Opinion What counts in caste census

In America, DEI programmes have been generating more controversy than diversity. They have looked vulnerable in the shifting political winds — they have been in decline from their high point amid the racial reckoning after the murder of George Floyd by a White police officer in Minneapolis, in 2020. In 2023, the US Supreme Court struck down affirmative action in college and university admissions. Now, Trump has been able to convert the long-held Conservative pique against programmes designed to redress effects of discrimination on the basis of race, gender and national origin, into an unabashed witch hunt.

In India, the announcement of the caste census is also remarkable because it comes from a government led by a party that has been instinctively uncomfortable with the political imperative to address caste and its structures of inequality. The BJP in the past has labelled caste-centric politics as dangerous and divisive. For the forces of Mandir, the Mandal movement was seen as a threat to the homogenising project of “Hindu unity”. It is also true, however, that the BJP did not stay on its side of the fence for too long. It began making steady incursions into Mandal territory, by wooing the non-dominant OBCs and SCs. The BJP’s turnaround is now complete. Of course, it may not turn out exactly as the BJP plans — the party will have to deal with the resentments its caste census move touches off among its upper caste loyalists.

For the larger polity, however, the green-flagging of a caste census says some heartening things — the state has finally caught up with political parties in recognising the untenability of a position that sidesteps or vaults over the ground reality of caste inequality. It is acknowledging, if belatedly, that any affirmative action for marginalised groups, any attempt to address their exclusion from sectors and spaces, requires data-driven, evidence-based policy.

It is not just the Modi-BJP that has been reluctant to count caste, even the Congress-led UPA government deliberately missed the opportunity. In the best version of the arguments against the caste census, apart from worries about the nightmarish logistics, lay larger discomforts. Will a caste census solidify social divisions? Would an enumeration (beyond SCs and STs), backed by the authority of the state, harden fluid or “fuzzy” communities?

These concerns overlooked the fact that not counting caste had not in any way weakened its presence, or its mobilisation, or its divisions. In fact, caste is etched in the ground — villages across states are spatially arranged into caste and even sub-caste clusters. And then, as social scientist Satish Deshpande has put it: “… we must recognise that we need to measure precisely those things that we mean to abolish — or else we risk mistaking censorship for abolition”.

The timing of the caste census announcement, and the motive behind it, matter — but not really.

Coming as it does in the uneasy national pause after the horrific terror strike in Pahalgam, and only months ahead of the assembly election in Bihar, it sparks questions. Are the forces of Mandir, in a moment of smug self-assurance, attempting to domesticate Mandal in order to establish complete political domination?

The answers to such questions could hold the clue to when and how the caste census will be operationalised. After all, many of the calls taken in the design of the questionnaire, and in its calendar, will be political.

And yet, consider this: The acceptance of the Mandal Commission Report by the VP Singh government in 1990 may have been influenced by the pull-and-tug between Singh and Devi Lal, but ended up unleashing transformations much larger than their rivalry. LK Advani’s rath yatra may have been conceived as a direct riposte to the VP Singh government’s acceptance of the Mandal report, but ripples more than three decades later in the polity. The Modi government’s motives for announcing the caste census matter, until they don’t.

What counts much more is this: What will governments do with the caste data once the census is done? Will they, or won’t they, make a crucial distinction — between proportional representation and social justice.

Rahul Gandhi, who has for the last couple of years made the demand for a caste census the centrepiece of his politics, has revived Kanshi Ram’s slogan, or a version of it. “Jiski jitni sankhya bhaari, uski utni hissedari”, said Kanshi Ram. “Jitni abaadi, utna haq”, said Gandhi during the Karnataka assembly election campaign, where he first prominently articulated the demand for a caste count. Both slogans speak of a participation/representation that is proportional to the share in population.

Kanshi Ram’s slogan was a rallying call for a vast and amorphous majority in the 1980s. The challenge, then, was to build a political class out of the under-mobilised mass of bahujan or oppressed castes, including SCs, STs, OBCs and minorities. A new leadership had to be encouraged to rise from among them, to challenge the domination of the “85 per cent” by the “15 per cent”.

In 2025, the challenge has a new shape: Inequalities remain, but over the years different caste groups and sub-groups have been mobilised, and new caste-based parties have come up that claim to represent them. Cleavages have also opened up within SCs and within OBCs — between the dominant castes and smaller groups in both categories. In this backdrop, a proportional representation argument would do injustice to the smaller and weaker castes within OBCs and within SCs.

The rubric of “social justice” avoids the pitfalls of the “proportional representation” framework. It holds the promise of an affirmative action policy that is informed by the caste count — but in which backwardness and its alleviation, not the numerical strength of backward groups, remains primary.

Politically, it opens up crucial space for a caste census to also help identify the common ground for larger coalitions of the backward that Kanshi Ram spoke of — and even between bahujan and savarna groups, that his legatee Mayawati so successfully experimented with in her political prime in UP.

Till next week,

Vandita