Key Goa groups driving its power play: Bhandaris to Kshatriya Marathas, Saraswat Brahmins to Christians

Although elections in Goa are not fought strictly along the caste lines, there has always been an undercurrent of caste playing a silent but significant role in the coastal state’s politics marked by volatility and shifting alliances.

The caste factor has not figured largely in the campaign for the current Lok Sabha polls in Goa. However, according to a Lokniti-CSDS post-poll survey of the 2022 state Assembly elections, over one-third of the voters considered caste identity as an important issue while deciding their votes.

The caste politics created ripples in Goa ahead of the 2022 polls when the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) announced that the party’s chief ministerial candidate would be from the Bhandari community. While naming Amit Palekar, a Bhandari leader, as the AAP’s CM face, the party supremo and Delhi CM Arvind Kejriwal claimed that the party was not resorting to caste politics but was “correcting the injustice” allegedly meted out to Bhandaris by Goa’s major parties.

As Goa’s two parliamentary constituencies, North Goa and South Goa, go to polls in the third phase on May 7, here is a look at some of the major caste groups or communities that play a key role in Goa politics.

Bhandari

The Bhandari community is Goa’s largest caste group constituting a significant percentage of its Hindu population. Placed in the Other Backward Classes (OBCs) category, the community’s traditional occupation was toddy-tapping and distilling, farm tilling and working in orchards. The community is spread across Goa and Maharashtra’s Konkan belt including parts of Ratnagiri and Sindhudurg.

A survey of the OBCs, conducted in 2014 by the Goa State Commission for Backward Classes, estimated the OBC population to be 3,58,517, which account for 27% of