Cast(e)ing the Census
It seems that no lessons have been learnt from the flawed exercise of 2011
FINALLY, India is conducting its Census. Like most other countries, India has been enumerating its population according to several social and economic attributes every 10 years. The Census was scheduled to be held in 2021, but it got delayed, initially because of Covid-19 and later due to internal contingencies. With the household as the unit of enumeration, the exercise collects demographic details of every individual living in the country, including even those who are not Indian nationals.
The Census is not an innocuous estimation of the total population or a mapping of the patterns of its growth or decline. It provides critical data that governments require for policymaking and long-term planning. It also helps in imaging and imagining the country. A higher proportion of the younger population, for example, would present a very different picture of a country compared with one that may have a majority in the older age category, say, above 50 years. Such a simple mapping of age would go on to raise a wide range of questions about the future challenges and potential. The same is true about other variables, such as religion, language, occupation or gender.
Given the vastness of its coverage, the schedule for conducting the Census is carefully planned. What to include and what to exclude are often decided politically. Census data and modes of its classification could also become a resource for political action. It may even help produce new identities. In the 1920s, for example, a section of Punjabi Dalits demanded that they be classified as a separate religion, Ad Dharam, rather than as a Hindu caste. Such an identification, they thought, would bring them on a par with other religions, and not as a “low-status” caste group within Hinduism.
For some reason, the colonial rulers stopped enumerating caste after 1931. After Independence, India enumerated only the “untouchables” — communities which were listed as Scheduled Castes. This was done to implement reservation for them. Otherwise, the new native elite saw caste as a bad thing, a feudal hangover. “Caste ought to have no place in a modern nation,” they widely professed. Not enumerating it would help the people forget the practice, or at the least, would not reinforce it.
However, caste was not merely a “cultural hangover”. It was also a structure of material inequalities. From land ownership patterns to spatial disparities in Indian cities, everything had/has a caste dimension. It also works as a symbolic resource, a signifier of social worth and networks, aukaat and jaan-pehchaan.
India has changed over the past eight decades, in some ways quite radically. Caste, too, has changed, but it remains a robust axis of inequality. An important aspect of the change it has seen is its increasing politicisation. Participation in politics has altered the grammar of caste. It is no longer about tradition, propounded by the holy Brahmin. Its persistence in the present time is articulated from its margins, the Dalits and “backward communities”. They often frame it as an institution that works as a barrier to their citizenship. Even when democratic politics has empowered them, they often find it hard to travel beyond the boundaries of the local economy.
When then Prime Minister VP Singh decided to implement the recommendations of the Mandal Commission in 1990, he gave legitimacy to the grievances of OBCs (Other Backward Classes). The limited data available on caste and the modern economy tended to support their claim that they had been left behind.
Even the pathways to mobility have not been easily accessible to agrarian castes. The most critical of these is access to high-quality education. However, in the absence of robust data on caste and resource distribution, their claim remains a political slogan rather than a policy challenge for the State. Hence the demand for a caste Census.
If caste is recognised as a marker of “backwardness” and normalised as an aspect of State policy, why not count it? The demand was raised in the run-up to the 2011 Census. The UPA government promised to count caste, but not as part of the national Census. It was done half-heartedly through a separate exercise, the Socio-Economic Caste Census (SECC), without any serious consultation with experts. Respondents were simply asked to report their caste.
The SECC found an astonishing number of caste names, around 46 lakh, up from just 4,147 recorded in 1931! What explains such an inflation of caste identities? How could such a list be meaningfully classified at the national level? These are not difficult questions to answer. However, they needed to be raised before the enumeration was carried out. In the absence of such serious engagement, the exercise proved to be a waste of money and effort.
Caste is indeed not an easy subject. However, we must recognise that caste operates at the regional level. India has enough experience of enumerating Scheduled Castes. The same methodology could be extended for enumerating the OBCs. The rest, too, could be classified into sociologically meaningful categories. We also have robust scholarship on the subject, and we already know a great deal about the regional trajectories of caste.
However, no lessons seem to have been learnt from the 2011 SECC exercise. The 2027 Census is likely to repeat the mistakes made at that time.
When the NDA government announced the enumeration of caste, it was presented as a major political decision. However, the proposal to count caste appears to be a mere symbolic gesture, a reluctant bureaucratic process. Of the 40 questions in the 2027 Census schedule, 13 have been newly added. Surprisingly, none of them is on caste. The question on caste has simply been added to the SC/ST question. Those who do not belong to either category may report their caste, and nothing more. Most surprisingly, the term OBC is completely missing from the schedule.
Surinder S Jodhka is Professor of Sociology, formerly with JNU
