Minister. His party, the BJP, had just swept the tribal belt that had been a BJD fortress for two decades.

These two events — the firing and the swearing-in — are not a story of progress. They are a story of tension. The same state that shot tribals dead for resisting land acquisition now installs a tribal man as its head of government. The question is whether the system that produced Kalinganagar has changed, or whether it has found a more sophisticated way to manage the contradiction. To answer that, you have to understand how identity — tribe, caste, region, religion — actually shapes power in Odisha. Not as abstract categories, but as lived mechanics.

Part I: The Tribal Numbers — What 22.8% Actually Means

Start with the census, because the census is where the state sees you.

Odisha is 22.8 percent Scheduled Tribe as per the 2011 Census — approximately 9.6 million people, a figure that has certainly crossed one crore by now. This makes it the state with the third-largest tribal population in India, after Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra. But the raw percentage obscures the geographic concentration that makes tribal politics in Odisha fundamentally different from tribal politics in, say, Gujarat (14.8% ST) or Rajasthan (13.5% ST).

Odisha’s tribal population is not scattered evenly. It is concentrated in a crescent running along the western and southern rim of the state — precisely where the Eastern Ghats rise from the coastal plains, where the forests are densest, the roads worst, the state’s administrative machinery thinnest, and the mineral wealth greatest. That last coincidence is the central fact of tribal Odisha’s modern life.

Consider the district-level numbers:

Mayurbhanj: 58.6% ST — the most tribal district in the state, and one of the most tribal in India. Santal heartland.
Sundargarh: Over 50% ST. Iron ore and coal country. Munda and Oram communities.
Keonjhar: Over 45% ST. Iron ore hub. Santal, Bhuiyan, Juang.
Koraput: Over 50% ST. Paraja, Kondh, Gadaba communities. The old Koraput undivided district, now split into Koraput, Malkangiri, Nabarangpur, and Rayagada, is arguably the tribal heartland of eastern India.
Malkangiri: Over 57% ST. The Bonda hills. Maoist presence. India’s remotest corners.
Kandhamal: Over 53% ST. Kondh territory. Site of the 2008 communal violence that shook the state.
Rayagada: Over 55% ST. Dongria Kondh. Niyamgiri.
Kalahandi: Around 28% ST, but the Thuamul Rampur and Lanjigarh blocks are overwhelmingly tribal. Hunger belt.

Eight districts have ST populations above 50 percent. Six more are between 25 and 50 percent. The coastal districts — Puri, Cuttack, Khordha, Balasore — are in the single digits. This is a state split along an ecological fault line: coastal Odisha, which is largely caste-Hindu, urbanizing, better-connected; and highland Odisha, which is substantially tribal, forested, mineral-rich, and underdeveloped. When people talk about Odisha’s tribal question, they are talking about a geographic and economic divide as much as an ethnic one.

Sixty-Two Communities, Thirteen Emergencies

The administrative category “Scheduled Tribe” encompasses 62 recognized communities in Odisha (some counts say 64, depending on how sub-groups are classified). These range from the Kondh — the largest, numbering over a million, spread across Kandhamal, Rayagada, Koraput, Balangir, and Boudh — to the Birhor, a PVTG whose population in Odisha numbers in the low hundreds.

The major communities, and why they matter politically:

Kondh (Kandha): Over a million people. The largest tribal group. Concentrated in the central-southern districts. The Dongria Kondh sub-group — perhaps 10,000 people — became globally famous through the Niyamgiri resistance. But the broader Kondh community has been the demographic backbone of tribal politics in southern Odisha. Kandhamal is literally named after them.

Santal: Over 800,000 in Odisha, part of a much larger community spread across Jharkhand, West Bengal, Bihar, and Bangladesh. Concentrated in Mayurbhanj, Keonjhar, Balasore. Historically the most politically organized tribal community in eastern India — the Santal Rebellion of 1855-56 was one of the great anti-colonial uprisings. The current Chief Minister is Santal. President Droupadi Murmu is Santal, from Mayurbhanj. The Santal are the tribal community that has most successfully entered the apparatus of the modern Indian state.

Munda: Approximately 560,000 in Odisha. Concentrated in Sundargarh, Sambalpur, Keonjhar. Like the Santal, part of a larger eastern Indian community with deep roots in Jharkhand. Birsa Munda’s rebellion at the turn of the twentieth century remains one of the totemic events of tribal resistance in India.

