Parsa Venkateshwar Rao Jr | The Conundrum of Caste Calculus in India’s Polity

The political compulsions of the Opposition parties to demand a caste census, and the ruling BJP’s eventual decision to make the caste census a part of the decennial census, to take place sometime in 2026, marks a capitulation as the party and the Narendra Modi government were strongly opposed to the idea. Not enough analysis has been done on what lay behind the BJP’s U-turn on the issue, and it is not without reason that the Congress claims that it forced the government to accept its demand. It is easy to get drawn into the whirlpool of arguments about the political advantages each party wants to gain from the exercise. The speculation among some analysts is that the BJP wouldn’t do anything significant with the caste census, and that it was simply a tactical move to deflect the Opposition parties from gaining electoral advantage from the demand. Whatever may be the Opposition’s strategy and the BJP’s counter-strategy, the caste issue will remain a problem -- whether with the caste census and without it.

While India has evolved rapidly into a middle-income country, a far cry from the high levels of poverty seen in the 1950s, and our society is much less segregated on caste lines in schools and universities, in government jobs and other spheres, caste continues to cast its shadow over society and the polity. But caste games are played at various levels and in various guises.

Caste analysts, both in academia and outside, continue to see it as a simple contest between the upper castes and lower castes. The upper castes are cloaked under the generic label, while the Scheduled Castes or Dalits are the victims who are identified by name. But there is more happening between the two poles of upper castes and Dalits. And it is this adversarial interplay in the unnamed and label-less middle ground -- and it is a large one -- that the inadequately named caste contest is happening.

The middle ground is that of Other Backward Classes (OBCs), and the fight is inside the many groups of various intermediate castes to be included in the OBC list that is at the forefront of the caste census issue. A caste census was not demanded by the Scheduled Castes or Scheduled Tribes. It is also an indirect fight against the Supreme Court judgment in the Indira Sawhney case of 1992, where the court called for the exclusion of the “creamy layer”, which said that total reservations cannot exceed 50 per cent. This meant that while reservations for SCs stand at 15 per cent, and that of STs at 7.5 per cent, the OBCs will have to be content with 27 per cent. The claim is that OBCs comprise 70 per cent of the population. It is an indirect demand that the government should overturn the 50 per cent ceiling set for reservations by the apex court. It is understandable that the BJP and the Congress, and their allies, should maintain a tactical silence about OBCs while discussing the caste census issue. Powerful castes like the Patidars in Gujarat, the Marathas in Maharashtra, the Kapus in Andhra Pradesh, the Gujjars in Rajasthan and the Jats in Haryana are loudly demanding to be included in the OBC list so they could access reservations in educational institutions and in government jobs.

Many of the OBC groups have made huge strides through social mobility -- this phenomenon goes back to the late 19th and early 20th centuries -- and many have emerged as the dominant castes like the Lingayats and Vokkaligas in Karnataka and the Reddys and Kammas in undivided Andhra Pradesh. And in a majority of instances, the continued oppression of the Dalits is by the dominant castes. Academics and public intellectuals use the anodyne term “upper castes” to describe all those who target the Dalits.

Some of the academics, out of a sense of being inaccurate, venture to use the term “upper castes”.

There are, then, two battles going on in the caste arena. One is that the excluded upper middle castes seeking inclusion in the OBC list be part of the reserved category. And the other is the fight between the intermediate caste groups and the Dalits. This is best exemplified by the bitter political and social rivalry between the Yadavs, represented by the Samajwadi Party (SP) in Uttar Pradesh, and the Dalits, represented by the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP). Social liberals who are ardent supporters of the caste census and who believe, rather naively, that a caste census is a way to identify exploited castes from the oppressive upper castes, fight shy of seeing the many caste groups, each fighting the other for political representation and social empowerment.

Apart from the political battles, there is the caste factor in the social arena.

In the student associations across colleges and universities in many parts of the country, caste assertion is part of the public culture. In the Delhi University Students’ Union elections, it is a fight between the Jats and Gujjars for domination. In the Osmania University in Telangana, it is the Reddys who openly identify themselves with the caste label, and in Andhra University it is the Kammas. The minority Brahmins held sway in undivided Andhra Pradesh and in Tamil Nadu much before the 1920s, but they have been rightly edged out.

The caste struggle, however, remains. According to observers, the NRI associations of Telugus in the United States are divided along caste lines. In the social sphere, the dominance of caste is harmless. But it needs to be recognised that it exists.

The conspicuous presence of caste in the social sphere makes it necessary that it cannot be ignored. It also cannot be eliminated in the political sphere unless people get tired of the divisions and boycott everyone who steps forward in the name of caste. Political leaders will not defang caste because it serves their purpose. There is the issue of caste beyond politics, divisions and battles. It is the social features of caste groups that make society diverse as much as language, and shapes culture in a variety of unnamed ways. Caste is sure to die out in due course, but even as it dies out, the sociologist and the anthropologist should study caste diversity. There is no need to explain. It is enough if it is described in an ethnographic sense. The caste census should be the first step in this direction.