Is the caste system in India an ‘aberration’, an ‘anomaly’ or an ‘institution’ to be understood? Is ‘hierarchy’ the key to it?
Dwelling on these fundamental issues, celebrated French Social Anthropologist Louis Dumont says in his famous book on the Indian caste system and its implications, ‘Homo Hierarchicus’: “It is a remarkable fact that, quite apart from the Indians, no Westerner who has lived in India, whether the most fervent reformer or the most zealous missionary has ever, so far as is known, attempted or recommended the abolition pure and simple of the caste system either because of an acute consciousness of the positive functions fulfilled by the system as in the case of Abbe Dubois, or simply because such a thing appeared to be too impracticable.”
Thus, we continue to grapple with this grim reality of ‘caste’ despite protestations and avowals to the contrary, and the caste-based ‘identity politics’ it has spawned in the country. Reformative impulses within the caste system have not bid adieu to it; rather as educational opportunities increase and the economic development cake gets bigger, the clamor for caste-based census has been understandably on the rise.
Preparations for the 2021 nationwide decennial population census in 2020 got aborted due to the severe Covid-19 pandemic. As the Union Government has set in motion the process now, demands by political parties, particularly by the regional parties, for making it a caste-based enumeration this time has hit a new crescendo. More so after Parliament recently passed the Constitution (127th Amendment) Bill, 2021, which restored the power of the States to make their own lists of ‘Other Backward Classes (OBC)’. The position of the States would have been worse off had the power to notify the Socially and Economically Backward Classes (SEBC) was with the President in consultation with the Governors.
While States will now get back their right to notify their respective list of OBCs’ for the purpose of reservation in educational institutions and employment in state services, the larger issue, hanging like a Damocles sword over the States, is the overall 50 per cent cap on quotas laid down by the Supreme Court in the famous ‘Mandal case’. Amid varying total quota levels in various states, each is obliged to protect its existing levels of reservation for scheduled castes (SC), scheduled tribes (ST), backward classes (BC) and OBCs’.
HISTORICAL PATTERNS
The Census of India had enumerated the caste numbers in the past exercises every ten years from 1871 to 1931 under British rule. However, the Census in free India since 1951 had been publishing data on SC/ST population, but not about the other castes as policy-framers of a young, idealistic nation thought ‘caste census’ was a thing of the past. ‘Caste’ was seen as an anathema in a socialistic pattern of society.
However, the ground reality has been different with the erstwhile Madras Presidency, that later became Tamil Nadu, pioneering ‘reservation’ in education and government jobs as ‘positive discrimination’ towards the socially oppressed and depressed sections even before Indian Independence. The First Amendment to the Constitution, enacted by Parliament on June 18, 1951, among others, gave constitutional validity to reservation.
As the policy of reservation gained wider acceptance in different states in the postIndependence years, the lack of a proper estimate of the OBCs’ population on a scientific basis began to stare at leaders and impose severe limitations on the total extent of reservation that each state wished to give.
Though the Mandal Commission had reportedly estimated the country’s OBC population at 52 per cent, estimates began to vary with political parties and caste organizations coming up with their own numbers, which were again different from the National Sample Survey (NSS) data. Some States did their own caste counts and all these factors reinforced the need for making a uniform caste-based count as part of the national population census.
Bihar Chief Minister and JD(U) leader Nitish Kumar, who recently led an all-party delegation from his State including the RJD leader and leader of Opposition Tejashwi Yadav and local leaders of Congress, BJP and the Left parties, to meet the Prime Minister, Narendra Modi in New Delhi to press for a caste-based census in 2021, emphasized that their demand was not specific to Bihar, but for the entire country.
That was the only way to ensure a fair implementation of state welfare schemes and device welfare policies for deprived and marginal sections of the people, argued Nitish Kumar, though his move’s political implications and possible realignments ahead of the 2024 Lok Sabha polls was not lost.
“If animals and trees can be counted, why not people as castes,” posed Tejashwi Yadav to the media after meeting the Prime Minister, though Mr. Modi reportedly remained non-committal on their demand. “When the government has no scientific data on population (including castes) how can it make welfare policies,” asked Tejashwi Yadav.