Gond: A vast tribal community spanning central India — Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, and pockets of western Odisha. In Odisha, found mainly in Koraput and Rayagada. Numerically smaller in the state than the Kondh or Santal, but culturally and politically significant across the central Indian tribal belt.

Saora (Sora): Found in Gajapati, Rayagada, and Koraput districts. The Lanjia Saora sub-group is a PVTG. Known for their extraordinary idital wall paintings — ritual art that maps the spirit world. The Saora’s population is substantial, with the broader Soura group numbering over 500,000.

Bhuiyan: Found across Keonjhar, Sundargarh, and Mayurbhanj. The Paudi Bhuyan sub-group is a PVTG, living in the hill tracts of Keonjhar and practicing shifting cultivation. One of the communities most directly impacted by mining expansion in the iron ore belt.

Then there are the thirteen Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups — the PVTGs — communities the government of India has identified as being at the highest risk of demographic and cultural extinction: Bonda, Birhor, Chuktia Bhunjia, Dongria Kondh, Didayi, Hill Kharia, Juang, Kutia Kondh, Lodha, Lanjia Saora, Mankirdia, Paudi Bhuyan, and Saora. Odisha has the highest number of PVTGs of any state — thirteen out of the national total of seventy-five. These are communities whose populations are small or declining, whose technology is at subsistence level, whose literacy rates are among the lowest in the country.

The PVTG designation is, in a sense, the government’s way of saying: we know these people are disappearing, and we have not figured out how to stop it.

Part II: The 33 Reserved Seats — Representation Without Power

Odisha’s Legislative Assembly has 147 seats. Of these, 33 are reserved for Scheduled Tribes — reflecting the ST proportion in the population. Additionally, 24 seats are reserved for Scheduled Castes. This means that 57 of 147 seats — nearly 39 percent — are constitutionally earmarked for historically marginalized communities.

On paper, this is substantial representation. In practice, it functions differently.

Think of reserved seats through the lens of a software system. The interface shows representation — tribal faces in the assembly, tribal names on the ballot. But the backend — who selects the candidates, who funds the campaigns, who sets the legislative agenda, who controls the committee assignments — remains controlled by party machinery dominated by non-tribal elites. Reservation guarantees the demographic composition of the output; it says nothing about who controls the input.

For twenty-four years under the BJD, the tribal reserved seats were part of Naveen Patnaik’s electoral machine. The BJD dominated the tribal belt not through tribal political organization but through a welfare-delivery pipeline — KALIA for farmers, subsidized rice, Mamata for maternity benefits — that created a direct beneficiary-to-party link. Tribal MLAs were selected by the party leadership (ultimately by Patnaik and his inner circle), campaigned on the Patnaik brand, and legislated according to party direction. They were representatives of tribal constituencies, not representatives of tribal interests in any autonomous sense.

The 2024 Flip

Then came 2024, and the tribal belt flipped.

The BJP won approximately 18 of the 33 ST-reserved seats — a seismic shift from the BJD’s near-monopoly. Simultaneously, the BJP captured 14 of 24 SC-reserved seats. The tribal breakthrough was critical to the BJP’s overall majority of 78 seats.

How did this happen? The explanation has multiple layers, and each layer reveals something about how tribal politics actually works.

Layer 1: Welfare bypass. Central government schemes — PM Awas Yojana (housing), Ujjwala (cooking gas), Jan Dhan (bank accounts), PM-Kisan (direct cash transfers) — created a direct link between tribal beneficiaries and the BJP-branded central government. The BJD’s state-branded welfare competed with the center’s welfare, and when voters had to choose between the two brands, Modi’s outweighed Naveen’s. This is the classic “double engine” pitch: why settle for one welfare pipeline when you can have two flowing in the same direction?

Layer 2: The VK Pandian backlash. Pandian, a Tamil-origin former IAS officer who became Patnaik’s political proxy, triggered “Odia Asmita” (pride) resentment that cut across castes and tribes. In the tribal belt, this translated into a specific grievance: the person controlling access to the Chief Minister, deciding candidate lists, directing bureaucratic postings, was a cultural outsider who had never sought a popular mandate.

