Caste Census in India - the debate

India needs a caste-census, to ensure that welfare goods are distributed based on actual numbers and not perceptions.

 Caste Census in India - the debate

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• The story: India conducts its population census once every ten years. But it does not count the exact number of members of various castes and sub-castes, in it. Various groups are now demanding that castes be enumerated at a micro-level. But governments dither.
• The information age: While earlier, information was called power, today, power itself has become information. Large data-gathering exercises like the Indian Census have been controlled by those who count rather than those who are counted or those who do the counting.
• Mand the minority: Experts reckon that India's most powerful minority is composed largely of the upper castes. A caste census will make it visible, and that is a lingering fear in many privileged minds.
• Truth across strata and group: This simple fact remains the same across India's many religions, regions, and the political spectrum from right to left. The minor localised exceptions prove the rule that, in India, the upper castes rule.

1. It is true that much has changed in the past few decades, but changes are confined mostly to the middle.
2. Differentiation within caste groups — segments of the upper castes are not privileged, and many members of the lower castes are now relatively privileged — is still far from transforming the overall composition of the social elite and the precarious underclass.
3. Thus, as India completes 75 years of independence, the top layer remains overwhelmingly upper caste while its bottom has stayed almost entirely lower caste.
4. Interestingly, this "Fact" is neither discussed openly in India, not considered in policymaking seriously.

• Poverty: All governments since 1970s used "poverty" as a catch-all for the weak in Indian society. But a proper caste census may destroy the roundabout approach, bringing the core issue to the front.
• Mandal transformation: The Mandal Commission's report first broke the silence around caste in national-level politics.

1. The 1990s were a decisive watershed for India's collective understanding of caste, and a direct outcome was the gathering of momentum around the demand for a caste census.
2. The 2001 Census saw the first battles, but the opposing forces won relatively easily.
3. The 2011 Census witnessed a more even fight, ultimately forcing the UPA government into a backdoor escape via the Socio-Economic and Caste Census (SECC), a project designed to fail. All the data were kept a seceret.

• Stakes in 2021: Clearly, the political stakes are sky-high in 2021 now. The effects of the market and the pandemic have widened disparities in the recent past starkly.

1. Until the 1970s, it was broadly true to say that the overall ethos of Indian economic and social policy was that of sharing poverty.
2. In the neoliberal era (1990s and onwards), India has done better than most developed countries in producing dollar billionaires, while its performance in poverty alleviation has been fair but far from spectacular. In
3. So today, inequalities generate more discontent than they did in a kinder, gentler past. And that is a grave danger to the huge vote back created in past ten years.

• Nehruvian approach: The Nehruvian argument offered for not counting caste was moral-political, as doing so would strengthen caste identities, contradicting the official goal of erasing them. So assumption was that not counting it would weaken caste! This did not happen at all, because the Indian society fundamentally is structured along caste-lines.
• Complexity: One argument (by both the UPA and NDA governments) has been it's too tough to count castes. In the 2001 and 2011 censuses, the people of India said that they professed around 1,700 religions and spoke around 19,500 languages, not to speak of the thousands of occupations they practised. If that can be counted, can caste not be?
• Summary: It is high time to have a proper caste census of India, primarily to ensure that welfare goods are distributed fairly (based on latest numbers), and then hopefully, one day, to erase the caste system itself, and end all inequalities.

 

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