Modi's U-turn on Caste Census: The Battle for Comprehensive Social Justice Needs to be Intensified

The Wire

04-05-2025

Just when the country was expecting some decisive response from the Modi government in the wake of the Pahalgam terror attack, the regime took everybody by surprise by announcing its readiness to conduct a caste enumeration as part of the already over delayed census.
There is of course no announcement yet about the timeline of the census. The 2025-26 budget made no provision for this massive exercise. With no signs of the census happening anytime soon, the announcement at this moment must be seen more as a calculated political move ahead of the crucial Bihar elections than an immediate agenda of action. Be that as it may, this is a major announcement for a caste-ridden society where the last caste census was conducted in 1931.
For the Sangh-BJP establishment, this latest Modi 'masterstroke' is perhaps the biggest Sanghi U-turn in decades. In the run-up to the 2024 elections when the INDIA bloc and the Congress led by Rahul Gandhi made a forceful demand for caste census, the entire Sangh-BJP establishment called it a divisive and 'urban Naxal' agenda.
We cannot but remember how when the VP Singh government had taken the historic step to announce partial implementation of the Mandal Commission recommendations in 1990, the BJP engineered the government's defeat in a no-confidence motion, much the same way as the Jan Sangh had ousted Karpoori Thakur from power after the implementation of reservation for OBCs in Bihar in the late 1970s on the basis of the Mungeri Lal Commission report.
It is well known that the Sangh brigade opposed the Mandal Commission measures of OBC empowerment as fiercely as it had opposed the Constitution of India at the time of its adoption. It is another thing that now in power, it swears allegiance to the Constitution even as it wages a relentless war of subversion of all constitutional values, principles and objectives; and with the rise of Modi it has been busy projecting the BJP as the biggest champion of OBC assertion. Sangh-BJP's desperation to hijack the popular call for comprehensive social justice
Now, the latest caste census U-turn signals the Sangh-BJP's desperation to hijack the popular call for comprehensive social justice even as the Sangh brigade is busy trying to stop the biopic on Savitribai and Jyotirao Phule, the legendary pioneers of women's education and bahujan empowerment in 19th century India and its members continue to perpetrate caste atrocities across the country.
Post-Pahalgam, the Sangh brigade worked overtime to weaponise the terror attack for its agenda of hate and division. When terrorists kill on the basis of religion, other identities like caste, language and region should no more matter – this was the aggressive Sanghi line of post-Pahalgam propaganda.
But now, just a week after the attack, the government itself has decided to ask everybody's caste identity, making it clear that the government needs an urgent tool to deflect public attention away from the questions that Pahalgam has generated.
Ten years ago, the BJP had cut a sorry figure in Bihar when it did not have the support of Nitish Kumar and Bihar reacted strongly against Mohan Bhagwat's call for 'review' of reservations, a thinly veiled expression of the Sangh-BJP clamour for ending reservation.
Ahead of the 2024 elections, the same Bhagwat acknowledged two thousand years of caste oppression, a departure from the oft-repeated Sangh formulation of caste as a defence mechanism adopted by Hindus in the face of 'Muslim aggression' or caste as a colonial era legacy, and asked the Sangh to tolerate reservations for two hundred years.
And now ahead of the forthcoming Assembly elections in Bihar, the Modi government is trying to camouflage the Sangh's campaign of subversion of the Constitution in general, and reservations in particular by this sudden announcement of caste census.
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The same Sangh-BJP ideologues, IT cell and godi media amplifiers who were mocking at the call for caste census till the other day have overnight turned into caste census exponents. The government which told the Supreme Court that conducting a caste census was a logistical nightmare and impossibility is now busy blaming the Congress for not having held a caste census all these years.
The Modi-Yogi slogans 'batenge toh katenge' (divided you'll be slaughtered) and 'ek hai to safe hai' (stay united to stay safe) that were coined and repeated endlessly during the 2024 BJP Lok Sabha campaign in order to counter the caste census demand and advocate Hindu unity on the basis of anti-Muslim fear and hate, have now been put on the back burner.
Bihar had already done its caste count in 2023 and on the basis of the 2023 caste data, the state Assembly had unanimously adopted a resolution to enhance the level of reservation to 65 percent. The onus for getting it implemented by incorporating it in the 9th Schedule of the Constitution and thus taking it out of the ambit of judicial review lay with the Modi government.
With this caste census announcement, the Modi government now seeks to nullify the caste surveys that have already taken place in states and defer the whole agenda to an indefinite future. The social justice movement of India must therefore become more alert and mount decisive pressure on the government to implement the caste census at the earliest and take it to its logical conclusion. Reservation as a measure of affirmative action has lost much of its earlier efficacy
In the absence of up-to-date caste data and given the Supreme Court directed cap of 50 percent on caste-based reservation, the OBC quota has been pegged at 27 percent, way lower than the estimated proportion of OBC population in Indian society. Even this 27 percent reservation has been achieved only in phases, first in government employment in 1990 and then in central educational institutions in 2006.
But with relentless downsizing of government jobs, institutionalisation of lateral entry in higher echelons of bureaucracy to bypass reservations and most recently with the introduction of reservation on economic basis for otherwise privileged caste groups, reservation as a measure of affirmative action has lost much of its earlier efficacy.
The social justice movement must therefore fight for not just removal of the artificial 50 percent quota cap and for extension of reservation to the private sector, but also for completion of effective land reforms and reversal of the neoliberal policies that have undermined the state's role in the spheres of education and employment.
A properly conducted caste census should reveal a comprehensive picture of social inequality in India. Now that the social justice movement has succeeded in forcing the Modi government to agree to this first step, the battle has to be intensified not only for an honest timebound implementation of the census but also for necessary follow-up action to destroy caste-based privileges and ensure fair representation and rightful participation of the historically excluded and underrepresented sections of Indians in all spheres.
The writer is General Secretary of CPI (ML-Liberation).