The golden era of caste politics is still ahead of us

With his stupendous re-election, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has transcended caste, we are told. Caste-based regional parties have again lost to great development, never mind that the elections happened at a time of economic slowdown and record unemployment.

Victors get to write history. And so, Modi declared on 23 May 2019, “Only two castes will remain in this country. And, the country is going to be focused on only these two castes. The first caste in India is the poor. And, the second caste is people who contribute towards alleviation of poverty.”

One is reminded of this claim as the BJP celebrates the court upholding reservation for the Marathas in Maharashtra, brought in by the Devendra Fadnavis government. The BJP’s social army trended #DevendraRealMaratha on Twitter.

If India has only two castes now — the poor and those who help alleviate poverty — why is Yogi Adityanath government changing the status of some caste communities from OBCs to SCs? Tinkering with caste category status to make some communities get more reservation benefits is standard caste politics. We thought the BJP wasn’t doing caste politics. Before the 2019 elections, BJP president had promised to build a statue for the icon of the Nishad community. The community has also been given the SC status by the Yogi government.

So, did the BJP win Nishad votes due to caste-neutral development or because it promised them a statue and an SC status?

In the run-up to the 2019 elections, the BJP arranged caste gatherings of small OBC communities in Lucknow. According to journalists in Lucknow, who attended some of these, there were at least 100 such gatherings to reach out to the smallest of communities. Each sammelan was addressed by Keshav Prasad Maurya, the party’s OBC face and the deputy chief minister, who told them, “Each one of you should think you are deputy CM”.

The key to the BJP’s wooing of caste communities is using the sentiment of caste pride — your caste has a great history, you had amazing icons, we’ll build a statue for one, and so on.

And, we’re told the BJP has transcended caste?

The BJP, and the wider Hindutva parivar, is very good at being diabolical with language. Do black and claim white, polarise against Muslims and claim Sabka Saath Sabka Vikas, and so on.

Golden era

The truth about caste politics is that its golden era hasn’t even arrived yet, and the BJP will take us there.

A news development of great importance has gone unremarked in the media. The Modi government has decided that the 2021 Census will count OBCs as well, just like the Census counts SCs, STs and religious minorities. This means we will finally have very rich data on the population and economic conditions of OBCs, from the national to the village level. This data will, without doubt, revolutionise caste politics in India.

If the BJP has transcended caste, why is it counting OBCs?

The Manmohan Singh government decided not to count OBCs in the Census but in a separate Socio-Economic and Caste Census, or SECC. The survey asked people their caste, and got all kinds of caste names, which have apparently been difficult to reconcile. This is why, the government claims, the detailed OBC data on the basis of the SECC was never released.

The 2021 Census will give people caste name options and they will choose. The last time the Census counted OBCs was in 1951 but the data wasn’t made public.

Both the SECC data and the 1951 Census OBC data are classified government records. In this leaky country, one wonders how secret they are and if they haven’t reached the political parties already?

The last time the Census publicly counted and published the OBC data was in 1931. So, the 2021 Census will reveal the status of OBCs after 90 years. To begin with, we’ll have a big, official number revealing the percentage of the OBCs. The only caste group not to be counted will be the upper castes, thus revealing their percentage by deduction. It will, therefore, be clear how small India’s upper caste elite is.

The Modi government is wisely using technology for the 2021 Census, and promises to publish all data in just three years — that is, by 2024, the year of the next Lok Sabha election.

Five years from now, we should have publicly available data on the OBCs, a first in 90 years. Data crunchers are going to have a field day. Micro-targeting of communities, finding intersections of caste, class, occupation and religion are going to become very exciting. When Mandal meets big data, we’ll have a whole new world of caste politics. The game hasn’t even begun. For doing this alone, Modi could become the biggest face of caste politics in India. You ain’t seen nothing yet.

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