Count caste in this census to annihilate it
3 Jun 2010, 0628 hrs IST,ET Bureau
Satish Deshpande, Professor of Sociology, DSE, DU
The single-most important lesson offered by the history of independent
India is that caste awareness is the only viable route to the true
abolition of caste. The new republic and its idealistic Constitution
opted for a caste blind policy, treating the Scheduled Castes and
Scheduled Tribes as an unavoidable exception.
In order to succeed, caste blindness needed to be preceded by an
all-out assault on caste privilege. Instead, Nehruvian India
squandered a historic window of opportunity. By limiting itself to
'abolishing' caste formally, it turned a blind eye to the perpetuation
and deepening of substantive caste inequalities.
Designed to fail, this 60-year experiment has done so in a spectacular
fashion. Its crowning achievement is that the country is split into
two warring camps. On one side is the upper caste elite, the minority
group that has leveraged its caste privileges to maximum effect under
the cover of caste blindness, and thanks to the same policy, now
believes itself to be caste-less .
On the other side is the vast majority of the so-called 'lower'
castes, which, having been massively shortchanged by six decades of
supposedly caste-blind development, now insists that caste is
all-important and all talk of abolishing caste is mere humbug.
Although both sides are products of the same fatally-flawed notion of
caste blindness, they seem to have nothing else in common, least of
all a mutually-comprehensible language that permits dialogue.
Nevertheless, both these sides inhabit the same nation and must learn,
willy-nilly, to share it. In order to forestall further rifts in our
social fabric, we must create a climate more conducive to debate and
discussion across the two camps.
To do this, we need a decisive break with the naive caste blindness
that insists on equating victim and beneficiary, urging them both to
be silent about caste. Such naivete fosters the false and incendiary
upper caste belief that caste awareness is steeped in the sin of self
seeking 'politics' while caste blindness is an elevated 'ethics'
without sin.
It is surely better to count caste than to cast stones. Census 2011
offers us yet another historic opportunity to make a fresh beginning
in tackling the caste question. It can help us break out of the
sterile deadlock in which 'caste' is reduced to 'lower caste' , and
the latter to quota quarrels. To collectively acknowledge that all of
us are marked by caste in different ways is the most important reason
for a caste census, going far beyond the need to rationalise
reservation policies.
We must count those who need no quotas and feel caste-less . Let them
say they have no caste, or like Mr Amitabh Bachhan, claim to be of the
Indian caste. The number and class composition of those who can afford
this luxury will itself be educative.
The practical objections to a caste census are exaggerated. Caste is
certainly complex, but not too complex to be counted. Only a minuscule
proportion will be genuinely uncertain; for the overwhelming majority,
the only problem will be with synonyms.
This can be tackled because the interpretation and tabulation of data
comes at a later stage, by which time careful procedures for localised
aggregation can be designed.
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