The government that announced the caste census a year ago has decided to kill it. The same cold political calculus that forced a concession has now prompted a reneging on that reluctant promise. Obviously, we should not expect a formal announcement or an official funeral. Instead, the idea will be buried quietly, finely camouflaged under technical verbiage, while the charade of the caste census carries on.

According to the report by Deeptiman Tiwary, first carried in this paper (‘No drop-down options, caste census format to be open-ended’, IE, August 9), the Registrar General of India (RGI), in charge of conducting the census, has decided to use an open-ended question on caste rather than a drop-down menu of castes for the population enumeration phase of the coming census of India. Simply put: When the census enumerator comes to your house, she will not offer you a list of caste names to choose from, but simply ask you to name your caste and record it the way you state it.

Now, what’s wrong with that? And how does this seemingly trivial and super-technical decision sound the death knell of the exercise of the caste census?

For this, you have to read Trina Vithayathil’s authoritative book Counting Caste: Census Politics, Bureaucratic Deflection, and Brahmanical Power in India. It is a painstaking documentation of how the caste census was sabotaged in 2011. An intense parliamentary debate led by Sharad Yadav contributed to an all-party consensus in favour of carrying out a caste census. But there was no discussion or even an awareness of how exactly caste was to be recorded in the census. This........

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