The Machinery of Identity | Why Some Groups Organize Better Than Others

The Uncomfortable Truth About Organization

Here’s what most people miss: organization doesn’t happen organically. Strong identity mobilization is never a natural phenomenon. It’s always the result of massive, deliberate, sustained effort backed by substantial resources and institutional machinery. When you see a well-organized identity group, you’re not looking at some innate quality of that community. You’re looking at the endpoint of decades of painstaking work by dedicated organizers, backed by money, institutions, and systematic programming.

Consider Muslim organization globally. The cohesion you observe isn’t some mystical property of Islam or the Muslim community. It’s the result of unlimited oil money being poured into creating and maintaining organizational infrastructure. It’s deliberately propped up, painstakingly sustained, and continuously reinforced through institutions, funding networks, and coordinated efforts. Take away that machinery, and you’d see the same fragmentation you see in any other large, diverse community.

The same principle applies to Dalit mobilization in India. The political consciousness and organizational strength of Dalit communities didn’t emerge spontaneously from shared experience. It was built through relentless effort by missionaries and other external actors who had specific strategic goals. The objective was clear: create faultlines within Hindu society to facilitate conversions and maintain divisions. This required enormous labor, sustained over generations, to establish the organizational infrastructure, create the narrative framework, and build the institutional memory that now sustains Dalit identity politics.

The Self-Sustaining Identity

Once an identity is well-established and mobilized, something interesting happens: it becomes partially self-sustaining. You no longer need the same level of external effort to maintain it. The Western architects of various Indian identity movements have largely lost interest in actively maintaining these projects, yet the movements continue with their own momentum. Why? Because once people have seen the benefits of organization, once they’ve learned how to react collectively, once the identity becomes tied to concrete advantages, it perpetuates itself.

This is where the struggle myth becomes crucial. Every successfully mobilized identity has a narrative of historical oppression or struggle that bonds the group together. This myth doesn’t have to be historically accurate. It just has to be useful. It has to create a sense of shared grievance, collective identity, and justified claims on resources or power. The struggle myth for women’s movements, for Dalit politics, for Muslim identity in India all serve this function: they provide the emotional and ideological glue that keeps the group cohesive even when external support diminishes.

The Incentive Structure

Now let’s talk about why some identities don’t mobilize. It’s not about lacking the capacity for organization. It’s about lacking the incentive structure that makes organization worthwhile.

Look at the groups that remain poorly organized: upper castes in India, whites in Western countries, men as a gender category. What do they all have in common? They’re generally doing relatively well in material terms. They’re the supposed “rulers of the past” who maintain certain advantages in the present. This creates a fatal problem for mobilization: when you’re already relatively comfortable, the internal pressure to organize collectively is minimal. You have more to lose than to gain from explicit identity politics. You find it easier to agree with universalist principles, to advocate for merit-based systems, to criticize identity politics itself, because you don’t desperately need the protective benefits of group mobilization.

This is why waiting for Hindus to “naturally” organize the way Muslims do is fundamentally misunderstanding the problem. There’s no concrete benefit structure driving that organization. There’s no machinery building it. There’s no generational effort being invested in creating it. And most crucially, the people who would need to organize don’t face sufficient material pressure to justify the costs of explicit identity politics.

The Engineering Required

The scale of effort required to mobilize an identity is staggering, and most people simply don’t appreciate it. Consider what the British did in India. They didn’t just rule through military force. They undertook an enormous project of social engineering that required:

• White men coming to India and living in brutal heat
• Learning Sanskrit and other Indian languages to a scholarly level
• Producing massive amounts of historical and anthropological scholarship
• Systematically rewriting and reinterpreting Indian history
• Creating new categories and classifications of Indian society
• Building institutional structures that embedded these new understandings

This wasn’t casual work. It was a generational project involving thousands of people and enormous resources. It was scholarship weaponized for political ends, executed with remarkable sophistication and sustained over decades.

Compare that to the efforts to mobilize Hindu identity. What exists? Some organizations, lots of slogans, occasional rallies. But where’s the systematic scholarship? Where’s the generational investment in creating institutional infrastructure? Where are the dedicated individuals living and breathing this project for decades? Where’s the massive resource commitment? It’s simply not there, and slogans won’t substitute for the real work.

