Can more knowledge about our society, about the individuals and groups who constitute it, be a bad thing?

I’ve been wondering about this lately, in the context of two government initiatives to gather more knowledge about us Indians, as caste groups and as individuals. Both of these information-gathering exercises—the proposal for a “caste census”, which has generated a stormy argument, and the merely desultory discussion over the planned Unique Identification number (UID) for every Indian—has implications for our sense of what it is to be a citizen, and for the terms of the social contract that holds us together as a nation.

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The counting of caste groups was first undertaken in a systematic and exhaustive manner by the British, and gave statistical reality to the operative motto of the empire: that India was so fractured by caste that only the grip of imperial rule could keep it together.

Counting castes was a trial for the British census officers. Their questioning elicited many thousands of self-descriptions, including sub-castes, sects, lineages and jatis, which the census men pruned down and ranked as “castes”. To some of these castes, the British awarded social and economic privileges, so that politics in the colonial era revolved around caste groups petitioning the British for preferential categorization.

At independence, the Indian state decreed caste abolished. Although the 1948 Census Act makes no mention of what categories should or should not be enumerated, the 1951 Census broke with the colonial census tradition and did not count individual castes.
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However, the counting of two social groups subject to particular social and economic deprivation was continued. The scheduled castes, those castes marked by the stigma of “untouchability”, and the scheduled tribes, outside the Hindu caste order altogether, were enumerated and made the recipients of state policies of positive discrimination.

Debate about reintroducing caste counts was reopened from the early 1980s, with the invention of new hold-all categories such as the Other Backward Classes (OBC), designed to identify other castes subject to systematic inequality, who therefore had a claim to benefit from positive discrimination.

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In the current debate over caste in the census, all parties agree that they wish to see the abolition of caste; and all share a concern with remedying the systemic inequalities of our society: with providing at the very least equality of opportunity, “a level playing field” for all (all agree too that Dalits and tribals should continue to benefit from affirmative action policies). The differences turn on what they judge to be the best means to get there.

There are three broad positions. Some thinkers are entirely opposed to counting caste, and argue that we must move to more universalist policies to address inequalities.

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Others argue that the census must be used to produce a detailed caste enumeration of the OBCs. Such data, they argue, will reveal that the OBCs don’t form a homogenous bloc subject to equal deprivation.

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Finally, still others are calling for a full caste census, arguing that a complete count of all castes is the only non-discriminatory form of caste enumeration. This view seeks to politicize all caste categories and to disabuse those (upper castes) who believe themselves somehow to be “casteless”.

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Some proponents of OBC enumeration hope to show that perhaps half of those today classified in the OBC category are doing well enough not to justify being recipients of positive discrimination. They see hard data will be a basis on which to exclude those who are better off, and to direct resources more precisely at the truly needy. However, I wonder if this is a realistic reading of the nature of caste politics.

Is it credible that simply collecting the empirical data will be sufficient to induce the better off OBC groups to renounce their reserved benefits? It’s far more likely that they will mobilize in order to preserve their quotas; and they will certainly find political entrepreneurs willing to defend their interests in return for votes. We will have a more fragmented and more vicious mobilization of politics along caste lines.

Second is the fact that the reserved sector to which the OBCs are struggling to gain access is fast shrinking.

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Third, there is the matter of the social and political costs of enshrining caste counts in the census.

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I think we need to collect empirical data on OBC castes by means other than the census: by academic studies, special commissions and reports. We may well lose something in accuracy and authority. But I’d argue it’s a necessary discount. As one of our few tangible expressions of citizenship, the census needs to maintain—and to be seen to maintain—an indifference to caste identities. In our politics, it need hardly be said, symbols and symbolism matter.

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Yet I think the strongest case against a caste census is the fact that persisting with policies of positive discrimination and reserved quotas is no longer the best way to construct a more just society. Instead of continuing to tinker with reservation policies, we’d do better to write a new social contract for ourselves, based on a more universalist approach to justice. Instead of arguing for privileges for some, we should be redesigning the state so that it works towards providing adequate public goods—above all, education—for all.

In working to build a new social contract, founded on a universalist approach, the ability to individuate our citizens is fundamental. And for this, the Unique Identification number is an important tool. That’s not to say that there are not dangers inherent in it. All forms of knowledge, especially those collected by a state and linked to state power, contain the potential for pernicious misuse.

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