The politics of identity, a dominant feature of post-colonial India, is an outcome of a process which reveals both commonality and continuity between two contending and antagonistic entities - the state and the market. The state and the market in the mainstream development mode, which characterises this process, interact almost exclusively with the upper, visible and dominant segments of the society, subjecting vast number of people lower down the hierarchy to silence. The politics of identity manifests itself either as a protest or as a protective response to these exclusionary parties of both the state and the market.