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First Caste Count in 80 Years as Modern Politics Revive Ancient Traditions
India will count the number of people in each layer of its caste hierarchy for the first time in 80 years, reigniting debate over whether the centuries-old classification should play a role in policy making.
Home Minister Palaniappan Chidambaram said today the federal Cabinet had approved a house-to-house survey of caste affiliation to be carried out between June and September next year, after the completion of the country’s national census.
Initially opposed to the idea, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s government reversed its position after regional politicians drawing support from underprivileged communities argued that a count of caste identities would improve the implementation of affirmative action policies. Such programs reserve government jobs and places in higher education for those from traditionally marginalized groups.
Opponents argue the count will reemphasize the role of caste in social planning and lead to more demands for special status. “A caste census will help politicians target a section of the community to create a vote bank to keep them in power,” Surinder Nath, a professor of anthropology at the University of Delhi, said today. It’s unlikely to improve governance and may “bring more social conflict,” he said.
While government policy and a market economy have eroded the influence of the more than 3,000-year-old caste system, it remains strong in the small towns and villages where 72 percent of Indians live. There, caste, based on ancient ideas of personal purity and pollution, remains a major factor in determining how people earn a living and whom they marry.
1931 Census
The fight for benefits doled out to lower castes can turn violent. At least 37 people died in demonstrations by the Gujjar community in the western state of Rajasthan in 2008 as it fought for the same rights handed to another local group.
The last time a full count of caste numbers was carried out was in 1931. After the end of British colonial rule in 1947, surveys were restricted to two especially disadvantaged groupings. Jawaharlal Nehru, the independent nation’s first prime minister, criticized popular beliefs that “become petrified in caste divisions.”
While caste is largely associated with India’s majority Hindus, who account for 80 percent of the population, some Muslim and Christian communities are similarly organized.
A civil society campaign -- Meri Jaati Hindustani or My Caste is Indian -- and led by former bureaucrats, lawyers, religious leaders and journalists campaigned against the new caste count, saying on its website the move would “prove disastrous for the unity, integrity and prosperity” of India.
‘Caste Reality’
“Caste is a reality in the country, which cannot be ignored. The people of every caste have to be enumerated,” Lalu Prasad, chief of the Rashtriya Janata Dal, a party based in the eastern state of Bihar, said in the parliament earlier this year. “When counting of animals, bird and everything else is being done, why can’t we have a caste-based census?”
India’s modern social stratification is immensely complex. A commission in 1980 identified 3,743 castes among the population group referred to as the Other Backward Classes, to which it said 52 percent of the country’s people belonged.
State-funded colleges such as the Indian Institutes of Technology and the Indian Institutes of Management have to reserve 27 percent of seats for members of the community.
To contact the reporter on this story: Bibhudatta Pradhan in New Delhi at bpradhan@bloomberg.net
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