Layer 3: RSS organizational groundwork. The Akhil Bharatiya Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram — the RSS’s tribal-facing organization, founded in 1952 — had been working in Odisha’s tribal areas for decades. Running schools, hostels, health camps, cultural programs. Building relationships. The political harvest in 2024 was the fruit of a very long organizational project.

Layer 4: Simultaneous elections. When Lok Sabha and Assembly elections happen together, the national tide overwhelms local dynamics. In previous cycles, tribal voters split — BJD for state, BJP for center. Simultaneous elections collapsed this distinction.

The result: Odisha’s first tribal Chief Minister — but installed by a party whose central leadership made the selection, whose governance model integrates the state into a national framework, and whose development philosophy prioritizes mining liberalization and industrial corridors in precisely the landscapes that tribal communities inhabit.

Part III: The Constitutional Architecture — Fifth Schedule and PESA

The Indian Constitution provides specific protections for tribal areas, concentrated in two instruments: the Fifth Schedule and the PESA Act. Understanding the gap between what these instruments promise and what they deliver is essential to understanding tribal politics in Odisha.

The Fifth Schedule

The Fifth Schedule applies to tribal-majority areas in ten states, including Odisha. In the state, seven districts are fully covered and six partially covered as Scheduled Areas. The full districts include the entire undivided Koraput (now Koraput, Malkangiri, Nabarangpur, Rayagada), Mayurbhanj, and Sundargarh. Parts of Keonjhar, Kandhamal, Ganjam, Kalahandi, Sambalpur, and Balasore are also included.

The Fifth Schedule establishes:

A Tribes Advisory Council (TAC) in each state, with the Chief Minister as chair, to advise the Governor on tribal welfare.
The Governor’s special powers to direct that particular laws do not apply in Scheduled Areas, or apply with modifications. This is a substantial constitutional authority — in theory, the Governor can block legislation that harms tribal interests.
Restrictions on land transfer from tribal to non-tribal ownership in Scheduled Areas.

In practice, the Fifth Schedule has been a paper tiger in Odisha. The Governor’s special powers have rarely been exercised to block mining or industrial projects. Land alienation — the transfer of tribal land to non-tribal ownership through various legal and illegal mechanisms — has continued despite constitutional protections. The Tribes Advisory Council meets infrequently and functions as a rubber stamp rather than an independent watchdog.

The gap between constitutional text and administrative reality is a pattern you see across Indian governance. But in tribal areas, the consequences are existential. When the Constitution says “no transfer of tribal land without the Governor’s approval” and the administrative system routinely facilitates such transfers, what you have is not a failure of implementation. It is a system working as designed — designed to enable resource extraction while maintaining the appearance of protection.

PESA: The Law That Was Never Implemented

The Panchayats (Extension to Scheduled Areas) Act of 1996 — PESA — was supposed to be revolutionary. It was designed to empower gram sabhas (village assemblies) in Scheduled Areas with specific powers over:

Minor minerals: The gram sabha must be consulted before any mining license is granted.
Minor forest produce: Community ownership and management.
Land acquisition: Prior consent of the gram sabha required.
Money lending: Regulation to prevent debt bondage.

PESA was the legislative expression of a simple idea: in tribal areas, the village — not the district collector, not the mining company, not the state capital — should have the final say on what happens to the land. The Niyamgiri precedent, where the Supreme Court directed gram sabha consultations before Vedanta’s mining could proceed, was a high-profile application of this principle.

Here is the fact that tells you everything about how seriously Odisha’s political establishment has taken tribal self-governance: Odisha has never framed the rules necessary to implement PESA.

The Act was passed in 1996. It is now 2026. Thirty years. No rules. This is not bureaucratic delay. This is a political choice. Every state government — BJD for twenty-four years, BJP since 2024 — has chosen not to create the administrative framework that would give gram sabhas legal teeth in mining decisions.

The reason is not mysterious. Odisha’s mineral revenues — iron ore, bauxite, chromite, manganese, coal — contribute approximately 45 percent of the state’s own revenue and 26 percent of total revenue receipts. The state’s share in India’s total mineral production value rose from 32.8 percent in 2017-18 to 44.7 percent in 2023-24. Mining revenue grew tenfold from approximately Rs. 4,900 crore in FY17 to Rs. 50,000 crore in FY22.

