In recent days, in India, an opposition proposal has been stirring up the national political debate a lot and is worrying the government led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, a nationalist and Hindu and leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The INDIA coalition, which brings together 26 parties and which is at a clear disadvantage in the parliamentary elections which began in mid-April and is running until June, has proposed that a national population census be conducted based on castes, formally abolished in the 1950s but which still define and influence Indian society today. According to the opposition, censusing the population based on caste would help plan effective interventions against inequalities and discrimination.
The proposal is much discussed because carrying out a census of this type is considered by some to be a step backwards in overcoming the caste system, but not only that: the government party fears that it could encourage the fragmentation of an alleged “Hindu unity” that Modi has been trying to consolidate for years, especially to the detriment of minorities living in India, especially the Muslim community. Modi argued that the census could favor the Muslim population, which he recently accused of being made up of traitors (Indian Muslims would be “infiltrators” who do not belong to the nation), also referring to some conspiracy theories widespread in India, such as that of “ethnic substitution” (Muslims would have more children because they want to replace Hindus).
The census proposal should also be interpreted as an attempt by INDIA to gain votes in the ongoing elections and obtain the support of voters and electorates who, according to the opposition, have been neglected by Modi’s policies.
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Although castes have been formally abolished in India, their role in society continues to be extremely relevant. There are four main castes, they derive from the system of hierarchical stratification of society that had gradually developed with Hinduism during the first millennium BC and for centuries they have influenced almost every aspect of Hindu religious and social life.
In first place are the priests o Brahmins; then the warriors or Kshatriya; so the Vaisya, artisans and merchants; and finally i Sudra, farmers, poorer artisans, servants. Lowest of all on the social ladder are the “outcastes”, generically referred to as equal to or “untouchables”, excluded from the caste category due to their occupation: they carry out all the jobs considered impure, such as cleaning bathrooms or burying the dead, or have lost, by violating the rules, belonging to a caste, and with it social rights and roles in religious rituals. Today the outcasts define themselves Dalitsthat is, “oppressed”.
Over time, each of the four castes has broken up into a multitude of smaller groupings, which are those that are concretely found in today’s India under the name of jati relative to the profession carried out as well as to birth. This fragmentation occurred under the pressure of geographical, historical, ethnic or linguistic reasons.
After independence from the British colonizers, in 1947, India established a ban on discrimination based on caste in its Constitution, seeking to abolish such hierarchical divisions and, in an attempt to correct historical injustices to those who traditionally belonged to the lowest castes, has reserved for Dalits and other disadvantaged groups special rights such as quotas in government, jobs and universities. In 1989, these quotas were extended to include a group officially classified as Other Backward Classes, socially and scholastically backward middle and lower classes. In recent years there have been several requests from different communities to be recognized as OBC: in 2015, in the state of Gujarat, for example, there were large protests organized by patel, a historically rather wealthy group who denounced the discriminatory effects of quotas because they were excluded for the benefit of others. They therefore asked the government either to overcome the quota system or to include them.
Despite legislative efforts, the caste system has not disappeared and indeed continues to influence the daily lives of millions of people: it manifests itself with the greatest risk, for Dalits and other castes considered inferior, to suffer attacks and violence, with segregation in homes and schools, with marriages between people of the same caste or with discrimination in access to services.
Furthermore, there is a strong correlation between castes that would be formally abolished and people’s socio-economic status, a correlation which was confirmed by a survey carried out last year in the north-eastern state of Bihar. The caste census in Bihar showed that more than 80 percent of the population, which is made up of 130 million people, belongs to castes considered lower and that these groups are actually among the poorest in the area.
During the colonization of India, the British carried out caste-based censuses on a regular basis. The last one done with this criterion on a national scale dates back to 1931: the data showed, even then, how the lower castes were decidedly poorer than the others. From 1931 onwards it was decided that the censuses should no longer take into account belonging to this or that caste: out of the desire not to confirm a division of society with this parameter and for fear of opening a phase of fragility and political instability . Until the survey conducted last year in Bihar, governments had therefore always avoided taking a caste census despite the fact that, during elections, the various parties had always exploited these divisions which were essentially still active to seek blocks of votes and supporters.
Over time, in India, various proposals for a national survey that took caste into account were made, but they were never successful. The issue of the caste census has in fact always divided Indian politics and almost all political forces have changed their minds several times, including the BJP which declared itself in favor in 2018, until retracting its position in 2021.
Now, and especially after the publication of the investigation in Bihar, the opposition claims that Narendra Modi has marginalized citizens who belong to the lowest castes, but that this data is not emerging as much as it should. Collecting data at a national level with a census would therefore allow us to “have an x-ray of society”, as claimed by Rahul Gandhi, leader of the main opposition party, the Congress Party (centre-left), and to combat inequalities more effectively in the population.
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The census, as mentioned, is opposed by Modi’s government, which fears that data similar to those of Bihar may emerge and that these numbers will lead to a mobilization of the lower castes and show how illegitimate the privileges of the higher ones are, which own much of the national wealth, occupying leadership positions in the media, universities, local governments and central government.
