Cast off caste in Census 2001

While the desire of the framers of the Constitution to usher in a casteless society is evident from the treatment ofcaste in the Constitution, it would have been impossible to abolish caste as an institution. So, as a testimony to constitutional pragmatism, the mandate was to ignore it in public life, make it socially stigmatic and its discriminatory aspects illegal, and let it die a natural death. That explains why, while there are guarantees to preserve the integrity of religious and linguistic groups, there is none for caste groups. The judicial interpretations of the Constitution have also been in the same spirit, specially in the context of the judgments in the Mandal Commission case.

Enumeration of caste in censuses was dispensed with, as part of national policy since 1951. But, as reservation of seats for the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes in the Lok Sabha and legislatures in proportion to their population is a constitutional requirement, collection of population data on them is a constitutional imperative, and has continued uninterrupted in all the censuses since 1951. This does not justify inclusionof data on castes in general, which are excluded hitherto from the censuses.

It is argued that concrete data on the extent and whereabouts of the occurrence of even patently illegal social practices like child marriage and child labour would be essential to deal with them, and a caste-wise break-up of the population will facilitate cross-tabulation with various social, cultural, and demographic characteristics, and thus provide a wealth of data. But the manner in which the census department has been treating the quot;wealth of dataquot; collected so far is a colossal waste of the nation8217;s resources.

In any case, how caste is relevant to such information is a moot issue. That apart, if the department has not completed processing the data collected on the SCs and STs accounting for only about one-fourth of the total population even nearly a decade after its collection, how will it be able to process, not to speak of making available to the data-users in the foreseeable future, caste data on 75 percent of thetotal population?

Inclusion of caste data in the census has also been claimed to be necessary to determine the political representation of the OBCs in parliament and legislatures. The Constitution, however, does not envisage such representation; nor has there been any enabling by Parliament. The data is also said to be necessary in order to facilitate extension of reservation in services to the backward castes after 1991 that is, after the Supreme Court Judgments of November 16, 1992 in the Mandal case, for enabling implementation of welfare schemes launched for them by the government. As the Supreme Court8217;s judgments of November 16, 1992, have clearly laid down guidelines for identification of the OBCs and for removing anomalies from the OBC lists by either exclusion or over-inclusion or both through commissions set up by the Centre and states, such arguments are misleading.

The caste composition of the society is, of course, assiduously followed in the selection of ministers at the Centre and states,members of the Public Service Commissions and chairmen of state corporations and the candidates of political parties for the legislatures and local bodies, and so on. But, what politicians do must not determiner what the census department should do.

The writer is a Professor at Madras Institute of Development Studies