EARLIER EFFORTS
The Nitish Kumar-led Bihar team's proactivism on this front was preceded by the Maharashtra Assembly in January earlier this year passing a resolution urging the Centre to hold a caste-based census in 2021.
A keen tracker of these issues, G. Karunanidhy, General Secretary of the AllIndia Other Backward Classes (AIOBC) Federation, batting for a caste-wise census in 2021, wrote in 'The Modern Rationalist', that besides Maharashtra, both Bihar and Odisha State Assemblies have also "adopted similar resolutions urging the Union Government to undertake caste-wise census of OBCs."
He also points out that cases in various courts including in the Supreme Court challenging the extent of reservation at both the Central and State levels, besides petitions calling for 'identification of creamy layer' among all the reserved categories including SC/STs'," have necessitated the "need for a valid database that can be done only through enumeration of a caste-wise census." It is now an imperative, the AIOBC functionary adds.
The issue was flagged even prior to the 2011 all-India census and the first DMK MP to raise it in the Lok Sabha in 2010 was T.K.S. Elangovan. "The interesting thing is when I raised the issue, the other person to raise it was Gopinath Munde (of the BJP)," chuckles Elangovan.
Though some States like Karnataka had taken a caste-based census at the statelevel, Elangovan contended that only the data obtained from a caste-wise census along with the national population census "acquires greater weight" in responding to petitions in Courts challenging the quota levels for OBCs and the others.
There is no bar in using State data on caste numbers as each State has varying percentage of reservation, but that by itself may not be sufficient, feels Mr. Elangovan, while reiterating the DMK's plea for a caste-based count. "It (All-India caste-wise census) is the only way to break the overall 50 per cent barrier on reservations laid down by the Supreme Court in the Mandal case," he stressed.
This is notwithstanding the fact that in 1993 the Tamil Nadu government (when AIADMK was in power) had enacted the "Tamil Nadu Backward Classes, Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Reservation of seats in Educational Institutions and of appointments or posts in the Services under the State)" to ensure the continuity of its 69 per cent quota and included it in Constitution's Ninth Schedule to get protection under Article 31-B.
Significantly, the DMK leader, late Kalaignar M Karunanidhi, had during his fifth term as Chief Minister (2006-11) had clearly favoured a caste census when the OBC-Vanniyars-based Pattali Makkal Katchi (PMK) first sought a separate quota within the 20 per cent total reservation for Most Backward Classes (MBCs') and denotified communities in Tamil Nadu. Along with BCs', SCs' and STs', the total level of reservation in Tamil Nadu is currently 69 per cent. Kalaignar had then said the PMK's demand could be considered only if there was data on all the castes.
In the earlier decades, Tamil Nadu had constituted two Backward Class Commissions, one under Thiru. A.N. Sattanathan in 1969 and the second under Thiru. Ambasankar in 1983. The latter also included a caste-wise socio-economic and educational survey. The Ambasankar Commission submitted its report to the state government in 1985. But that report is now over three decades old.
No wonder, when the PMK, as an ally of the AIADMK, in 2020 exerted pressure for its separate horizontal quota demand within the 20 per cent for MBCs’, then Chief Minister, Edappadi K Palaniswami in December last year set up in haste a Commission under the Chairmanship of Justice A Kulasekaran, retired High Court Judge, to collect quantifiable data on all castes, communities and tribes of Tamil Nadu. The Commission would also collate social, educational, economic and political parameters of the population of the State and submit a report in six months.
Pending the Kulasekaran panel report, the former Chief Minister, hours before the Election Commission announced the schedule of the Assembly elections in February 2021, managed to pass a Bill in the House granting 10.50 per cent sub-quota exclusively for Vanniyars and few related sub-castes out of 20 per cent cap for MBCs' and denotified communities. The DMK-led opposition dubbed it as a desperate eleventh-hour pre-poll bid to appease the PMK, which in fact was given AIADMK's tenuous ties with the BJP.
UPA'S SECC HAS RAW DATA ON CASTE
During the UPA-II regime led by Dr. Manmohan Singh, the Government in 2011 conducted a 'Socio-Economic and Caste Census (SECC-2011)', to identify households living below the poverty line (BPL), given the inherent complexities of a purely caste-based census.
