MARGIN SPEAK
Counting Castes: Advantage
the Ruling Class
Anand Teltumbde
If castes are counted in the 2011
census, it will be the second
biggest blow to the emancipation
project of the oppressed, the first
being the Mandal reservations.
Anand Teltumbde (tanandraj@gmail.com) is a
writer and civil rights activist with the
Committee for the Protection of Democratic
Rights, Mumbai.
10
T
he debate over whether caste
should be included in the decennial
census 2011, which has actually
begun, has provoked the government to
constitute a Group of Ministers (GoM), the
magical invention that yields decisions on
any vexatious issue. The shrill arguments,
both in favour of and against the proposi-
tion, with an amazing degree of embed-
ded confusion, coming from all conceiva-
ble quarters (caste, class, individuals, par-
ties, and so on) are making it difficult to
guess what the decision of the GoM would
be. But if it comes out in favour of enumer-
ation of castes in the census, it will be the
second biggest blow to the emancipation
project of the oppressed people, the first
being the Mandal reservations.
Colonial Census of Castes
It is well known that the institution of the
census (with enumeration of castes) came
as a part of the measures that were taken
by the British colonialists after the upris-
ing of 1857. The uprising made the govern-
ment officials painfully realise that they
were woefully ignorant of local Indian
customs and more. The knowledge of the
natives would enable them to find local
allies to provide insurance against the
possibility of a future uprising and, more
importantly, use internal divisions among
them for playing groups against one
another.1 The inclusion of questions about
caste in the census was thus not just for
the sake of intellectual curiosity. There
were political reasons for the intensifica-
tion of British interest in the institution of
caste. District-level manuals and gazet-
teers began to devote whole chapters to
the ethnography of caste and custom;
imperial surveys made caste into a
central object of investigation; and, by the
time of the first decennial census of 1872,
caste had become the primary subject
of social classification and knowledge
july 10, 2010 vol xlv no 28 EPW Economic & Political Weekly
By 1901, when the census commissioner
H H Risley announced his ambition for
an ethnographic survey of India, it
was clear that caste had attained its colo-
nial apotheosis.2
Notwithstanding the crude formulation
of Hindutva nationalists, relying on some
smart American historians that castes
were a colonial creation, it cannot be
denied that the introduction of the census,
in particular transformed previously
fuzzy into enumerated communities.3
As Cohn points out, what was entailed in
the construction of census operations was
the creation of social categories by which
India was ordered for administrative
purposes.4 The census objectified reli-
gious, social and cultural difference. This
objectification later catalysed the lower
caste movement but its unintended by-
product, which could not be confused
with the primary aim of the colonialists,
was to preserve their rule.
Politics of Caste
The ostensible need to enumerate the
backward castes (BCs) flows from the
Mandal Commissions recommendations,
among which was a mandate for the moni-
toring of their progress 20 years after their
coming into force. Before the 2001 Census
began, there was a demand made for such
inclusion in the census. But, for whatever
reasons, this proposal was turned down
by the Ministry of Home Affairs, which
controls the census organisation.5 This
time, although the government created
turbulence around the issue by referring
it to the GoM, it will be under pressure
to accept it.
The core rationale for this caste census
may thus lie in the technical requirement
arising from the acceptance of the Mandal
Commission recommendations to extend
reservations to the Other Backward
Classes (OBCs). The Mandal recommenda-
tions, particularly their acceptance by the
V P Singh government in 1989, was an
ominous mark on the path of annihilation
of castes. It gave a new lease of life to
castes. The entire caste game was mis-
chievously played in the name of the Con-
stitution, which rather had reference to
class and individuals. The Constitution

under Articles 15(4), 16(4), 46 and 340
refers to socially and educationally back-
ward classes or backward class citi-
zens. In the country in which politics is
stuck on the unfortunate duality of caste
and class, the state, particularly the judici-
ary, coolly interpreted class in the Constitu-
tion to be synonymous with caste. In
order that an entire caste is to be deemed
as socially, economically and educationally
backward, it needed to pass the test of
homogeneity and to formulate a policy for
such castes, there should have been objec-
tive definability. However, there was none.6
Whither Caste Dynamics?
The entire load of the argument in favour
of inclusion of castes in the census is that
it will help in targeting development
efforts at the specific social groups. But
can social groups be viably conceived on
the basis of castes today? The entire argu-
ment smacks of colossal confusion in
transposing the non-caste dalits and trib-
als to others and an enormous ignorance
about contemporary caste dynamics. It
was the Nehruvian project of modernisa-
tion, mapped mainly by land reform and
the green revolution in rural India that
brought about a change as never before in
the caste structure. The displacement of
the upper caste landlords from villages,
enrichment of a section of the shudra
caste cluster (traditional farming castes)
through this programme and the consoli-
dation of the populous shudra castes into
a powerful political constituency changed
the entire socio-political fabric of the
country. Paradoxically, these castes,
labelled as backward, are in social control
of rural and semi-urban India, dominate
politics and a significant part of the econ-
omy of the country. The ritual caste differ-
ences between them and dwija castes are
no more extant because of these develop-
ments. This caste dynamics reduce caste
to the divide between dalits and non-
dalits. Although, many people constitut-
ing BC/OBC are as backward as the dalits
and the tribals, the idiom of caste binds
them with their powerful constituents
and prevents them from identifying with
dalits and tribals.
