Caste Enumeration: Transformative and Commendable
Asia News Agency
The government’s decision to include caste enumeration in the next Census, writes K. Ashok Vardhan Shetty (IAS officer of the Tamil Nadu cadre and a former Vice-Chancellor of the Indian Maritime University, Chennai) “is one that is bold, transformative and commendable. Counting caste is not capitulation to identity politics. It is a mirror to the lived realities of millions. It marks a vital step towards evidence-based policymaking to build a more just and inclusive India. A nation that refuses to see itself cannot hope to heal itself.”
Post-Independence views
Post-Independence, the “refusal to count caste in the Census was a corollary of the policy of caste blindness. But the Constitution explicitly mandates the pursuit of social justice through reservations in education, public employment, and electoral constituencies — measures that require precise, disaggregated caste data…..”
In his 1955 essay, ‘Thoughts on Linguistic States’, Dr. B.R. Ambedkar denounced the omission of caste tables from the 1951 Census as an act of ‘petty intelligence’. Visibility in data, writes Shetty, “is the first step toward meaningful inclusion. Caste data collection across all major social groups is essential not only for administering reservations, but also for equity-driven planning, targeted policymaking, and tracking disparities over time. Not collecting it has rendered many of India’s marginalised communities invisible in official statistics. Worse, a narrow elite of upper castes and dominant Other Backward Classes (OBCs) has entrenched its grip over wealth, opportunity and power behind the smokescreen of caste anonymity. In hindsight, this ranks among India’s gravest policy failures.”
Caste is India’s biggest vote bank
That the Socio-Economic Caste Census found more than 46 lakh castes, in the view of Sunanda K Datta-Ray (senior journalist, columnist and author) “exposed the ignorance in which Indians remain steeped even in this supposedly digital age.”
The purpose of a census is not only to enumerate the numbers and list the privileges to which they feel entitled. “If that were the sole reason, a census will degenerate into another protracted argument over whether the 50 per cent ceiling on reservations is justified, and whether or not private educational institutions and even, as Lalu Prasad Yadav’s son, Tejashwi Yadav, seems to demand, private sector employers, should be forced to set aside reserved quotas."
Caste census in Bihar: Some of the Prime Minister’s critics may not be off the mark in “accusing Narendra Modi of belatedly agreeing to a caste census (although without setting a date or divulging any details) only with the Bihar Assembly elections due later this year in mind.” Bihar’s Chief Minister, Nitish Kumar, of the Janata Dal (United), who is now an ally of the Prime Minister's ruling BJP, carried out his own caste survey in 2023. He was then a leading light in the Opposition INDIA bloc. The survey revealed that although 63 per cent of Bihar's more than 130 million people were scattered among 214 castes, all these groups fell in the OBC or Extremely Backward Classes categories.
Caste census in Karnataka, Telengana: The Congress government in Karnataka too has carried out its census that ‘gathered data on the social, economic and educational status of all communities’. The information that was collected and the resultant data were ‘compiled and analysed in a scientific manner’.
Prime Minister Modi is being pressed to adopt as this model a third such census in the also Congress-run state of Telangana whose Chief Minister, Revanth Reddy, stresses that this is a ‘proud moment’ for the Congress leader, Rahul Gandhi, who has been demanding a caste census for years and whose vision has now become official policy.
Telangana’s survey showing that the OBCs account for 56.33 per cent of the population, resulted in two bills providing for 42 per cent reservations. These await the Centre’s approval.
What has been lost sight of amidst all this political wrangling, concludes Datta-Ray “is that reservations were meant to be a temporary measure to help the under-privileged overcome the handicaps of birth. Instead, it has created a vested interest in backwardness and turned quotas into a crutch. Worst of all, it has created a prosperous ‘creamy layer’ that treats benefits as an entitlement.”
The need today is to cleanse the politics of reservations. “But there can be no such cleansing so long as politicians need votes to acquire and hold on to power. Caste is India’s biggest vote bank."
