The Caste Survey that Backfired

 

The caste survey has boomeranged in Karnataka. The Congress government has ordered a fresh enumeration after the release of the earlier one, commissioned in 2015 by the Karnataka State Commission for Backward Classes, set off alarm bells across the social spectrum. That data, leaked this April but never officially published, suggested a demographic reversal: Scheduled Castes and Muslims appeared more numerous than the electorally entrenched Vokkaligas and Lingayats. The fallout was swift, including from within the ruling party. Now, with panchayat and municipal elec­tions on the horizon, the government is looking to start over—this time under the Directorate of Economics and Statistics. The decision is expected to be pushed through at the cabinet meeting on June 12.

Chief Minister Siddaramaiah insists the new survey is being conducted on the orders of the Congress high command. He has said that it will take no more than 90 days, although the 2015 exercise took over two years. To avoid repeating past mistakes, this will be framed as a “socio-economic and education survey”. Yet, no one misses the point: this is about reservation arithmetic and political reassurance. By limiting household revisits to those seeking corrections, the government hopes to minimise disruption. Still, dissent brews within the cabinet. A full-scale caste count hasn’t happened in India since 1931. Karnataka’s reboot, nudged by its party leader­ship and hemmed in by deadlines, reveals the challenge facing the national caste census. In India, caste is not just a category—it is a claim, a memory, a grievance, a performance. To count it is to disturb it. And to recount it is to admit: no survey, however scientific, can fully contain what caste has come to mean. What a census uncovers is not just population ratios, but anxieties about power, place, and purpose. Some fear the loss of ancestral prominence. Others dread the dilution of historic claims to grievance. Still others, having clawed upward, worry they will be pinned back to labels they thought they had out­grown. Enumeration, then, is never neutral. Categories are cartographies of ambition. Who defines them, and how, matters.

caste censusdemographyIndian politicsMuslimsSiddaramaiah