When so-called progressive intellectu-
als take up cudgels for the lower castes
they ignore this post-Independence
Economic & Political Weekly EPW july 10, 2010 vol xlv no 28
developmental dynamics. They certainly
err in extending the social justice logic
applied to scheduled castes (SCs) and
scheduled tribes (STs) to these castes.
The rationale behind applying the excep-
tional measure of quota for SCs and STs
was deep-rooted social prejudice against
them through the practice of untoucha-
bility (against SCs) and physical separa-
tion (against STs). This simply cannot be
replicated to the shudra castes, lest one
deliberately undermines the rationale
itself and ignores the structural forces
that exploit them. The backwardness of
the BC/OBC is a part of the larger secular
backwardness of the country, depicted
by a plethora of disgraceful indices and
statistics on poverty, health and such
others. It is the duty of the State to
ensure distributional justice to these
classes. But to say that it should be done
along the caste axis is playing into the
hands of the ruling classes. It serves the
latter best to tacitly support caste issues
as they deflect attention from the neo
liberal project, which is dispossessing
people of even whatever little they have.
Flawed Arguments
The best of these arguments are perhap
presented in this very journal by Satish
Deshpande and Mary John (The Politics
of Not Counting Caste, EPW, 19 June
2010). They dealt with opponents conten-
tions logistical challenges and politi-
cal objections in their own way. Logisti-
cal challenges may not be insurmountable
if one is reconciled with the tentative col-
lective self portrait the census provides.
But the question is to what avail? Recog-
nising the fluidity and polyvalence of
caste identity, they suggest, somewhat
clumsily, the collection of supportive syn-
onyms for castes and using technology to
resolve them. Obviously, they belittle the
logistical problems by imagining their
complexity and offering a weird solution.
The basic problem is associated with the
characteristics of caste itself. Caste, as one
sociologist puts it, has no precise defini-
tion; it is not an objective measurable
category like occupation, age, sex, educa-
tion, etc and rather, may be seen as a
subjective category related with identity
and perceptions which change from time
to time.7 They have missed out one
MARGIN SPEAK
dangerous logistical characteristic of
caste which is that caste is essentially
hierarchy seeking and hence infinitely
divisive. If one still wishes to have caste
data, one fails to understand why.
The other point they deal with is politi-
cal objections that caste enumeration
would promote divide and rule and
argue that subaltern claims for power
sharing is always taken as divisive by the
elites. The basic point here is whether
castes today are viable units to plan shar-
ing of power, privileges or any resources
equitably. Today, the Indian political real-
ity may be simply read in terms of rulers
as a class whereas the ruled are castes,
whether by volition or by engineering, as
in colonial times. In defence of the caste
census, their shadow-boxing reaches a
profound pitch when they claim that not
counting caste has been one of independ-
ent Indias biggest mistakes. One fails to
know how, in face of the fact that the so-
called backward castes as a caste group
have done extremely well in coming to
dominate the political, social and eco-
nomic spheres. Why unlike the colonial
rulers the Congress under Nehru decided
not to count castes is because it was afraid
it would permanently fragment the con-
stituency of the Congress. Despite this, the
state with all its apparatus has not been
caste blind as claimed by them. However,
this did not deter the progress of the BCs.
As a caste group, the coalition syndrome,
Mandal, as well as the current demand for
the caste census reflect their empower-
ment, the disempowerment of huge mass
of their own members notwithstanding.
Counting caste can never benefit peo-
ple; it benefits only the ruling classes.
Notes
1 See Sekhar Bandyopadhyay, Caste, Politics and
the Raj: Bengal 1872-1937 (Calcutta: K P Bagchi &
Company), 1990, p 29.
2 Nicholas B Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and
the Making of Modern India (New Jersey: Prince-
ton University Press), 2001, p 15.
3 S Kaviraj, The Imaginary Institution of India in
P Chatterjee and G Pandey (ed.), Subaltern Stud-
ies VII (Delhi: Oxford University Press), 1992.
4 B S Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge
(Princeton: Princeton University Press), 1996,
p 8.
5 A Krishnakumar, Caste and the Census, Front-
line, 17(18), 15 February 2000.
6 G Shah, Caste-based Census Will Compound
Past Blunders, Times of India, 22 May 1998.
7 G Shah, Caste and Democratic Practice in India
(London: Anthem Press), 2004, p 27, in addition,
see ibid.
11
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