History has taken a full circle in the last one century on the issue of caste-census in India. On 30th April 2025, the Cabinet Committee on Political Affairs of the NDA Government led by Prime Minister Mr Narendra Modi decided to include caste enumeration in the upcoming census to be conducted by 1 March 2027. It is widely believed that for this government to have agreed for conducting caste-census might have emerged as a corrective measure since the Bhartiya Janta Party (BJP) was bereft of the majority mark by its own in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections. More so, there is a perceived belief that the Indian National Congress led by Rahul Gandhi and in coordination with INDIA alliance partners did generate traction among the electorates for a promise to conduct nationwide caste-census if voted to power in this election. But a historical paradox does exit that raises obvious doubt about whether the promise made by the current Government will actually be met. This decennial census was originally scheduled to be held in 2021 which could not be conducted owing to COVID-19. And this Government had no such intent till then.
A scepticism prevails because a similar promise made by the UPA-II Government headed by Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh which had agreed to conduct caste-wise census in 2011 which was deliberately and meticulously deflected and scuttled. Now the current Government may have agreed for such census but as late as 2021, Minister of State for Home Affairs, Nityanand Rai had denied conduct of caste-census except for the SCs and STs as has been the practice since 1951 in written reply to the question asked by one Member of Parliament, Dr Ambumani Ramadoss. It needs no reiteration that in the run up to the 2011 census, the major national political parties, namely the Indian National Congress which headed the Government then, and the Bhartiya Janta Party which heads the Government now in New Delhi, were ideologically against the inclusion of caste in the census. The core of this book under review is primarily about the failed promise of counting caste in the 2011 decennial census of India.
An obvious question arises: why a caste-wise census at all? The SCs and STs and religious minorities in any case have been on count without fail in all successive decennial censuses. Those who have been advocating for the conduct of caste census through various interventions have the agenda of redistribution of resources and furthering the cause of social justice. There are two prime considerations in defence of those seeking an answer to this question. The author of the current volume has enlisted these two. First, the state needed the exact share of the OBC population since the Mandal implementation, as this issue about justification of 27% reservation in Central Government jobs had lingered since 1993.
Furthermore, as this benefit was extended to them for entry to centrally funded institutions of higher learning, the question about proportion of their population size emerged yet again. Not just the Supreme Court in its verdict on Indra Sawhney vs. Govt of India but in various subsequent rulings of different High Courts, the judges have specifically asked for producing empirical data to show the proportion of OBCs. The latest being the case of Madhya Pradesh where the reservation share for OBCs has been increased from 14 per cent to 27 per cent by the Kamal Nath Government in 2019. Now the cases relating to this are being heard by the Madhya Pradesh High Court as well as the Supreme Court of India.
Second, the availability of caste wise data about ownership of economic resources or their share in terms of income and job can definitely be of help in formulating inclusive state policies to dismantle deep-seated caste based social and economic inequalities. The third reason relates to the social categories vis-à-vis religious minorities since the Mandal Commission recognizing their social and educational backwardness, categorized them as OBCs. A discussion on this point would have further enriched this book. The author mentions civil society organizations like Janhit Abhiyan and BAMCEF in making traction about the agenda of caste census, other organizations like Pasmanda Muslim Mahaz led by Rajya Sabha MP Ali Anwar too made considerable efforts to pitch in the demand of caste-wise census in 2011.
The book has foregrounded the making of the caste-census demand and failing of its actualization during UPA-II Government led by Dr Manmohan Singh. The real intention of the government got exposed time and again. Ajay Maken, the then Minister of State for Home Affairs on 20th February 2010 had argued:
…there is a necessity to have the population details of the OBCs in the country for better formulation of policy, it is felt that the population census is not idle instrument for collection of these details. The operational difficulties are so many that there is a grave danger that the basic integrity of the census data may be compromised…(p. 97).