For BJP, the mobilization that did occur happened because there was a clear power incentive: electoral victory and political control. When there’s a concrete benefit—gaining power, winning elections—then individuals will dedicate their lives to the project. But for broader Hindu mobilization without such immediate payoffs, the machinery simply doesn’t exist.

The Zero-Sum Game

Here’s where we need to be brutally honest about how identity politics actually works. It’s a zero-sum game, and in zero-sum games, truth-seeking is a luxury few can afford.

Consider trying to convince a Dalit person that the historical narrative of oppression is exaggerated or that caste discrimination was more complex than commonly portrayed. Even if you had ironclad evidence, even if your argument was completely sound, why would they accept it? Their entire political positioning, their access to reservations, their moral authority in public discourse, all of it depends on maintaining a particular narrative. It would be strategically idiotic for them to accept your version of history, even if privately they could see you might be right.

This isn’t about truth versus lies. It’s about what narrative is useful for securing resources and power in a competitive political environment. The Dalit movement isn’t strong because it has the most accurate historical scholarship. It’s strong because it has successfully mobilized an identity around claims that generate political benefits.

The same applies to every identity politics movement. Muslims don’t need to prove that they’re actually under siege to act as if they are. Women’s movements don’t need to demonstrate that contemporary women face the same oppression as historical women to maintain the narrative of ongoing patriarchy. The narrative’s utility lies not in its historical accuracy but in its ability to mobilize collective action and secure group benefits.

Who Are You Actually Trying to Convince?

This realization should fundamentally change how we approach these discussions. If you’re trying to convince Dalits or Muslims or feminists that their narrative of oppression is overstated, you’re wasting your time. You’re asking them to voluntarily give up the foundation of their political power and material benefits. That’s not going to happen through scholarly debate.

The real audience isn’t the other side at all. The real audience is your own group, the people who don’t yet understand how the game actually works. For Hindu identity politics, this means other Hindus who are still operating under the assumption that truth and good arguments matter in political mobilization. They’re the ones who need to hear the uncomfortable reality: the other side isn’t acting based on historical truth or moral righteousness. They’re acting based on cold, rational calculation about what benefits their group.

Once you understand this, certain things become clear:

1. Defensive scholarship trying to prove the Vedas aren’t discriminatory or that ancient India was an egalitarian paradise is pointless. You’re playing a game where the other side’s position isn’t based on textual analysis and won’t be changed by it.

2. Attempting to debate historical facts about caste or untouchability in good faith misses the point. The discussion isn’t really about what happened in the past. It’s about who gets what in the present.

3. Moral arguments about fairness or truth won’t work because the framework of identity politics isn’t about universal principles. It’s about group interests.

The Hierarchy Everywhere

One of the most absurd aspects of caste discourse is the pretense that hierarchy is somehow uniquely Hindu or Indian. Every human society has hierarchies. Every community sorts itself into status rankings. Every culture has mechanisms for determining who is above whom in various social contexts.

A wealthy father won’t give his daughter to a poor man. This is true across every culture, religion, and civilization. It’s not caste; it’s just hierarchy based on economic status. Muslims maintain elaborate internal hierarchies based on lineage and ethnicity. Early Muslim historians in medieval India openly denigrated converts from low-caste Hindu backgrounds. Sultan Balban made noble birth a prerequisite for state service. When Aligarh Muslim University was founded in 1875, it banned admission to low-caste Muslims.

Christian communities maintain their own hierarchies. European aristocracy operated on principles just as rigid as any jati system. Modern American society sorts people by education, wealth, profession, and cultural capital in ways that are functionally equivalent to caste, just with different labels.

The question isn’t whether hierarchy exists. It exists everywhere, because humans organize themselves hierarchically. The question is what you call it and how it’s politically weaponized. When Hindus do it, it’s called the oppressive caste system. When Muslims do it, it’s barely mentioned. When it happens in the West, it’s just “social class” or “meritocracy.” The universal human tendency to create hierarchies gets rebranded as a uniquely Hindu moral failing, and we’re expected to engage in elaborate defenses instead of pointing out the obvious double standard.

