Caste is a basic social fact of Indian life, and as such, a caste census would be an obvious and regular exercise of governance in the country. Precisely because caste is not exclusively a social fact, but primarily a political relationship, its official counting has been and remains overtly partisan.
In demanding a caste census, Rahul Gandhi and the Congress Party last week drew a new dividing line between the two national parties of India. Whether it will yield electoral payback for the Congress will only be determined in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections.
This electoral promise and political principle have, above all, not redefined but certainly repositioned the grand old party. Historically, the Congress has generally been on the side of equity and even distributive justice, but it was at best squeamish in overtly naming caste as the fundamental force of inequity in India. The issue of the caste census offers the Congress a new ideological plank and possibly even momentum—it could potentially challenge and redraw parties and their representation in the coming years.
The greater challenge will be for the party to imagine and design a new and relevant set of ideas and policies that can effectively challenge an evolving Hindu-first identity politics in the era of a highly competitive and increasingly globalised economy that India is. To put it another way, once the caste data is publicly available, will it be a matter of increasing the threshold of reservations as currently set by the Supreme Court to 50 per cent? Though politically explosive, this is not the only where it is at. The fundamental issue is between the contradictory pulls of fissure and fusion that Indian identity politics of caste and religion have left entirely and quite cynically to electoral gaming. It is this blurred contest of division and unity that requires the greatest imagination, hence remains politically most risky, if not unthinkable.
To be clear, this is a visceral issue and for what it’s worth, I am pro-caste reservations. Thus, the demand for a national and regional census of caste, to me, seems both necessary and basic, and a tad underwhelming. It can, at best, punctuate or momentarily pause but it will be insufficient to pierce the aspiration-driven polity that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) seeks to dominate.
Also read: Modi govt’s reluctance for caste census is a political move to hide ground realities
Caste and Congress: Two histories
In one of his earliest writings, BR Ambedkar had deemed the Congress’ outlook as ‘politically radical’ in demanding Independence from the Empire but he also identified them as ‘social Tories’ or status-quoists. This was mainly because the party’s dominant view before Independence remained beholden to the view that caste was primarily a social-religious artefact and that it was best left out of realpolitik.
Ambedkar had also critiqued religious and social reformers and even Karl Marx to decisively articulate and position caste not merely as a (bad) social institution of occupation or labour, but a historically deep and wildly unequal political relationship marked and retained by power and violence. The Indian Constitution testifies to Ambedkar’s tenacity in arguing for a national reservation policy. In ensuring this, Ambedkar— who had Jawaharlal Nehru’s Congress party’s support—was designing Indian democracy. How so, you may ask?
Succinctly put, Ambedkar understood that caste was primarily segregative and separatist in nature. Caste, as Ambedkar knew, militated not just against fraternity but also a life of association that is fundamental to any form of democracy. Reservations provided a sharp and deep instrument to ensure that the separatist tendencies of caste were made to face each other in public institutions. While it offered a key mechanism to distribute public goods and primarily education, reservations offered, for the first time, a form of political power to those very caste groups that had been simply and brutally excluded of agency or play. This has led to both the emergence of multi-parties in India and a competition among caste groups.
In what was both an immediate and long-term form of thinking, Ambedkar folded the question of the minority or the politically disadvantaged within the category of the Hindu social order. Several lower sub-castes, which are small in numbers, cannot not simply be incorporated into one mass category of the Hindu majority.
The confrontation of lower castes and primarily the other backward classes against a majority Hindu politics had its first and full-blown contest only decades later, in the early 1990s when Mandal and Mandir convulsed and changed Indian democracy.
If in the 1940s, the Congress party had whole-heartedly supported Ambedkar’s design, then in the late 1980s and 1990s it simply evacuated (through equivocation) itself from the big-ticket contest of caste and Hindu nationalist politics. This contest, with former Prime Minister VP Singh as its architect, was conducted on the political site and at the cost of the Congress.
