Opinion Narayana Murthy, Sudha Murty opt out of Karnataka’s survey — yet they benefit from India’s oldest freebie system

Opposition to the survey has come from Karnataka BJP leaders as well. In September 2025, Bengaluru South MP Tejasvi Surya urged the public to boycott the survey, saying it would “divide communities”.

The pushback against the initiative from the above-mentioned personalities does not come as a surprise. That’s because all of them are “upper” caste (Murthy, Murty, Pai, and Surya are Brahmins) and beneficiaries — including this writer — of, probably, the country’s oldest freebie scheme, known as casteism. Any initiative that could ultimately empower lower castes would jeopardise the perks of this scheme for the upper castes.

Unlike other government-sponsored initiatives, the Centre and states do not publicise the benefits of casteism that are reaped by upper castes. There are no billboards on highways or at petrol pumps about this highly efficient scheme. There are no advertisements about it in newspapers or on television.

In fact, most upper castes prefer not to even mention the scheme in public. For them, caste became irrelevant after India’s Constitution declared the nation to be casteless. These upper castes also believe they have compensated for the historical discrimination their ancestors inflicted upon lower castes through reservations. Therefore, in modern India, according to many upper castes, any lower caste community that asserts its identity to demand rights and improve its life changes is casteist and dividing communities.

“As a modern republic, India felt duty-bound to ‘abolish’ caste, and this led the State to pursue the conflicting policies of social justice and caste-blindness. As a consequence, the privileged upper castes are enabled to think of themselves as ‘casteless’, while the disprivileged lower castes are forced to identify their caste identities. This asymmetrical division has truncated the effective meaning of caste to lower caste, thus leaving the upper castes free to monopolise the ‘general category’ by posing as casteless citizens,” wrote Satish Deshpande, former professor at Delhi School of Economics, in his article, “Caste and Castelessness: Towards a Biography of the ‘General Category’”, published in the Economic & Political Weekly in 2013.  

Any upper caste person who believes themselves to be casteless disregards the fact that even after Independence and the implementation of reservation, caste hierarchy remains entrenched in Indian society. Moreover, upper castes continue to benefit from this durable social arrangement — even when they do not publicly invoke their identity to take advantage of casteism.

For upper castes, their “caste is a resource, perhaps best conceived as a network, in part of actual or potential kin; a network of enormous durability and spatial reach… offering protection (social insurance), access (to jobs, business, the state), mediation (of disputes) and control (over resources), beyond state regulation,” wrote David Mosse, professor of social anthropology at SOAS (London), in his 2018 paper, ‘Caste and development: Contemporary perspectives on a structure of discrimination and advantage’, which was published in the journal World Development.

This has helped upper castes use their traditional caste capital to disproportionately gain modern forms of capital, such as land, educational credentials, and corporate jobs. For instance, between 1983 and 2021, the proportion of regular wage workers belonging to the Scheduled Caste category increased, but it was significantly lower than the proportion of regular wage workers belonging to the general caste category, according to the ‘State of Working India 2023’ report by Azim Premji University. In 2021, 32 per cent of general caste workers were in regular wage employment as compared to 22 per cent of Scheduled Caste workers, the report revealed.

A similar trend is visible in higher education as well. According to the National Sample Survey of 2015, the proportion of Other Backward Classes in higher education is 35 per cent. By comparison, the percentage of students from the upper castes is 41 per cent, and the proportion of Scheduled Castes in higher education is 24 per cent. 

Such disparities exist in Karnataka — where Murthy, Murty, Pai, and Surya live — as well. For example, the Justice O Chinnappa Reddy Commission’s 1990 report found that the Lingayats and Vokkaligas (the dominant castes in the state), with a combined strength of 26 per cent of the population, held 46 per cent of the seats in the Assembly.

That’s why Karnataka’s ongoing survey is crucial. It will help the government implement various welfare schemes and empower deprived and vulnerable groups more effectively. The survey could be the first step on the long journey to end inequality. Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah last month said, “Even decades after Independence, inequality persists. To make our democracy stronger, we must eliminate these disparities. This survey will provide the data needed to design effective welfare programmes for everyone.” 

However, the non-participation of upper caste people such as Murthy, Murty, and Surya will undermine the entire exercise and perpetuate systematic inequalities. Their position is understandable, though. The rich and dominant communities have rarely voluntarily surrendered freebie schemes like casteism in the past. They have only been taken away through social movements and gradual reforms.

alind.chauhan@expressindia.com