Giving gram sabhas effective veto power over mining decisions would mean giving the poorest communities in the state the ability to block the largest source of state revenue. No government — regardless of ideology, regardless of whether it installs a tribal Chief Minister — has been willing to accept that trade-off.

This is a structural insight worth sitting with. The Indian Constitution provides tribal communities with legal instruments of self-governance. The Indian state has systematically declined to activate those instruments in the one context where they matter most — resource extraction from tribal land. The instrument exists. The political will to use it does not.

Part IV: Kandhamal — The Wound That Didn’t Heal

In August 2008, Kandhamal district — the heart of Kondh territory — erupted in communal violence that left between 38 (official count) and over 100 (independent estimates) people dead, roughly 56,000 displaced, over 5,600 houses and 300 churches destroyed, and at least three women gang-raped.

The trigger was the assassination of Swami Lakshmanananda Saraswati, a prominent VHP leader who had spent decades campaigning against Christian conversions in the tribal belt, along with four associates at his ashram on August 23, 2008. Despite the Central Bureau of Investigation later determining that Maoist insurgents carried out the killing, the violence was directed against the Christian community — predominantly Pano Dalits who had converted to Christianity, but also tribal Christians.

To understand Kandhamal, you need to understand the three-way identity fault line that runs through the district.

Fault line 1: Kondh (tribal) vs. Pano (Dalit). The Kondh are the original inhabitants of the Kandhamal highlands. The Pano, a Dalit caste group, migrated into the area over the preceding centuries, initially as laborers and traders. Over time, Pano families acquired land, accessed education, and achieved some economic mobility — often through association with Christian missions that ran schools and hospitals. The Kondh perceived this as encroachment on their territory and resources.

Fault line 2: Hindu vs. Christian. Christian missionaries had been active in Kandhamal since the colonial period, primarily among the Pano. Conversions created a religious divide overlaid on the caste-tribe divide. Hindu nationalist organizations — VHP, Bajrang Dal, RSS — framed the conversions as predatory, arguing that tribal culture was being destroyed by foreign religion. The irony — that Hindu nationalist organizations were themselves seeking to absorb tribal animist communities into the Hindu fold — was lost in the heat.

Fault line 3: Tribal animism vs. organized religion. The Kondh’s own spiritual practices — animist, ancestor-worshipping, rooted in the sacred groves and the mountains — were distinct from both Christianity and Hinduism. But in the political imagination, “tribal” was being claimed by both sides. Christians said they were freeing tribals from caste oppression. Hindutva organizations said they were reconnecting tribals with their Hindu roots. Neither frame accommodated the possibility that tribal cosmologies were autonomous systems that did not require either salvation.

The 2008 violence was not a spontaneous eruption. It was the culmination of decades of tension, and it was organized. Mobs moved through Kandhamal with voter lists, identifying Christian households. The pattern of destruction — systematic, targeted, moving from village to village — indicated coordination. An estimated 2,000 Christians were forced to undergo “reconversion” ceremonies. The violence lasted for weeks.

The legal aftermath was inadequate by any measure. A special court was established, but conviction rates were low. Many of the displaced never returned. The underlying tensions — Kondh vs. Pano, tribal vs. Dalit, animist vs. Christian vs. Hindu — remain live. Kandhamal is an annual anxiety, a wound that the calendar reopens.

What Kandhamal reveals about Odisha’s identity politics is this: the tribal belt is not a simple story of marginalized communities resisting the state. It is a complex landscape where multiple identity groups — tribal, Dalit, Christian, Hindu — compete for the same geographic space, the same constitutional protections, and the same political representation. The Scheduled Tribe category and the Scheduled Caste category are supposed to be distinct. In Kandhamal, they collided.

Part V: The Resistance Tradition — From Niyamgiri to the Maoist Question

Tribal resistance in Odisha has a lineage that runs from the Santal Rebellion of 1855 through Kalinganagar in 2006 to the ongoing Niyamgiri defense. It is one of the longest-running confrontations between indigenous communities and the modern state anywhere in the world.

Niyamgiri: The Precedent

The Niyamgiri case deserves its fame, but more for the legal precedent than for the outcome.

When the Supreme Court ruled in April 2013 that the gram sabhas of the affected Dongria Kondh and Kutia Kondh communities must be consulted before Vedanta Resources could mine bauxite from the Niyamgiri hills, it was doing something unprecedented in Indian jurisprudence: recognizing that a tribal community’s religious and cultural relationship with a landscape constitutes a legal right capable of overriding industrial interest. Between July and August 2013, all twelve gram sabhas voted unanimously against mining.

