BJP, Congress clash over who demanded Caste Census data first 

The census, that most sober of state exercises, is suddenly the most dramatic act in Indian politics. It counts people. But now, it looks like it also measures credit.

When news broke that the Narendra Modi government had greenlit a caste survey, Rahul Gandhi’s Congress erupted in a flurry of I told you so posters. Outside the AICC headquarters, large vinyl banners declared that “Justice has begun”. The implication was that the ruling party had finally bent to pressure, and the caste census— a demand of the Congress—was now their reluctant inheritance.

The BJP, in return, responded not with denial but with archival evidence that showed otherwise. Amit Malviya posted on X a thread quoting the then-Home Minister and Congress leader P Chidambaram’s 2010 Lok Sabha speech, in which he had raised methodological and logistical objections to collecting caste data. He had warned that caste enumeration, suspended since 1931, was fraught with classification errors, lack of enumerator training, and incompatible state-level lists. The Census, he had insisted, must prioritise accuracy above all.

So why the U-turn, the BJP asks, and why the triumphant banners now?

The answer lies in politics, not principle. For the Congress, caste enumeration is a pivot—a way to reconnect with the social justice plank it once pioneered but let drift. The BJP, traditionally cagey about a full caste count, is now recalibrating. Bihar’s survey changed the arithmetic. So did electoral signals from the OBC heartland.

But the heart of the matter is this: India’s caste census has become a proxy war for moral authority. The Congress wants to be seen as the force that stood with data, with dignity, with backward classes. The BJP wants to remind voters that it is the one actually governing—and doing the counting.

For all the outrage, what we’re witnessing is not a dispute over policy. It’s a scramble for ownership over a statistic. When the numbers arrive, they will show us who we are. 

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