The Futility of Defensive Arguments

Much of the pro-Hindu scholarship on caste falls into a predictable trap: defensive justification. Scholars spend pages explaining that the Purusha Sukta doesn’t really mean what it appears to mean, that the four varnas weren’t really hierarchical, that Shudras could become kings, that untouchability came later and wasn’t in the original system, that the Vedas don’t actually prescribe discrimination.

All of this misses the point. The problem isn’t that these arguments are wrong. Many of them are historically supportable. The problem is that they accept the premise that Hindu texts and traditions need to be defended against charges of discrimination, as if passing some external moral test matters for the political effectiveness of Hindu organization.

Consider the alternative approach: radical honesty about what we’re actually dealing with. Instead of trying to prove that the Vedas are egalitarian documents, simply acknowledge that ancient texts describe hierarchical systems because all ancient societies were hierarchical. Instead of arguing that untouchability is a later corruption, acknowledge that ritual purity concerns exist in many religious traditions and had practical roots in dietary and occupational differences. Instead of trying to prove that Hinduism is compatible with modern liberal values, acknowledge that trying to retrofit ancient traditions to satisfy contemporary Western moral frameworks is a fool’s errand.

The response to “your texts are discriminatory” shouldn’t be pages of interpretive gymnastics. It should be: “Show me an ancient civilization that didn’t have hierarchies and discrimination by modern standards. The question isn’t whether our ancestors’ social systems meet your contemporary moral approval. The question is whether you’re applying that standard consistently or weaponizing it selectively against one tradition.”

The Real Lesson From History

Here’s what the historical evidence actually shows: the caste system was far more fluid than commonly portrayed. There were Shudra kings throughout Indian history. The Nanda Empire was founded by Shudras. Untouchability existed within Dalit communities themselves, with elaborate hierarchies determining which groups would accept food from which others. Even in contemporary India, 96% of Scheduled Castes practice endogamy, and most maintain internal hierarchies where they consider certain other Scheduled Caste groups to be untouchable.

What does this prove? That the narrative of Brahminical oppression creating a rigid, unchanging caste hierarchy is a simplification at best and deliberate distortion at worst. The real history is far more complex, with fluid boundaries, internal hierarchies within every caste group, and social mobility occurring through various mechanisms.

But here’s the crucial point: this historical complexity doesn’t matter for contemporary identity politics. Dalit politics doesn’t need historical accuracy. It needs a mobilizing narrative. The struggle myth of timeless Brahminical oppression is far more useful politically than a nuanced historical account showing that things were complicated, that hierarchies existed everywhere, that lower castes also practiced untouchability, and that the system had more fluidity than commonly acknowledged.

Understanding this doesn’t mean you stop pursuing historical truth. It means you understand that historical truth and political effectiveness operate on different planes. Scholars can pursue accurate history. But political movements pursue useful narratives. And these are not the same thing.

Recognizing Bad Faith

Once you understand the incentive structure driving identity politics, you can recognize bad faith arguments for what they are. When someone argues that Hinduism is uniquely oppressive while ignoring similar or worse practices in other traditions, they’re not engaged in honest comparative analysis. When someone demands that Hindus prove their texts don’t sanction discrimination while not applying the same standard to Islamic or Christian texts, they’re not interested in universal principles. When someone cites a single verse from the Vedas to condemn all of Hinduism while dismissing vast evidence of social fluidity and mobility, they’re not doing scholarship.

The appropriate response isn’t to engage with these arguments on their own terms. It’s to recognize them as political moves in a zero-sum game. The person making these arguments isn’t looking for truth or open to being convinced. They’re looking for ammunition to delegitimize Hindu claims and strengthen their own group’s position.

Muslims have largely figured this out. When confronted with problematic verses in the Quran or problematic episodes in Islamic history, the response is typically just: “You’re lying” or “That’s not the real Islam” or “You’re taking it out of context.” There’s no elaborate defensive scholarship. There’s no attempt to prove Islam meets modern liberal standards. There’s just rejection of the premise and refusal to play the game.