Ten thousand people with no lawyers and no lobbyists defeated a multinational corporation valued at billions of dollars. The victory was real. But note the conditions that made it possible: a Supreme Court willing to intervene, a globally visible advocacy campaign (Survival International, ActionAid, dozens of Indian civil society organizations), sympathetic media coverage, and a legal mechanism — the gram sabha — that happened to map onto the Dongria Kondh’s own tradition of collective decision-making.

Communities without that specific combination of legal access, media visibility, and organized advocacy support rarely win. For every Niyamgiri, there are dozens of quiet dispossessions that never reach a courtroom.

Kalinganagar: The Cost

Kalinganagar in 2006 was the blunt version of what Niyamgiri resolved through law. Thirteen tribals killed by police for obstructing an industrial project. The government had acquired land for Tata Steel without implementing settlement surveys required under the Odisha Survey and Settlement Act. The tribals rejected the compensation as inadequate. They gathered. The police fired.

The Justice Mohanty Commission, appointed to investigate, eventually ruled the firing “justified.” The land acquisition proceeded. Tata Steel built its plant. The tribals built a “Birabhumi” — a martyrs’ tower — where they gather every January 2 to remember.

Kalinganagar is the event that explains why tribal resistance in Odisha carries an edge that liberal policy discussions tend to smooth away. When the state has demonstrated that it will shoot you dead for standing on your own land, the question of whether you trust the state’s promises about consultation, consent, and compensation is not an academic one.

The Maoist Question

The southwest corner of Odisha — Malkangiri, Koraput, Rayagada, Kalahandi, Kandhamal — has been affected by Maoist (Naxal) insurgency for decades. The number of Maoist-affected districts in the state has dropped from 21 to 7 in recent years, and the insurgency is in what security officials describe as its “final phase.” But the conditions that generated Maoist recruitment — tribal dispossession, land alienation, state failure, chronic poverty — have not been fully addressed.

The relationship between tribal resistance movements and the Maoist insurgency is the most fraught question in Odisha’s tribal politics. The Indian state has a persistent tendency to collapse the two — to treat every form of tribal dissent as Maoist-inspired, every forest-rights activist as a Naxal sympathizer. This conflation serves a purpose: it delegitimizes resistance by associating it with violence, and it justifies a security-state response to what are fundamentally political and economic grievances.

The reality is more layered. There is genuine Maoist presence in the forested borderlands of southwest Odisha and Chhattisgarh. According to police intelligence, ninety percent of Maoists operating in Odisha are originally from Chhattisgarh, suggesting it is as much an interstate security problem as a local political one. But there are also entirely non-violent tribal resistance movements — defending forest rights, opposing mining, demanding PESA implementation — that have nothing to do with Maoism and everything to do with constitutional entitlements being denied.

The failure to distinguish between the two is itself a form of political violence. When a gram sabha exercising its legal right to oppose a mining lease is treated as a law-and-order problem, the state is revealing which interests it actually protects.

Part VI: BJP’s Tribal Strategy — The “Vanvasi” Project

The BJP’s success in Odisha’s tribal belt in 2024 was not an accident. It was the culmination of a decades-long project that operates simultaneously at the cultural, organizational, and electoral levels.

The Naming Game: Vanvasi vs. Adivasi

Start with a word. “Adivasi” — literally “original inhabitant” — is the term most tribal communities use for themselves. It carries a political claim: we were here first, this land is ours, our rights precede the state’s.

The RSS and its affiliates prefer “vanvasi” — “forest dweller.” The semantic shift is not trivial. “Adivasi” implies a distinct identity with prior claims. “Vanvasi” implies a subset of Hindu society that happens to live in forests — forest-dwelling Hindus, not an indigenous people with autonomous identity. The Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram, the RSS’s primary tribal-facing organization, is named with this logic. If all Hindus are one family, and tribals are simply Hindus who live in the forest, then their animist practices are not a separate cosmology — they are folk Hinduism. Their sacred groves are not autonomous spiritual spaces — they are expressions of Hindu nature-worship. The specific political claim embedded in “adivasi” — that tribal identity is distinct from and prior to Hindu identity — is dissolved.

