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You seriously don’t know what caste you are or do you choose to ignore it for ideological reasons?” I recently asked the man I have been married to for almost a decade. It’s not that I didn’t know the answer to that question, but it’s just that seeing Sam Pitroda emerge as an OBC icon for the Congress during the Uttar Pradesh elections had put me in an incredulous mode. As I saw him standing there at a Lucknow election meeting, releasing the Congress manifesto and reiterating the hidden fact that he was from a backward caste of carpentars or barahi, I wondered whether an entire generation of us had been fooled into believing that caste doesn’t matter.

I guess, like everything else, you can blame it on idealistic parenting. Unlike my husband, my brother and I knew very well our caste antecedents but it was only to embellish a very romantic story. When we were growing up, my mother would love to tell us the story of how my father’s Brahmin family had some misgivings about his intention to marry a Kayastha girl. She portrayed this James Dean kind of character, but the truth is that it was nothing major and basically meant that the family made some cursory noise and instead of having the wedding at his parents’ house, their reception was at his sister’s. And that was the end of the big fuss, but we were encouraged by our mother to imagine a Hindi film scenario where my father waged a caste battle to marry the woman of his choice.

That is the only reason caste entered our world view, and even though we were both old enough to register the Mandal agitation, it never became a tangible factor in either of our lives, or in those of our friends. So when I wanted to get married to a man of indeterminate caste, I was deprived of all drama by my parents. It was simply a non-issue.

Till I thought about the entire thing this week. I thought about all the rallies that I, on the Rahul Gandhi beat, had attended, and all the speeches I had been forced to hear over and over again about development and change and the new India that was emerging. I wondered if there had been a subtext of caste that I had missed out on all along and whether the talk of development was all a front. I knew that Rahul Gandhi marked his entry into UP politics by visiting Dalit homes, but it wasn’t until the Sam Pitroda caste expose that I realised how exploitative it was.

Before Rahul Gandhi stood on the stage in Akbarpur and introduced Pitroda, most of us didn’t know that he was from a backward caste. Actually, most of us probably didn’t even know which part of the country he was really from. But we knew the important things about him — like the role he played in shaping India’s telecom and communication policy, how he was part of Rajiv Gandhi’s core group, and how he was also roped in by Dr Manmohan Singh to be an adviser to the UPA government. But all these achievements were dwarfed by Rahul when, while introducing him to a brand new audience of rural voters, he fell back on the regressive description of caste.

I wondered what Pitroda thought about this transition — from tech icon to caste icon. I was told by his office that he didn’t want to give any interviews about this. I guess if someone only wanted to describe me by my caste, I wouldn’t want to talk about it either. But the Congress party’s reaction was a lot more cynical. When I asked a spokesperson about the strategy behind this, they simply laughed, looking around to share knowing glances with a lot of the hangers-on. They were probably laughing because they knew that a name like Sam wouldn’t really go down well with voters unless, of course, Rahul was also going to resurrect his original first name, which is Satyanarayan.

While following Rahul Gandhi on a recent tour of Bundelkhand, I did notice what other political commentators had been talking about — a perceptible increase in his confidence and aggression.

He has been talking of late about his learning experience in politics, from all the mistakes that he made. I wonder if this caste enthusiasm is part of his new, evolved being. Isn’t it sad that learning the ropes in politics means falling into the old caste trap? How about a game changer now, Rahul?

Sunetra Choudhury is an anchor/ reporter for NDTV and is the author of the election travelogueBraking News OnTwitter: @sunetrac