The contours & context of caste

CASTE is back in the spotlight. The Centre has decided to include caste enumeration in the much-delayed Census. So far, the caste count has been limited to members of Scheduled Castes (SCs) and Scheduled Tribes (STs). Every state has a separate list of caste groups included in the SC category, and their enumeration is done as part of the Census. It not only counts their demographics but also the individual jaatis (or, tribes, in case of STs) and the occupational or socio-economic profile of their members. The obvious reason for doing so is to help the state fine-tune its policies, such as caste-based reservation, that are oriented towards their welfare.

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Interestingly, though the listing of SCs and the policies targeting their uplift were enshrined in the Constitution at the time of its adoption, caste was not viewed as a relevant variable in development planning by the Nehruvian state. The mainstream national leadership saw caste primarily as a cultural hangover.

Moving on the path of development and modernisation was supposed to be the best palliative. The increasing opportunities for social and economic mobility, expected to be made available by industrialisation and the modern service economy, along with a steady decline in traditional agrarian and caste-based occupations, were expected to usher in a society organised around a ‘modern ethos’.

Individual merit and skill acquired through formal education were to help Indians overlook their caste. As was widely believed, asking questions about castes and their compilation into demographic blocks would have only worked to keep their ‘outdated’ identities alive, which was the underlying assumption for not including them in the Census. Such an argument was also supported by the experiences of colonial administrators who had enumerated caste from 1881 to 1931 and decided not to do it later for operational reasons.

More important was the dominant opinion and perspective of the first generation of India’s modernist ruling class. Beyond the Nehruvian elite, such a view was also shared by those on the Left and Right of India’s political spectrum. For the leftists, caste represented a pre-modern conservative mindset that divided the working class. The right-wingers’ Hindutva politics saw caste as a hindrance to the formation of a united Hindu national identity. Even when the Hindutva ideologues continued to espouse Manu’s ideological dictum of chatur-varna, they did not want caste to come in their way as a politically mobilised identity.

However, caste turned out to be much more tenacious than expected. It emerged as a potent platform for the articulation of political aspirations of those who did not find space in the English-educated elite circles. The post-colonial elite was not merely a social class made up of people representing different segments of society. In caste terms, they mostly came from a narrow set of non-agrarian ‘upper’ castes. The narrative of merit suited them well.

However, political democracy works on the basis of numbers. As democracy percolated down to the hinterland, its social dynamics began to change. The agrarian rich from the regionally dominant castes were the first to mobilise their communities for electoral politics. It soon went further down, to the ‘backwards’ and the ‘Dalits’. By the 1980s, ‘social justice’ emerged as the new political idiom. While the regionally dominant and ‘backwards’ could gain access to political power through the electoral process, their representation in government jobs and institutions of higher education remained marginal.

The introduction of quotas for Other Backward Classes (OBCs), as proposed by the Mandal Commission, marked the beginning of a new caste-centric phase in Indian politics in the 1990s. Caste was no longer merely about a traditional and conservative mindset. For those on the margins of society, it was also an indicator of their social exclusion, development deficit and discrimination. Caste began to be seen through the prism of citizens’ rights.

Such recognition of caste being a source of deficit and denial was not enough. Once accepted as a development variable, how could the state frame meaningful policies without the availability of data? How many of them are there? What is the nature of their deprivations? How do their deprivations vary across jaatis and regions? How have they changed over time? Such questions also came up in courts during disputes about policies and claims.

The rise of Hindutva politics during the second decade of the current century was seen as a defeat of the politics of ‘social justice’ unleashed by the ‘Mandal moment’. With the BJP in power, Hindu consolidation took over, and caste-centric political parties such as the Samajwadi Party and the Bahujan Samaj Party saw a significant decline.

However, the notion of caste as a system of inequality and exclusion persists. The growing politicisation of the OBCs and other socially excluded categories, even among those who subscribe to Hindutva politics, has also sharpened their awareness about their marginality in an economy guided by neo-liberal policies.

It is in this context that Congress leader Rahul Gandhi has managed to bring the caste count to the centre stage. Through the demand for a caste census, he has attacked the ruling party for its apparently pro-corporate and pro-rich economic policies. Clearly, the decision to include the ‘caste variable’ in the Census is aimed at blunting Rahul’s criticism of the Modi government. The forthcoming Assembly elections in Bihar, where the findings of a caste survey were released in 2023, have also acted as a catalyst.

Surinder S Jodhka is Professor, Centre for the Study of Social Systems at JNU.