The Organizational Machine

The Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram was founded in 1952 in Jashpur (then Madhya Pradesh, now Chhattisgarh) and has been active in Odisha’s tribal areas for over fifty years. Its activities are classically RSS: schools (ekal vidyalayas — single-teacher schools in remote areas), hostels, health camps, cultural programs, reading of the Ramcharitmanas, distribution of religious literature, yajnas (fire rituals) in tribal villages, and “Shraddha Jagran” (awakening of devotion) campaigns.

The approach is patient, incremental, and deeply effective. A single-teacher school in a remote tribal village, run by an RSS-affiliated organization, fills a genuine vacuum — the government school may not exist, or may exist only as a building without teachers. The cultural programming — connecting tribal deities to Hindu mythology, framing tribal festivals as Hindu festivals, incorporating tribal youth into RSS-organized events — works at the level of identity formation over generations.

By the time the BJP asks for votes, the groundwork has been laid. The tribal voter who has sent their child to a VKA-run school, attended a VKA health camp, participated in VKA cultural events, has already been partially integrated into the Sangh ecosystem. The vote is the last step, not the first.

The Electoral Arithmetic

In 2024, this project paid off. The BJP won approximately 18 of 33 ST-reserved seats. But the victory also depended on the specific offering BJP could make that the BJD could not: “double engine” governance, meaning the same party at the center and state, with the implied promise that central welfare schemes would flow faster and more generously.

The installation of Mohan Charan Majhi as Chief Minister — a Santal from the mining district of Keonjhar — was the signal. A tribal CM said to tribal voters: you are not just beneficiaries of this party, you lead it. Whether that signal translates into substantive shifts in mining policy, forest rights, or PESA implementation is the open question. The signal is real. The structural constraints are also real.

Part VII: Caste — The Quiet Architecture

Odisha’s caste structure is less dramatic than North India’s — no single dominant OBC caste, no BSP-style caste mobilization, no Mandal moment — and for that reason, less analyzed. This is a mistake. Caste in Odisha operates not through mass mobilization but through elite capture, and the subtlety of the mechanism is precisely what makes it durable.

The Structure

Brahmins: Five to ten percent of the population. Historically dominant in politics, bureaucracy, and the professions. Small in number but vastly overrepresented in positions of power.

Karan (Kayastha): Three to five percent. The traditional administrative caste — record-keepers, scribes, accountants for the ruling powers. In Odisha, Karans are often grouped with Brahmins as the “upper-caste” political elite. The Patnaik family is Karan. This is significant: the longest-serving Chief Minister in Odisha’s history came from a caste comprising perhaps four percent of the population.

Together, Brahmins and Karans — roughly ten to fifteen percent of the population — have held the Chief Minister’s post for over fifty of Odisha’s seventy-eight years of statehood. This is an extraordinary concentration of power in a state where OBCs constitute approximately 54 percent of the population.

Khandayat: The largest agricultural caste, constituting an estimated 35 percent of the state’s population. Classified as Socially and Educationally Backward Class (SEBC) in Odisha but not as OBC in the central list. The Khandayat claim Kshatriya status based on their quasi-martial heritage, but were historically placed in the Shudra category by Brahminical classification. They have produced two Chief Ministers — but two out of seventy-eight years is not power proportional to a 35 percent population share.

Other OBCs: Fragmented across dozens of caste groups — Chasa, Teli, Gauda, Keuta, and many more. No single OBC caste has the numerical concentration to form the basis of a caste party in the way Yadavs powered the SP in Uttar Pradesh or Marathas dominated Maharashtra politics.

Scheduled Castes: Approximately 17 percent of the population. Dalit communities — Pano, Bauri, Dhoba, Hadi, and others. No Dalit has ever been Chief Minister of Odisha.

Why No BSP in Odisha?

This is the question The India Forum’s analysis calls “Ambedkar’s unasked question.” Why has Odisha — with 17 percent SC population and 54 percent OBCs — never produced a Dalit-Bahujan political movement comparable to what happened in Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, or Tamil Nadu?

Several structural factors:

OBC fragmentation. In UP, the Yadavs alone are roughly 9 percent of the population — concentrated enough to anchor a party. In Odisha, the OBC landscape is fragmented across dozens of groups, none individually large enough to serve as a political nucleus. The Khandayats are big enough, but they aspire to Kshatriya status, not Bahujan solidarity — their caste politics points upward, not horizontally.

