India's castes: Don't ask, don't tell, don't count?
For the first time in 80 years India may get a true tally of an ancient system.
By Jason Overdorf - GlobalPost
Published: June 5, 2010 08:30 ET in Asia
Balwanti Devi from the Dalit caste (formerly known as untouchables)
speaks at Nonahi Nagwan village in Jehanabad district in the eastern
state of Bihar. (Jayanta Shaw JS/Reuters) NEW DELHI, India — The
2,000-year-old Hindu caste system remains the most powerful force in
Indian society.
Friendships, business ties and marriages live and die according to its
dictates. Political parties carefully script their election tickets
according to its mathematics. And an increasing number of government
policies — including spiraling quotas for government jobs and
university education — follow its logic.
But it's not polite to talk about it, and might even be dangerous to
quantify it.
Yet in an unexpected turn, earlier this month the coalition-leading
Congress Party led by Sonia Gandhi and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh
caved to pressure from opposition leaders and agreed to add a survey
of India's myriad castes to the 2011 census, which began April 1.
Weeks after the decision, jostling and debate rages on as India's
politicians reflect over the potential upheavals that may result.
Many here fear that a new understanding of the various groups' numbers
could disrupt the current political structure, while the upper crust
fears another wave of escalating quotas will make it even more
difficult for a young upper caste person to get a university
education. But the momentum of caste politics makes a reversal seem
impossible.
Broadly speaking, the caste system has Brahmins and Kshatriya at the
top of the social order, followed by the trading castes known as
Baniyas and scores of laboring castes such as the Yadavs, and beneath
them all the erstwhile untouchables, whom the constitution calls the
Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes.
[Watch this video on how untouchables in Delhi are coping with the
economic changes of India]
But the last official tally of the different groups was done in 1931,
and present policies are based on extrapolations from those figures.
An official count will no doubt have far-reaching and unpredictable
implications.
Significantly, the caste census promises to determine just how many
people belong to the country's so-called "Other Backward Classes," or
OBCs, who have made dramatic political gains since the Mandal
Commission was formed "to identify the socially or educationally
backward" in 1979.
Extrapolating from the 1931 census figures, the Mandal Commission
estimated the number of OBCs at 52 percent of the population. It then
went on to recommend that OBCs be included in the quota system for
government jobs and higher education that had already been established
for the erstwhile untouchables, and recommended increasing the
proportion of reserved places from 22.5 to 49.5 percent of the total.
"[The] caste social order of the Hindu society and a large number of
the other religious groups is oppressive," said Rangarajan. "This is
one way to open up some space. There is no magic wand. I see the caste
census as part of that. It's fact finding."
The caste census proposal is now sequestered in a council of ministers
tasked with developing a plan for implementing the count – which the
home ministry has argued could bring the whole census project crashing
down, as the inclusion of caste might prompt people to fudge the
numbers to ensure their group gets a healthy share of government
benefits.
The new tally might justify a hike in spending for OBC welfare and
scholarships, and it could have a dramatic impact on the controversial
quota system.
Working backwards, the Supreme Court verdict on Mandal commission set
a ceiling of 50 percent on job and education quotas and subtracted the
existing reservations for untouchables to determine the quota for OBCs
at 27 percent. But an official count is likely to spark fresh demands
to make these quotas proportional to each group's representation in
the population.
Already, the OBC leaders of the drive for the caste census, Lalu
Prasad Yadav, Mulayam Singh Yadav and Sharad Yadav, have stepped up
their rhetoric. "In 20 ministries and 18 deparments, there is not a
single OBC in the [highest paid] Group A category," Sharad Yadav
argued during a recent parliament session.
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