The republic was not even a month old when the census superintendents of all states of the infant nation gathered in Delhi to prepare for the gargantuan task before them – the first census of independent India. The operation was headed by Scotsman William Walter Murray Yeatts – he would die months later, to be replaced by RA Gopalaswami – but in his inaugural speech, deputy prime minister Vallabhbhai Patel made it clear that the 1951 census would mark a break from India’s colonial past, particularly on the question of caste.
“Formerly there used to be elaborate caste tables which were required in India partly to satisfy the theory that it was a caste-ridden country and partly to meet the needs of administrative measures dependent on caste divisions. In the forthcoming census this will no longer be a prominent feature,” Patel told the officials, urging them instead to devote their “energies and attention” to collecting basic economic data that would help the nation.
It was no accident. The sentiment that explicit enumeration of caste was primitive and improper in a modern democracy was crystallised in Constituent Assembly discussions, where many members felt the counting of castes aided in British divide-and-rule policies. Both Patel and Jawaharlal Nehru appeared to agree that caste enumeration – beyond what the Constitution absolutely necessitated – would hurt attempts to forge unity, a national obsession at India’s founding moment.
Yet, despite the moral arguments against it, the demand for caste enumeration never wilted. BR Ambedkar – who so skillfully had marshalled caste census data in front of the Simon Commission and the Round Table Conferences to push for expanded representation of marginalised castes and win political reforms – was its first votary. “The home minister of the Government of India who is responsible for this omission was of the opinion that if a word does not exist in a dictionary it can be proved that the fact for which the word stands does not exist,” he wrote in Thoughts on Linguistic States in 1955.
{{/usCountry}}Yet, despite the moral arguments against it, the demand for caste enumeration never wilted. BR Ambedkar – who so skillfully had marshalled caste census data in front of the Simon Commission and the Round Table Conferences to push for expanded representation of marginalised castes and win political reforms – was its first votary. “The home minister of the Government of India who is responsible for this omission was of the opinion that if a word does not exist in a dictionary it can be proved that the fact for which the word stands does not exist,” he wrote in Thoughts on Linguistic States in 1955.
{{/usCountry}}Then, the first backward classes commission – whose recommendations would end up being repudiated by its own chairman and subsequently by Nehru – recommended that the 1961 census be remodelled to enumerate caste. “Before the disease of caste is destroyed all facts about it have to be noted and classified in a scientific manner as in a clinical record…As long as social welfare and relief have to be administered through castes, classes or groups, full information about these groups should be obtained and tabulated,” it wrote.
The second backward classes commission – made famous by chairman BP Mandal – echoed the appeal in the 1970s and 80s, noting that the study faced “enormous difficulties” in the absence of caste enumeration after 1931, and asking for reconsideration of the policy of not counting castes in the census.
The endurance of the demand -- despite stonewalling by every administration across the ideological spectrum – underscored a fundamental dichotomy of the Indian State: Where caste is a defining reality of everyday life yet curiously absent from policy, and where enumeration only marks the marginalised, not the privileged.
The last eight decades have seen caste transmogrify into newer and more entrenched forms, regulating the lives of millions from the accident of birth to the moment of death, even as affirmative action has been haltingly implemented and elicited bitter hate from upper caste. Modernity’s great failure in India has been in undercutting the effect of caste, made plain by the sharp demand for a caste count in every census since the turn of the millennium.
What’s been the political response? In 2001, LK Advani ruled out the enumeration of caste. In 2010, Pranab Mukherjee confirmed that caste would be included in the census, only for the government to use technocratic manoeuvres and bureaucratic delay to graft caste enumeration onto a poverty survey, delineate it to a ministry with little experience of nationwide exercises, and eventually never officially release the data, citing impurities.
In 2025, the Cabinet announced that caste would be part of the decennial census; and while the promise has been met on paper, the open-ended format of the census question has sprouted doubts on the quality of the data collected. It appears certain that the government will end up with hundreds of thousands of caste names, and with no pre-approved list (as was used in Bihar in 2023 and Telangana in 2024), census officials will have to work the backend to put out caste data – if it ever comes out.
Clearly, a political call has been taken. Maybe the government is confident that the deficit among marginalised castes in 2024 has been addressed; maybe it is buoyed by recent electoral victories and doesn’t want to tinker with a winning formula; maybe recent Gen Z protests have made it wary of embarking on a risky expedition; or maybe it doesn’t want to alienate its core upper-caste base amid economic and energy disruptions. After all, the Opposition has not won over significant chunks of the backward and Dalit vote despite sustained effort, Nitish Kumar – once a driver of the caste census demand – is now an ally and anyway not in active politics, and caste surveys in Bihar, Karnataka and Telangana have engendered no radical transformation of their electoral landscape, as once projected. And the prospect of quotas breaching the 50% cap mandated by the Supreme Court no longer looks as inevitable -- at least in the short run.
As Trina Vithayathil has noted in Counting Caste, the obfuscation of caste cuts a long arc in India’s history. By marking only scheduled caste and scheduled tribes, the census refrains from putting the spotlight on groups that are numerically feeble but socially, economically and politically muscular. It inverts the logic of caste by tying it to those who are at the receiving end of discrimination, instead of those who practice it. The consistent stance on this issue taken by India’s left and right lays bare the stranglehold that the caste elite have on policy, bureaucracy and politics – no matter the expansion of backward caste politics over the past half century.
A rigorous enumeration of all castes cannot eradicate caste bias, or radically transform electoral politics. In fact, it might do little to immediately improve the lives of those at the bottom of the pyramid. But what it can do is present an intellectually honest picture of contemporary India, gather evidence on how caste has shaped health, education and employment indices, underline which communities have commandeered outsized resources, and provide a starting point for policy tweaks. India’s first government used anti-colonial logic from the freedom movement to invisibilise caste. The last government may have used technocratic measures to limit it.