The Patnaik model. For twenty-four years, BJD operated an “above-caste” appeal that distributed welfare benefits across caste lines and selected candidates based on electability rather than caste representation. This was not caste-blindness — it was the strategic management of caste by a leader whose upper-caste identity was camouflaged by his “apolitical” persona. It worked because it delivered material benefits. When the Dalits and OBCs are getting rice at one rupee per kilo, the incentive to mobilize along caste lines diminishes.

Absence of intellectual infrastructure. Ambedkar’s movement in Maharashtra had the Mahars as a base community, a long tradition of anti-caste thought (Phule, Shahu Maharaj), and proximity to Bombay’s political economy. Tamil Nadu had Periyar and the Self-Respect Movement. Odisha had none of this. The Dalit-Bahujan intellectual tradition in the state is thin — not non-existent, but lacking the institutional depth to sustain a political movement. Neither the movements of the Mahars and Ad-Dharmis nor the Panthers could impact the Dalits of Odisha in the way they transformed politics elsewhere.

Brahmin-Kayastha adaptability. The Odisha elite caste structure adapted to democratic politics by absorbing caste challenges rather than confronting them. When caste pressure built, the system responded with welfare targeting, candidate diversification, and the occasional symbolic appointment — just enough to release pressure without conceding structural power.

The result: Odisha’s caste politics is a system of elite dominance sustained not by overt caste mobilization but by the absence of counter-mobilization. The Brahmin-Kayastha hegemony persists precisely because it has never been named and challenged as forcefully as comparable hegemonies in other states.

The BJP’s arrival does not fundamentally change this. The BJP’s own caste strategy in Odisha is broad Hindu consolidation — Hindutva as a supra-caste identity — rather than caste-specific mobilization. Majhi’s appointment as a tribal CM is significant, but the party’s organizational and financial backbone in the state remains upper-caste and OBC. The architecture endures.

Part VIII: Regional Identity — The Kosal Fracture

Caste and tribe are not the only identity fault lines. There is also region.

Coastal vs. Western Odisha

The development gap between coastal Odisha (Cuttack, Bhubaneswar, Puri, Balasore, Jajpur) and western Odisha (Sambalpur, Balangir, Kalahandi, Nuapada, Boudh, Sonepur) is one of the defining features of the state’s political geography.

Coastal Odisha has the state capital, the IT hubs, the better roads, the universities, the media houses, the political establishment. Western Odisha has the mineral wealth, the tribal populations, the hunger belt, the drought-prone districts, and a persistent sense that the coastal elite governs the state for its own benefit.

The numbers back the grievance. In the backward districts of the Kosal region — Boudh, Sonepur, Balangir, Nuapada — more than 60 percent of people have historically lived below the poverty line. Recurrent droughts, inadequate irrigation, and uneven land distribution made western Odisha a “hunger belt” that produced some of the most disturbing images of post-independence India: starvation deaths, child-selling, mass migration.

The Kosal Movement

This development gap has generated a demand for a separate Kosal state, encompassing the western Odisha districts. The movement, led by organizations like the Western Odisha Yuva Manch (WOYM), Kosal Youth Coordination Committee, Kosal Sena, and the Kosal Kranti Dal (a political party), argues that western Odisha’s resources are extracted — its minerals, its forests, its labor — while its people receive a disproportionately small share of development spending.

The Kosal movement has never achieved the political traction of, say, the Telangana movement (which successfully carved a new state out of Andhra Pradesh in 2014). Academic analysis describes it as “stalemated subnationalism” — strong enough to express grievance, not strong enough to force structural change.

Why not? Several reasons:

Identity fragmentation. The “Kosal identity” — linked to the Kosli/Sambalpuri language and cultural tradition — lacks cohesion. Western Odisha is itself diverse: tribal communities in the highlands, caste-Hindu farmers in the valleys, mining-belt workers in the industrial corridors. The Kosal label papers over internal differences that make sustained political mobilization difficult.

Competing identities. In the tribal-majority districts of western Odisha, tribal identity often supersedes regional identity. A Kondh in Kalahandi may identify more as tribal than as Kosali. The regional movement and the tribal movement sometimes overlap but often pull in different directions.

