At one time, caste dictated every aspect of Indian life – the work you did, whom you married, where you lived. This ancient, hereditary class system, setting your social status immutably in stone, even determined from which well you could drink water.
Today, its influence has waned, but it has not disappeared. Some argue that caste has become a sort of invisible hand, still shaping the everyday lives of Indians. But the scope and nuances of caste inequality are difficult to understand, largely because the country’s current caste breakdown is a mystery.
The most recent nationwide data on caste dates back to 1931, some 16 years before India became an independent country. Now as the nation awaits its next census, its first in 14 years, a long-running debate over the morality and wisdom of counting and categorizing people based on an archaic system has again divided politicians, activists, and academics.
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Caste – an outlawed hereditary hierarchy – has continued to shape Indian society in overt and subtle ways. But calls for a full nationwide caste census have been met with resistance, sparking debate over India’s path to equality.
“It is foolish not to collect information on a social institution that is of such importance in the distribution of life chances today,” says sociologist Satish Deshpande, echoing the opinions of many other public policy experts.
For Alok Bansal, a newspaper columnist, the exercise is futile – and threatens to deepen divisions.
“This is nothing but a political ploy [by opposition parties] to garner votes in the name of caste,” he says. Caste divisions are fading in modern India, he adds, and counting caste would only grant the system more legitimacy.
Is the caste system really fading away?
Caste, an ancient social order rooted in Hindu beliefs of karma and rebirth, divides people into rigid groups based on traditional occupations. Brahmins, who were traditionally priests, sit at the top, followed by warriors, merchants, and laborers – each further divided into thousands of subcategories. Lowest in the hierarchy are Dalits, once known as “untouchables” (now considered an offensive term), who were relegated to the most demeaning labor.
India outlawed the caste system in 1950, but it persists, cropping up in social situations and leading to widespread discrimination. Government data shows that caste-based atrocities have been rising in recent years. People with Dalit surnames say they have been denied housing, socially ostracized, and even the victims of communal violence.
But Mr. Bansal insists that caste is losing its relevance.
In his experience, Indians are now more open to marrying outside their caste, and urban-educated youth are often unaware of their caste. There’s research that backs this up.
The focus should now be on obliterating caste, he says. He would like to see the government officially recognize “casteless” identities, and make flaunting caste illegal. A caste count would deepen divisions, he says, by “forcing an individual to assume a caste-based identity even if he or she doesn’t want it.”
A caste census may not end inequality, counters Professor Deshpande, but it’s part of the solution.
“The things which you wish to abolish you must monitor and measure,” he says. “Otherwise you risk equating censorship with abolishing.”
Affirmative action in India
Researchers say that comprehensive caste data would help improve existing affirmative action policies, including India’s controversial job quotas system, which has not been updated in over 30 years.
Plus, they note, the national census actually does ask some Indians about their caste, but only the most marginalized, like Dalits and members of specific Indigenous communities. It does not count the upper castes, or the hundreds of other castes that fall somewhere in the middle of the social hierarchy, which are collectively known as Other Backward Classes, or OBCs.
A heterogeneous group with varying levels of affluence, OBCs are believed to make up roughly half of India’s population, but that is just an estimate based on the findings of a government commission in 1980, and on population data gathered back in 1931. At the federal level, 27% of government jobs and public university places are reserved for members of OBCs, but many of them believe they are entitled to a larger share, in line with their estimated population. Data provided by a caste census could fuel this demand – and create problems for whichever party is in power.
On the other hand, some OBC groups have moved up the socioeconomic ladder and may no longer need caste-based quotas, says Niranjan Sahoo, a senior fellow at the Observer Research Foundation, a Delhi-based think tank. Incorporating caste into India’s national census would reveal that, too.
“The caste census is overdue,” says Dr. Sahoo. “To better implement the policies and to allocate resources in a more targeted manner, you need those data.”
A political football
To researchers, counting caste is a practical necessity, but it’s also a third rail of Indian politics. In states where OBCs make up a large segment of the electorate, a party might push for a caste census, only to backtrack if it wins the elections, out of concern that the OBCs might make expensive demands for more jobs and educational opportunities.
“Whenever parties are in opposition, they publicly say that they are in favor of it, and when they come into power, they act very vigorously to scuttle any attempt” to actually conduct a caste census, says Professor Deshpande.
There have been a few exceptions. In 2011, after conducting India’s last official census, the government led by the Indian National Congress party gave in to mounting pressure and held a “socioeconomic and caste census,” but the results were never made public. The data collected was reportedly flawed and unusable. Professor Deshpande believes that was by design. “It was a kind of a planned failure. It was the government’s way of sabotaging the whole thing by allowing it to fail,” he says.
Today, Rahul Gandhi, the face of the opposition Congress party, is one of the most vocal supporters of a national caste census. The southern state of Telangana, where the Congress party won local elections last year, is among a handful of states that recently launched their own local caste censuses.
If this trend reaches his state, Mr. Bansal has his answer ready for census enumerators: “I have no caste.”
