Editorial: The caste census conundrum

Since the BJP is a party steeped in cynicism, it is pointless to argue that the Union government’s decision to include caste enumeration in the overdue national census is a sly, copycat move to wrest a vote-magnet issue from the Opposition. India’s politics has for close to 40 years hinged on caste and faith, with all parties fishing at different depths of the murky waters. The regional parties initially stole a march over the national parties in courting the locally dominant intermediate castes, and now the Congress and the BJP have joined the fray. In Indian politics, it doesn’t matter in the long run who arrived at the idea first. The vote goes to whoever is effective.

The Narendra Modi government’s interest in joining the caste survey sweepstakes now is obvious. The caste data collected in the census will enable it to gerrymander constituencies to its advantage when delimitation takes place any time after the census (which itself has not yet been scheduled). It can also tweak reservation policies and allocate resources to various social constituencies as per its electoral interests. As the party best equipped to use data analytics, the BJP is hoping to be in pole position for the next general election.

While the political parties are steering us towards something that serves their interests, there needs to be a wider debate on the deeper implications for the nation. A caste count is the easy part. Once we have collected the data, the question arises how we will use it. It is obvious and a bit facile to say that the data will be used to tweak development priorities and policy thrust. But do we have a proper index of social, educational, cultural and economic backward that captures every local context in India?

Moreover, are we agreed, even before the numbers have come in, that allocation of resources and opportunities will in future be on the basis of proportion in population? In which areas will that principle apply and which not? If resources and opportunities are to be allocated proportionately, does it not make sense to extend the principle to representation in Parliament, and therefore reserve seats for the OBCs in elections as befits their share of the population? And logically, shouldn’t the principle of proportionality apply to religious minorities and, most importantly, women as well?

There are operational difficulties that have not been thought through yet. In fact, it is not accurate to call this exercise a caste census, a count of people belonging to the four varnas. This is a jati census, a count of the myriad occupational groups present in India, each with a unique place within the social relations of a region.

The more we know about society in India more bewildering the picture becomes. For example, when a caste census was taken in 1931 in pre-Independent India, a total of 4,147 occupational jatis were counted. When the Manmohan Singh government carried out a Social and Economic Caste Census in 2011, there were 46 lakh caste names, some unique to a place, some with different degrees of backwardness in different places. To design policies that do justice to this entire kaleidoscope is going to be a great challenge indeed.

But the biggest challenge posed to policymaking based on caste data will be how to distribute proportionate opportunities and resources to backward social groups while preventing perpetuation of group identities.