A caste census will reveal India’s worst-kept secret

By Andy Mukherjee

For the first time in nearly 100 years, India will get 1.4 billion people to name their caste in a census.

Presenting the biggest obstacle to India’s embrace of modernity, the caste system divides Hindus into rigid categories that govern every aspect of life. The last successful exercise to record this ancient, hierarchical social identity, conducted by British colonial rulers in 1931, threw up more than 4,000 answers. (There was another attempt in 2011, but it didn’t quite work; an open-ended question generated 4.6 million replies. The government decided the caste data was worthless.)

For people to discard this abhorrent marker, it’s important for the state to gauge it accurately. That would allow it to double down on efforts to improve the lot of historically disadvantaged sections. With equality of opportunity, the idea that one person is superior to another by birth should lose its sway; restrictions on inter-dining and inter-marriage would wither away.

Without fresh data, however, it will be difficult to persuade people in the higher strata that their privilege is in the way of progress of those below. I witnessed a previous cycle of resentment and violence in 1990. The government had just expanded the scope of caste-based quotas in federal jobs to 49.5 per cent, from 22.5 per cent previously — basically using the 1931 census. That triggered massive protests, with a 19-year-old student setting himself on fire at his campus in Delhi University, where I was in my second year.

When the economy opened up in 1991, it created a private sector, helping soothe some of the anxiety felt by the educated upper-caste youth. The rise of a Hindu temple movement around the same time papered over the remaining cracks with religious jingoism aimed at Muslim minorities.

Three decades later, the temple project is over, and youth unemployment is once again a headache for politicians. India wants to take China’s place in global supply chains, but with a workforce that’s struggling with upward mobility. Dalits are far more likely to be working odd jobs than earning regular wages. It’s the opposite for higher castes.

Ancient religious texts codify Hindus into occupational groups: Brahmin priests; Kshatriya warriors; Vaishya traders. These so-called “twice-born” castes are followed by the Shudra artisans and laborers. Beyond the boundaries of the system lie the Dalits, to whom the society has assigned the most degrading and dangerous occupations, such as burning corpses, slaughtering animals, and cleaning sewers. Many nomadic communities used to be counted as criminal tribes, giving a hereditary role even to thieves.

Is it some kind of pre-modern division of labor? No. It’s a corralling of laborers into a cage they can’t escape with talent or enterprise, as Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, who would go on to draft India’s post-independence constitution, noted a century ago. Ambedkar, a Columbia University economics PhD, was himself a Dalit, or to use the more common label from his time, an “untouchable.” In Annihilation of Caste, a 1936 address he wasn’t allowed to deliver at an anti-caste convention, Ambedkar ruled out any possibility of economic or political reform until Hindus smashed the dogmas of their scriptures that gave sanction to the regressive social practice.

Anyone who tells you caste has no contemporary relevance is ignorant — or lying. The Indian diaspora has even taken it to California. Most people who know their own place in the elaborate hierarchy can guess where others sit. It’s the society’s worst-kept secret; a family name like mine advertises my high status for free. Such privileges may once have been about control of property. Nowadays they are more about connections. The luxury of a phone call to a distant uncle who would get someone a job, or a start in business, is not available to communities that are underrepresented in high places.

People like me are conditioned to think of these networks — and as basic a head-start as having educated parents — as our “merit.” A more militant expression on social media nowadays is “Brahmin genes” — as if man-made differences are coded in the chromosomes.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s acceptance of a caste census is being viewed with puzzlement. Until now, the Hindu right-wing leader, who’s from an oil-pressing community, low in the pecking order, was resolutely opposed to demands for a count. He said the only four “castes” he believed in were women, youth, farmers, and the poor. Rhetoric, however, can’t change the reality. Polls are due in Bihar, a dirt-poor, overpopulated eastern state where power has traditionally been contested along caste lines. That makes this exercise all the more pointed.

Rahul Gandhi, the main opposition leader, rejects this cynical interpretation. He wants to use the data to persuade the courts of the preponderance of disadvantaged groups and ask them to relax the 50 per cent judicial ceiling on affirmative action. Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party hasn’t committed to any of this. Even if it tries, the BJP can’t get its core upper-caste supporters to change their view that more aggressive social justice will only mean fewer opportunities for the meritorious.

Reform will have a better chance if the BJP’s ideological parent, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, coopts the agenda and carries the Hindu rightwing along. Discriminating against people based on who they marry and what they eat may have fitted the RSS’s 1925 vision of a Hindu nation-state lorded over by Brahmins. It’s a costly fantasy in a secular republic. Dalits are still dying of toxic fumes cleaning sewers, while a vegetarian elite’s insistence on the exclusion of eggs from midday meals in schools is worsening child malnourishment among vulnerable communities. Is this any route to rivaling China as a superpower?

A better model exists. In southern India, Tamil Nadu’s 69 per cent quota for what the government calls “backward classes” in educational institutions and local public-service jobs has survived legal challenges because it predates the 50 per cent judicial ceiling. The state boasts of near-10 per cent economic growth, one in two of India’s factory jobs for women, and rapidly falling child-mortality rates. Although no egalitarian paradise, the southern state also has a 100-year history of a successful anti-caste movement.

Japan’s 19th-century Meiji Restoration ended feudalism and unleashed modernity. India had a similar chance under Mahatma Gandhi, but the leader of the freedom movement wouldn’t go beyond demanding an end to untouchability. Ambedkar’s call for overhauling Hinduism was a bridge too far for him. A century later, with all state institutions and the media controlled by upper castes and religious conservatism on the rise, any fight for equality and fraternity will be a slog. A caste count will be easy, but abolition? We’re a long way from that.