This isn’t because Muslims are less intellectual or less capable of engaging in textual analysis. It’s because they understand something that many Hindus don’t: these debates aren’t actually about the texts. They’re about power. And in power struggles, defending yourself within your opponent’s moral framework is a losing strategy.

What Would Real Mobilization Look Like?

If Hindus were serious about identity mobilization, what would it actually require? Not slogans. Not outrage on social media. Not defensive scholarship proving the Vedas are egalitarian. What it would require is:

Massive resource commitment: Mobilization requires money. A lot of money, sustained over decades. It requires funding institutions, supporting full-time organizers, creating media infrastructure, establishing educational institutions. Without this economic foundation, nothing else matters.

Generational commitment: This isn’t a project that bears fruit in five or ten years. It requires people dedicating their entire lives to building infrastructure that might only show results after they’re dead. It requires patience, persistence, and willingness to work on something bigger than immediate personal benefit.

Sophisticated scholarship: Not defensive apologetics, but genuine intellectual work creating new frameworks for understanding Hindu civilization, society, and politics. This means people getting advanced degrees, learning languages, producing rigorous research, and building academic credibility. The British didn’t just write propaganda. They produced real scholarship, which made their political conclusions more powerful.

Institutional infrastructure: Organizations that persist across generations, that train new organizers, that maintain institutional memory, that coordinate action across regions and demographics. This isn’t about starting another NGO. It’s about building institutions that last.

Clear incentive structures: People need concrete reasons to participate beyond abstract identity. This could be political power, economic opportunity, social status, or other tangible benefits. Without clear incentives, mobilization remains aspirational.

Narrative framework: A coherent story about who Hindus are, what they’ve endured, what they’re entitled to, and what they’re fighting for. This doesn’t have to be historically accurate in every detail. It has to be emotionally resonant and politically useful.

None of this exists at the scale required for effective Hindu mobilization. Some of it exists in fragments—BJP has built political infrastructure, some organizations work on cultural issues, some individuals produce scholarship. But there’s no coordinated, generational project with massive resources driving toward sustained identity mobilization.

The Path Forward

So where does this leave us? First, with clear eyes about what we’re actually dealing with. Identity politics isn’t about truth, justice, or historical accuracy. It’s about power, resources, and group interests. Successful identity mobilization requires massive machinery, sustained effort, and clear incentive structures. It doesn’t happen organically, and it doesn’t happen through good arguments.

Second, with realistic expectations about what can be achieved. Building the infrastructure for effective Hindu mobilization would require resources and commitment that currently don’t exist. Without that foundation, complaints about Muslim organization or Dalit politics are just wishful thinking.

Third, with strategic clarity about audiences and objectives. The goal of political communication isn’t to convince opponents who benefit from opposing narratives. It’s to educate your own side about how the game actually works, so they stop bringing arguments to a power struggle.

Fourth, with recognition that defensive postures don’t work. Trying to prove Hindu texts meet modern Western moral standards is a losing game. The alternative is radical honesty: acknowledging historical realities, rejecting the premise that ancient traditions must satisfy contemporary foreign moral frameworks, and refusing to participate in obviously bad-faith debates.

Finally, with understanding that all of this—the identity politics, the mobilization, the struggle myths, the zero-sum conflicts—reflects universal human patterns, not unique failures of particular communities. Every group that has successfully mobilized has done so through deliberate effort, substantial resources, and useful narratives. Every group that remains unmobilized lacks the machinery, incentives, or pressure to organize.

The machinery of identity isn’t mysterious. It’s just machinery. It can be built, but building it requires acknowledging what it actually takes: not good intentions, not moral righteousness, not historical truth, but resources, organization, persistence, and cold-eyed strategic thinking about group interests.

Until that machinery exists, identity groups that lack it will continue to be outmaneuvered by those that have it. That’s not a moral failing. It’s just how the game works. The question is whether anyone is serious enough about changing the outcome to actually build the machinery required—or whether we’ll continue substituting slogans for strategy and outrage for organization.