Why India cannot decide if caste should be counted or erased
Within a fortnight, India has been asked to do three contradictory things with caste: count it in the Census, remove it from school forms, and confront its persistence in a Dalit leader’s 'shuddhikaran' controversy. What do these competing ideas of caste visibility reveal about the discrimination that paperwork cannot erase?
India is preparing for a caste based census again, while simultaneously debating whether caste should disappear from some of its most routine official records. In the space of a fortnight, the Centre has defended a Census 2027 questionnaire that includes an open-ended caste question; Congress has demanded that it be withdrawn and redesigned; and Congress-ruled Himachal Pradesh has decided to remove caste columns from school and college admission forms. The contradiction is not simply political. It raises a more uncomfortable question: does making caste visible—or invisible—actually alter the social structures and its realities?
The Centre's 40-question Census 2027 population-enumeration schedule does include caste, marking the first nationwide Census caste enumeration since 1931, but the question is open-ended rather than based on a prescribed list. Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge and Leader of Opposition Rahul Gandhi have argued that this could fragment communities across different names and spellings and make the eventual OBC count unreliable. They have sought a revised questionnaire with a structured caste list and a separate OBC identification.
There is precedent for the concern. The 2011 Socio-Economic and Caste Census generated 46,73,034 distinct caste names, including sub-castes, synonyms, surnames, clan and gotra names and phonetic variations. The government subsequently reported that 1,45,77,195 caste-related errors still required rectification and constituted an expert group to classify the returns. The caste component was never released as a completed national dataset; in 2022, the government said there was no proposal to release it.
But the latest questionnaire raises a different concern. A recent analysis in The Wire has pointed to the unusually identification-heavy architecture of the 40-point schedule, including particulars and identifiers such as Aadhaar, passport and voter ID, arguing that the exercise begins to resemble an NPR ( National Population Register) -style identification exercise even as it is presented as a census with caste enumeration. The important question is therefore not merely whether caste is being counted, but what kind of citizen-data architecture is being built around that count.
Then comes the Congress question. Himachal Pradesh Chief Minister Sukhvinder Singh Sukhu has directed that caste columns be removed from school admission forms from the next academic session, while caste information will remain available where necessary for reservation and welfare benefits. The stated objective is to prevent children from being institutionally marked by caste.
A census seeks aggregate data for policy; an admission form places an identity directly into a child's everyday institutional record. Yet the juxtaposition exposes the limits of treating the column itself as the battlefield.
Rohan Manoj's recent analysis adds another complication. The OBC category encompasses communities with vastly different histories of social power, economic position and caste-based exclusion. If the category itself compresses unequal experiences into a single administrative group, simply counting more precisely does not automatically mean understanding caste more precisely. That further complicates the creamy-layer framework, which attempts to identify relatively advanced sections within OBCs through economic criteria, while the EWS framework separately introduces economic disadvantage as a basis for reservation outside the SC/ST/OBC categories.
And then Haldwani offers the most uncomfortable evidence of all.
After Mallikarjun Kharge addressed a rally there on August 8, a 'shuddhikaran' or purification ritual was reportedly conducted at the venue. Kharge described the episode as an experience of untouchability; the BJP rejected the allegation of a party connection and called for the matter to be investigated. The controversy subsequently reached Parliament and the Uttarakhand administration.
The sociological significance is difficult to miss. As The Wire's analysis of the episode argues, the incident exposes the distance between constitutional equality and inherited ideas of purity and pollution. A Dalit leader can occupy one of the country's highest political positions and still have his physical presence interpreted through an older social grammar of caste.
No census form produced that contradiction. No missing OBC dropdown produced it. No school admission form produced it.
That is the blind spot in India's latest caste debate. The Centre and Congress are arguing over whether caste should be more visible, better classified or removed from particular records. All of those choices may have legitimate administrative purposes. But in India caste discrimination does not require a database to exist.
India may soon possess more caste data than it has had in generations. The harder question is whether that data will make caste oppression more intelligible—or whether the country will continue mistaking the visibility of caste in paperwork for the disappearance of caste in practice. Like the exclusion or inclusion of 'Dalit' in the terms pre-determined.
