Not long ago, the Union government announced it would conduct a caste census along with the regular census. However, it has not told us explicitly as to why it plans to conduct the caste census after opposing it for a prolonged period. Since social justice is the idea associated with it, one has to assume this decision serves that singular end, notwithstanding that the phrase ‘social justice’ is a much-trampled term in Indian politics. It can mean a whole set of things without actually meaning anything for the truly oppressed.
Of course, the timing of the government’s decision has been attributed to political expediency–the Bihar assembly polls. But beyond Bihar, it speaks to a certain vulnerability and inevitable accommodation of a coalition set up. It also allows for other Mandal and Dravidian parties and their electorates to look at the BJP more favorably in the near future. In a sense, it could cause power realignments where necessary.
More than snatching away an obsessive plank from the Congress, caste census could be the BJP’s move to strategically delink Mandal parties from the former. It may want to smash the idea of the caste-narrative as a binary opposite of the religion-narrative that it commands. With this move, the BJP comes across as an all-encompassing behemoth. No narrative is outside its purview anymore. The Congress on the other hand looks like it has shrunk its worldview, and surrendered its pan-national appeal. All this said, one has to still confront the toughest and the most basic question about the caste census. It may offer abundant data, but how does one really enumerate caste in present-day India? How does one verify that data, and how does one interpret it when uncertainties exist about its very accuracy?
Caste is such a thing that gives a feeling of certainty as long as you do not have to pin it down under one category or the other. The moment one is asked to be specific about one’s caste, the confusion begins right from the name; its alignment to the varna categories, and the googlies that specificities of a sub-caste would hurl. Now is not the age of caste anyway, it is the age of sub-caste. After these many decades of reservations, the competition is between sub-castes. The conflict is more between sub-castes—one dominated by another, placed in the same quota category.
When it comes to caste or sub-caste, one identifies oneself in relative terms, to an immediate social setting as well as a certain aspirational or political setting, never to what one really is. There is a fluidity to caste/sub-caste identity that we hardly recognise, but that can make a mockery of the caste census. Social science in India has predominantly borrowed a western model, which has never attempted a model to enumerate caste. That could also be due to an upper caste or leftist bias in academia.
The general census works on a verifiable binary reasoning or response model to determine socio-economic distress or flourish. Questions like, do you own a house, do you have a degree, do you live in a joint family etc., elicit a definite ‘yes’ or ‘no’ response, but caste cannot be enumerated with such definitiveness because it carries ifs and buts in its belly.
In the last caste census that was conducted in 1931, J H Hutton, the census commissioner wrote that “the term ‘caste’ needs no definition in India.” He meant it in the sense that it was omnipresent, but it could also mean it cannot be defined conclusively because there are too many variables at play. Hutton honestly stated in his report the complications that were involved in enumerating caste, and those complications have acquired greater complexity today.
For instance, Hutton wrote: “There is… a tendency towards the consolidation of groups at present separated by caste rules. The best instance of such a tendency to consolidate a number of castes into one group is to be found in the grazier castes which at combining under the terms Yadava, Ahirs, Goalas, Gopis, Idaiyans and perhaps some other castes of milkmen.” He also spoke about “the desire of the artisan castes in many parts of India to appear under a common name.” He added that in “some cases a caste which had applied in one province to be called Brahman asked in another to be called Rajput,” and there were “several instances at this census of castes claiming to be Brahman who claimed to be Rajput 10 years ago.”
In summation, Hutton wrote: “It is obviously impossible for the census authorities to do anything other than accept the nomenclature of the individuals making the return, since to discriminate and to allot to different groups would involve entering into discussion on largely hypothetical data. Experience at this census has shown very clearly the difficulty of getting a correct return of caste and likewise the difficulty of interpreting it for census purposes.”
One has to only come to Karnataka, as the Dalit census for internal reservation is underway (ending May 17), to realise how these complexities are playing in the present day. Caste lobbies and organisations are issuing advertisements and holding conventions to request their respective caste brethren to identify themselves before enumerators under specific names. The consolidation of numbers under a certain name would eventually lead to higher quota and greater political representation, they argue.
If one advertisement instructed people not to list themselves as Adi Karnataka or Adi Dravida or Adi Andhra but call themselves Madiga, another appealed to consolidate under the name Bhovi Vaddar. This is not different from the enterprise that Hutton recorded in 1931. People culturally think of themselves as one thing, but politics dictates another name.
Any caste data collected is likely to lead to an irresolvable disputation, as the recently leaked caste numbers in Karnataka have proved. Castes, sub-castes want the perception of themselves and their size, historical or otherwise, to be reflected in the data, and that is terribly tough. This makes all data “hypothetical”, as Hutton said. Caste data is collected in the privacy of homes, not in town halls where caste claims can be contested by competing communities. Such town halls cannot exist, and also migration has hugely upset the geo-specificity and nomenclature of castes. Traditional caste-based professions too have largely dissolved. The BJP perhaps realises the eventual outcome of a caste census–small concessions but more confusion.
Sugata Srinivasaraju | Senior journalist and author of Strange Burdens: The Politics and Predicaments of Rahul Gandhi
(Views are personal)
(sugata@sugataraju.in)