Digital platforms have shaped the ways in which caste identities are defined across geographical and religious differences. This paper deals with the identity formation of the Muley (Muslim) Jats, a community that resides in western Uttar Pradesh and how digital spaces allow the formation of a collective caste consciousness for the Hindu and Muslim Jats found across India and abroad. The research is built on six months of digital ethnography watching across three connected spaces: the community site Jatland.com, Instagram pages, and YouTube channels dedicated to Jat history and community life. Over this period, posts, videos, captions, comment sections and images were collected through field notes, screenshots, and worked through thematic analysis. Theoretically, this study is based on the ideas of how a community imagines itself in digital spaces, adopted from Benedict Anderson’s imagined communities, and how a community sees itself as connected through roots, adopted from C.H. Cooley’s looking glass self and how a community present itself on digital spaces through presentation, like glorifying their caste on digital spaces, adopted from Ervin Goffman’s presentation of self. What is shown by the material is that belonging is created around shared ancestry, gotra ties, and common narrative. But this sense of unity is not stable. It comes apart when the topic is elections, honor, or communal violence. These platforms reveal gender imbalance, and the leadership is mainly male, while women’s experiences and voices stay largely at the margins. The article argues that placing caste online is not a one-time transfer of something into a new space. It is an ongoing process by which identity is being made and remade, not just displayed.

This issue of the Journal of Politics, Culture and Society, titled Imagining Plural Public Spheres, examines pluralism as an ongoing political, institutional, and democratic practice rather than merely a demographic condition of coexistence. It explores how public spaces are continuously constructed, negotiated, and contested amid unequal power relations, technological transformation, political fragmentation, and social change. Drawing on legal, cultural, political, economic, and historical perspectives, the contributions investigate diverse dimensions of plural public life, including legal pluralism, digital markets, community identities, caste, religious pluralism, new media, print culture, gender, and the normalization of violence. The issue highlights how institutions, technologies, markets, narratives, and social practices can both facilitate participation and reproduce exclusion, hierarchy, and domination. By bringing together empirical, theoretical, and historical approaches, the contributions question conventional distinctions between public and private spheres and examine the processes through which individuals and communities gain visibility, recognition, and political significance. The issue ultimately conceptualizes the plural public sphere as a dynamic and contested domain that requires continuous democratic negotiation of difference, belonging, participation, and power.