Politics as unusual: Who’s afraid of an all-India caste X-ray?

The politics of social justice has long held salience in India as an echo of the ‘class struggle’ of leftist extraction. As general elections loom, the question is whether it can evoke a rush of fervour that could spell an upset at the 2024 hustings. In the view of some analysts, just as the ascent of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) took a revolutionary path at first, with Hindu nationalism its rallying cry, so must the opposition find a heady issue, an arouser of passion, if it expects to shake today’s status quo. After all, expectations are rife of a third BJP victory. The ruling party’s political heft is undeniable. Yet, polls aren’t over till the last vote is counted. By one reckoning, how contestable key swing seats prove in a pivotal belt of the country could depend on vote shifts among caste groups classified as Other Backward Classes (OBCs). Little wonder that calls have arisen from the Congress and its allies for a caste census, pitched as an ‘X-ray’ of Indian life that will lay bare a crisis of caste disparity. Bihar has already taken such a snapshot. Its details, however, seem too blurry to offer voters a stark picture of haves and have-nots split by caste.

On 2 October, Bihar’s Nitish Kumar government had disclosed the outline of a caste survey it conducted by knocking on people’s doors to ask. Of the state’s 131 million people, over 63% were either OBC or Extremely Backward (a worse-off OBC segment sliced apart in Bihar). On 7 November, the state tabled the survey’s full socio-economic findings in its assembly, with Nitish Kumar using it to justify a policy of quotas going up to 75% of the pie, well beyond the Supreme Court’s 50% cap. While Bihar is among India’s poorest states, its income profile has high levels of self-reported poverty across all ranks of the traditional caste hierarchy. Over a third of its OBC homes earn no more than ₹6,000 per month, a fraction close to the Niti Aayog’s estimate of multi-dimensional poverty in this state. Although OBCs are better off than Scheduled Caste households, of which almost 43% are in this slab, their deprivation is not much worse than that of ‘general’ (or ‘upper’) caste homes, a quarter of which reported being in the lowest income bracket. Other patches of this X-ray—such as government employment, monthly earnings above ₹50,000 and vehicle ownership—show a clear skew in favour of the prevalent caste order’s elite. This conforms with guesswork based on how various groups are socially assumed to stack up. But then, while all this reveals inequality, the disparities are not distinct enough to diagnose an open-and-shut case of exclusion. As the well-off are mostly upper-caste, perhaps it would have been more alarming if richer homes were clubbed apart for a special look and surveyors could map true wealth. Right now, though, Bihar’s X-ray looks like an unlikely spark for a mass movement that might arise to challenge the status quo.

It is still possible that an all-India slice-up of economic data by caste will show worse gaps than Bihar’s. It could yield hints of whether market forces are pushing for equality. In any case, we must track distributional aspects of our economy’s emergence. It’s as an electoral issue that a caste X-ray might prove a let-down for its champions, who may have overestimated its scandal value. Maybe this explains the opposition’s focus on exceeding the 50% reservation limit—it has agitational scope. Bihar’s caste scan per se looks too smudgy to fan much discontent, let alone inflame passions. All in all, fears of a caste census seem misplaced.