Minister of Home Affairs, P Chidambaram, in his speech in the Lok Sabha delivered on 7 May 2010 tried explaining how ‘caste-wise enumeration may affect the accuracy of headcount and the integrity of the census’ (p. 103). The veteran political leaders of socialist background who consistently raised the issues of social justice in the Indian Parliament namely Lalu Prasad, Mulayam Singh and Sharad Yadav sensed a conspiracy on the part of Chidambaram and hence forced the adjournment of the Lok Sabha immediately after the latter’s the speech. Soon they met one of the most senior Cabinet ministers, Pranab Mukherjee and apprised him of their real demand. With their concerted mobilization and campaign strategy, the Congress party feared losing the OBC votes and succumbed to their demand. On May 8, 2010, all the major dailies reported Pranab Mukherjee making statement on behalf of the Cabinet committee that ‘caste will be included in the upcoming census’ (p. 104).
Soon, those self-serving liberal bogey favouring meritocracy started a counter-campaign against the proposed caste census announced by the Government. Most intriguing was the role played by the so-called upper caste celebrities including film stars, academics, journalists and many others who spewed their casteist venom through blogs, editorials to influence public opinion which were partisan in favour of the ‘make believe casteless public sphere’. On May 10, 2010, Amitabh Bachchan, for instance started a campaign called ‘Meri Jati Hindustani’ which spread like wildfire on social media which was just picking up by then. Barkha Dutt wrote a piece in the Hindustan Times hailing Bachhan’s position as forward looking and criticized the Government dubbing it as a regressive policy. Pratap Bhanu Mehta in his essay titled ‘Caste and I’ in the Indian Express dubbed this exercise of caste census as ‘monumental travesty’. Ved Pratap Vaidik later organized a symposium on Bachchan’s theme and even organized a People’s March in Delhi against proposed caste-count.
How the mandate for holding caste census failed despite the Cabinet Committee’s decision and how it took the shape of SECC (Socio Economic and Caste Census) that too conducted by the Ministry of Rural Development and not by the Ministry of Home Affairs as mandated in the Indian Constitution is a big mystery. This data could never be availed of even by the Government; it was argued that the entire data set had got corrupted. The author has done a meticulous chronicling of the events leading to this deflection in a chapter aptly titled ‘The Politics of the Count’. It is realized time and again that it was a meticulously designed model of how not to count caste as was done by the colonial enumerators in 1931. The notion of ‘castelessness’ is a prerogative of a privileged few who rise mostly on the foundations of caste-based social and cultural network but on the contrary, they do view caste-structure, caste-based reservation and now a caste based census as a barrier to national progress.
The author informs us how Marc Gallanter in the mid 1970s had observed that the caste elite administrators and clerks entrusted with implementation of reservations saw it as low priority and failed to recruit and promote the historically oppressed groups to higher echelons of bureaucracy and hence the social justice agenda has diligently been scuttled. As late as between 2018 and 2022, the percentage of the appointments in the IAS, IPS and IFS whose officers hold the top positions in both Central and State Government bureaucracies the percentage of appointment has been 7.7 percent for the SCs, 3.8 percent for the STs and 15.9 percent for the OBCs as against their allocated share of 15 percent, 7.5 percent and 27 percent respectively (p. 12).
Dr Ambedkar had raised concerns relating to the paucity of exact number of Shudras or backward classes (as the colonizer viewed and termed them) since they have not been enumerated separately since 1931. But he still made a tentative estimate making them around 75-80 percent of the Hindus excluding ex-untouchables in his book titled, Who Were the Shudras? How they come to be the Fourth Varna in Indo-Aryan Society (1946).
Later, in his Thoughts on Linguistic States (1955) too, he apologized for not being able to provide census data to support his description of caste and highlighted the then Home Minister’s role in blocking the collection of caste wise data in the first decennial census of independent India. Will India have a 1931-like caste census conducted before 2031 or not? Time alone can tell us.
Arvind Kumar teaches at the Centre for the Study of Social Inclusion, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi.