The Narendra Modi government’s decision to hold a caste census with the next population Census is a turning point and a milestone. In a sense, it is the state catching up with the lived socioeconomic and political reality. Caste shapes hierarchy and discrimination, culture and belonging. It plays a role in structuring opportunity and social mobility. It influences choices and trajectories, from education to employment, and rituals of birth, death and marriage. Political parties have long recognised the power of caste as a mobilisational tool and category. And in 1990, with the acceptance of the recommendations of the Mandal Commission Report, the central government acknowledged and affirmed what different state governments across the country had already responded to — the upsurge of the middle castes or Other Backward Classes, and their demand for a more equitable participation and representation. The Mandal moment made job and education quotas the centrepiece of affirmative action policies for OBCs at the Centre, but at the same time, it also inaugurated a long period of dissonance — after all, the government was framing caste-based policy without the empirical data on caste that is necessary for evidence-driven policy. That this glaring gap is now set to be filled is much-needed and enormously welcome.
The demand for the caste census has been central to the agenda of Congress, and more specifically Rahul Gandhi, for at least two years now. It was first heard prominently in the Karnataka assembly election in 2023, and it dominated the Lok Sabha poll campaign the following year. The Modi government’s Wednesday announcement can, therefore, be read as a vindication of its main opponent’s plank, and as a bid to wrest it. It is also a turnaround for a party whose leader said only recently that he recognises only four castes — women, the poor, youth and farmers. By all accounts, ever since Mandal became a political force in the 1990s, rearranging the national political lexicon and giving rise to new caste-based parties, the politics of Mandir was seen as the political counter to it. The project of Hindutva consolidation, went the argument, was threatened by the caste-centric framework. It soon became apparent, though, that the lines were shifting, and that the binary was not tidy. Over the years, even as the original votaries of “social justice” let their political platform become faded and frayed — Congress, a late convert, has sounded more insistent than credible in its demands for the caste census — the BJP has proved to be agile in criss-crossing the political-ideological fence, and in planting its flag on the other side. Its decision on the caste census now puts its imprimatur on a politics that it opposed to begin with, was awkward with for some time, and then purposefully worked to make its own.
There is work to be done after the caste census announcement. The design of the questionnaire will be consequential, and there will be the task of connecting the dots between the data and government policy. The caste census will also pave the way for the delimitation exercise — the OBC numbers and the gaps they point to may blunt the north-south faultline — and the implementation of women’s reservation in Parliament. It may lead to demands for extending quotas, and for removing the Supreme Court-mandated cap of 50 per cent reservation. There are challenges ahead, but the fact that caste will finally be counted provides a robust, data-driven basis for policy and politics.