Also read: What happened to ‘Hinduism is tolerant, secular’? Difficult question for an Indian today
Hindutva 3.0 contra Mandal 2.0
Thirty years later, as the Congress shifts its focus towards caste, the upcoming 2024 elections look like a replay of Mandal and Mandir movements, which the INDIA alliance and NDA might represent.
There are two obvious and fundamental shifts that complicate a simple repetition. To be clear, I don’t mean that all historic recurrences are necessarily farcical, occasionally repetitions can be imperative, with or without choice.
First, in annexing the idea of aspiration, Hindutva under Prime Minister Narendra Modi updated itself to the politics and psychic investments of a liberalised India. Or this was Hindutva 2.0. This is to say nothing of the personality or any other political style that has now become synonymous with Modi. In deploying the mantra of aspiration Modi had in effect responded to the Congress-led economic reforms.
Through the heady decade of the previous Congress-led UPA government, economic growth and ambitious welfarism marked several and major policy initiatives. Despite historically having been the party of aspiration, the Congress was outfooted. The BJP (and newly formed Aam Aadmi Party) instead successfully spun the UPA decade as one of corruption. The loss of ideological and social narrative left the Congress stymied since at least 2011 if not since 1989.
One broad stroke upshot has been that through aspiration, the BJP has been able to position itself among several lower caste groups, both Dalits and the OBCs, even as it keeps the decibels high on Hindu identity. Ambedkar’s design of the minority within the majority faces a new, even seductive force of incorporation from the BJP.
It is an open question, rather than an assertion, if Ambedkar’s design is saturating even before it could fully articulate itself.
Second, the plethora of parties overwhelmingly representing the OBCs in the last three decades are primarily regional. They may fuse social diversity at a regional level but at the national level they at best represent a bloc of fissures. This is quite apart from the fact that several of these parties now face generational stasis and transition both in leadership and in their followers. As the only national party in the rainbow coalition of the INDIA alliance, the Congress risks dilution as it potentially energises these several regional and primarily OBC parties that have now come together in their opposition to Modi.
Can the Congress imagine a new politics of caste to emerge as the primary bipolar node? This alone will determine the future of a bipartisan polity in India. If it were to remain only a presiding partner that oversees and helps manage these competitive and caste-laden fissures of the alliance, the work of aggressive incorporation will before time, return to the BJP.
In short, if Mandal 1.0 was conducted at the cost of the Congress party, then Mandal 2.0 offers now not a mere repositioning but also an erosion as a real risk. With imagination and new compelling ideas, this moment, however, could be a major opening for the Congress to create a new national conversation on caste. It will need to surpass Ambedkar’s design of fissured contestation. Or simply put, if the Congress can square the circle of aspiration with caste justice, then Mandal 2.0 will neither be a farcical repetition nor a last-ditch collective effort to stall Modi. Instead, it can transform the Congress’ current politics of protest to a real contention with power.
In gaining a new emotional and ideological momentum through the Bharat Jodo Yatra and now with the demand of a caste census, the Congress has found a new political utterance. It has yet to address aspiration. If aspiration is a byword for seeking privilege and status, the upcoming era of an even more competitive, globalised and privatised economy will only sharpen caste as privilege. India’s so-called neo-middle class remains expansive in every sense.
In taking the step forward towards caste census, the Congress may or may not have pushed back the BJP to its earlier avatar of temple and identity. Whether or not the BJP can reinvent itself a third time in 30 years, the Congress with a Dalit president has certainly acquired new social and political stripes after a long hiatus. Its emergence as a new, fully formed and forceful political entity will depend entirely on its power to reimagine, fuse, connect and animate a new national identity in which caste is fundamental but also a complicated fact.
Shruti Kapila is Professor of History and Politics at the University of Cambridge. She tweets @shrutikapila. Views are personal.
(Edited by Ratan Priya)