When DK Shivakumar takes the oath as Karnataka's Chief Minister on June 3, 2026, after serving as deputy to Siddaramaiah, the leader who built his career banking on Ahinda: minorities, backward classes and Dalits. Shivakumar, however, comes from the Vokkaligas, a powerful landed community of traditional landowning, dominant farming groups. So with this change in guard, the centre of gravity of the government is shifting. Therefore, thecabinetthat the new CM picks will be the Congress's way of managing that shift without losing any ground in the state on the basis of castes.
But before the caste math, one honest admission: Karnataka has no agreed, official count of its castes. So the numbers below rest on the best data available. When it comes to caste in Karnataka, only one set of numbers is rock solid: the official Census count, taken every ten years. But the Census counts only two caste groups — the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes. In 2011, SCs were about 17 per cent of the state's population and STs about 7 per cent.
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The Census also records religion, so we do have a firm figure for Muslims — 12.92 per cent in 2011.
For everyone else, though – Lingayats, Vokkaligas, Kurubas – there's no Census number at all. India simply stopped counting these castes after 1931. So whatever figures you see for them today are estimates, not official counts.
Decoding the Caste Arithmetic of DK's Cabinet
It was Siddaramaiah who ordered the Socio-Economic and Educational Survey, the so-called caste census, in 2015 when he became the chief minister the first time. The State Backward Classes Commission did this survey under H Kantharaj, and the Jayaprakash Hegde-led and later finalised it. Yet there was no report for years; the Siddaramaiah cabinet only formally accepted it in 2025.
The survey reached nearly 5.98 crore people, and its findings rearranged the old assumptions. Scheduled Castes turned out to be the single biggest bloc, at roughly 18.2 per cent. Muslims came next at 12.58 per cent. The Veerashaiva-Lingayats were third, at 66.35 lakh, or around 11 per cent — with the Vokkaligas, DK Shivakumar's community, close behind. The Kurubas, the community Siddaramaiah himself belongs to, came some way down the list.
A caveat: The numbers are fiercely contested, and no government has yet used them as the basis for policy.
The communities themselves tell a very different story. The Veerashaiva Mahasabha says there are more than 1.3 crore Lingayats in the state. The Vokkaligara Sangha puts its own community at around 1 crore. Both figures sit far above what the survey found.
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