Elite capture of grievance. The Kosal movement’s leadership has been predominantly non-tribal, caste-Hindu, and urban. The articulation of western Odisha’s backwardness tends to center the Sambalpuri cultural elite rather than the tribal and Dalit communities who bear the worst of the deprivation.

Both major parties’ management. Both BJD and BJP have responded to Kosal sentiment with targeted spending, infrastructure promises, and the occasional appointment of western Odisha leaders to visible positions — just enough to manage the grievance without addressing its structural roots.

The Sambalpuri linguistic and cultural identity — distinct from standard Odia, with its own literary tradition, music (the Sambalpuri folk tradition is genuinely distinctive), and cultural festivals — remains a powerful marker of regional pride. But pride and political power are different things. The Kosal movement illustrates a pattern visible across India: regional sub-nationalisms that are strong enough to generate cultural identity but not strong enough to alter power structures, because the communities they claim to represent are internally too diverse to sustain a unified political project.

Part IX: What the Identity Map Reveals

Step back and look at the full identity map of Odisha’s political landscape.

Tribe: 22.8% of the population, concentrated in a geographic crescent from Mayurbhanj in the north through Sundargarh, Keonjhar, Kandhamal, Kalahandi, Koraput to Malkangiri in the south. 33 reserved assembly seats. Constitutional protections (Fifth Schedule, PESA) that exist on paper but are not implemented where it counts. A resistance tradition that is real but depends on exceptional conditions (Supreme Court intervention, global media, organized advocacy) to win. Now claimed politically by the BJP through the Vanvasi integration project and the Majhi appointment.

Caste: An elite Brahmin-Kayastha hegemony that has held the top job for most of the state’s history. A fragmented OBC landscape that prevents caste-based counter-mobilization. A Dalit community that is 17% of the population but has never held the Chief Minister’s office and has produced no significant caste party. An agricultural caste (Khandayat) that is 35% of the population but is politically fragmented.

Region: A coastal-western divide that maps roughly onto a development divide, generating the Kosal statehood demand but not a viable political movement. A Sambalpuri identity that is culturally alive but politically unresolved.

Religion: A Kondh-Pano-Christian-Hindu fault line in Kandhamal that produced mass violence in 2008 and remains a live wire. A broader tribal-animist-Hindu tension around the Vanvasi/Adivasi framing.

These identity dimensions do not operate in isolation. They intersect, overlap, and sometimes conflict in ways that make Odisha’s political landscape irreducible to any single axis. A Santal in Mayurbhanj is simultaneously tribal, possibly Christian, possibly Hindu, possibly animist, a resident of a northern district with different development concerns than western Odisha. A Khandayat farmer in Sambalpur is simultaneously OBC, Kosali, and part of a caste that aspires to Kshatriya status. A Pano in Kandhamal is simultaneously Dalit, possibly Christian, and living on land that the Kondh consider theirs.

What holds Odisha together as a political unit — what prevents these fault lines from producing the kind of fragmentary politics you see in Bihar or the kind of identity-party system you see in Tamil Nadu — is a combination of factors: the absence of a single dominant cleavage (no one identity axis overwhelms the others), the historical success of the BJD’s “above-identity” appeal, and the fact that Odisha’s political economy — centered on the state’s relationship with the central government and the mining sector — creates shared interests that cut across identity lines.

Whether the BJP era sustains or disrupts this equilibrium is the question that Odisha’s identity politics will answer over the next decade. A party that explicitly mobilizes Hindu identity in a state where 22.8 percent of the population is tribal-animist, 17 percent is Dalit, and the developmental grievances are as much regional as communal is playing a different game than the BJD played. The old equilibrium was managed through the appearance of identity-neutrality. The new game involves active identity mobilization — claiming tribals as Hindu, consolidating caste Hindus under a supra-caste Hindutva identity, and managing regional grievance through development promises.

Whether this produces a new stable equilibrium or a series of destabilizing collisions is not something anyone can predict with confidence. The identity map is drawn. The political geology is visible. What happens at the fault lines depends on what happens next at the intersection of mining policy, welfare delivery, religious mobilization, and the unresolved question of whether Odisha’s tribal communities are peoples with autonomous identities or subsets of a Hindu nation.

That question has not been answered. It has only been raised, more sharply than ever, by the same election that put a Santal man in the Chief Minister’s chair.

Source Research

The raw research that informs this series.