Some of those problems were then explained in Parliament by the then Union Home Minister P Chidambaram, like the prevalence of thousands of caste groups and sub-castes as "people use their clan/Gotra, sub-caste and caste names interchangeably." Moreover, States had different lists of OBCs', some overlapping, some partitioned like in an arithmetic equation.
While the SECC data were released only in July 2015 after the BJP under Narendra Modi's leadership came to power in New Delhi, to this day the Government of India has not released the 'caste data' collected during the SECC. Even then, DMK patriarch Kalaignar M Karunanidhi had demanded the release of the 'caste data' in public interest and had questioned the NDA government's holding the raw data under wraps. The present Chief Minister M.K.Stalin has also urged the Union Government for caste-based census.
When the caste-census issue was raised again by the DMK Parliamentary party leader T.R. Baalu in July this year, Union Minister of State for Home, Nityanand Rai had replied in Parliament that while Maharashtra and Odisha governments had requested to collect caste details in the forthcoming Census (2021), "the Government of India has decided as a matter of policy not to enumerate caste-wise population other than the SCs' and STs' in the Census."
Significantly, the BJP's ideological mentor, RSS, is also against caste-based census, lest it might upset their agenda of 'majoritarian Hindu consolidation' on religious lines. So, we are left with a very peculiar situation, despite the availability of technology to undertake a caste count.
Interestingly, the Union government maintained that the 'raw caste data' obtained from the 'SECC-2011', which have been sent to the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment, "for the classification and categorisation of the data", has also been shared with the States. But there was no proposal to release the caste data now, the Home Ministry made clear.
Hence, without categorising and tabulating the 'raw data on castes' already on hand, even if it is nearly a decade old, it will still be the first such unique data-set since the 1931 AllIndia census which had data on caste. But States will not be able to use it or present it as evidence in Courts until the numbers are put in perspective, even as GOI is in no mood to release the data on its own.
The ruling BJP, post-2014, has already initiated a social engineering process in various states, particularly in the Hindispeaking heartland, to co-opt the least benefited sections/sub-sects among the OBC/ SC/STs' under the reservation scheme till now. It has been paying them electoral dividends, along with the new 10 per cent Economically Weaker Sections (EWS) quota introduced to woo the poor among the upper castes. Another big election in U.P. is also in the offing, and all these factors may explain BJP's decision not to go for a national caste-wise census now.
Nonetheless, at the other end of the spectrum, opposition parties including several regional parties in the North, are looking to encash the 'OBC card' in their own sagacious way by pressing for a caste-based census that would show up the 'real numbers' of each caste before 2024 Lok Sabha polls.
Should the ruling BJP not relent and push its homogenous model of social stratification and consolidation based on 'Hindutva Philosophy', one could expect defiant states like Bihar and Maharashtra to go ahead with their statelevel caste census, on the lines Tamil Nadu has constituted the Justice Kulasekaran Commission with a Herculean task on its hand.
These dynamics would also give a fillip to regional parties- like say PMK in Tamil Naduto reformulate the demand for a caste-census into a plea for a 'proportional representation system' as reflecting social justice better, with its own twists and turns for our democratic system.
For either camp- Centralists on the one hand and the Federalist groups on the other if one may put it that way- “there is no rose without thorns”, as the old adage goes.
"Truth and roses have thorns about them," mused the American Transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau, who was an important influence on Mahatma Gandhi. The celebrated Lebanese-American writer Khalil Gibran was equally insightful in deepening this metaphor: "The optimist sees the rose and not its thorns; the pessimist stares at the thorns, oblivious to the rose." There are no easy substitutes in this difficult terrain.
SONIA CONSTITUTES CONGRESS PANEL ON CENSUS
The Congress President Ms. Sonia Gandhi has constituted a 7-member Committee under the chairmanship of the former Union Minister Veerappa Moily to study matters related to the renewed demand for a nation-wide caste census along with the 2021 national population census.
Ms. Sonia Gandhi’s decision is significant in the light of demands by various political parties to undertake such a caste-wise census.
The other members of the Committee are, former Union Minister Salman Khurshid, legal luminary Abhishek Manu Singhvi, Mohan Prakash, R.P.N. Singh, P.L. Punia and Kuldeep Bishnoi, according to a press release issued by the All-India Congress Committee (AICC) General Secretary, K.C. Venugopal.
