As a young journalist I was introduced to the importance of the census operations fairly early. Interacting with the people behind the exercise made what would seem a dull, dreary exercise of just counting our millions of millions suddenly burst into the myriad shades of life; a walk, you could call it, through the entire landscape of the Indian sub-continent and its ways of life. I remember one Registrar General and Census Commissioner of India I interviewed – perhaps it was A. R. Nanda who incidentally was also a prime mover in getting the census form to reflect women’s invaluable contributions to family and society – telling me that census officers were trained to count every single Indian. This meant waiting for people, including the homeless, the factory worker, the share cropper, the housewife after watering the cattle for the day, “settle like flies”, so that they could be counted.

The print media on their part put out crucial information based on the census. There were reforms introduced including the re-evaluation of the value of women’s labour. For instance, according to 1981 census figures, women accounted for only 13 per cent of the workforce. Thanks to the efforts of feminist economists and scholars like Maitreyi Krishnaraj, a professor at SNDT Women’s University, Mumbai, more women were counted as economically productive workers because their hitherto “invisible” labour to keep families going was granted some economic value. When the figures of the 1991 census came in, it showed that women’s share had more than doubled to 28.6 per cent, just by making the census form more women-sensitive. 

The journalism of the day reflected these changes with cover stories in women’s magazines asking whether the term “just a housewife”, which was routinely bandied around, made sense when women played such a crucial role in keeping families going, whether they stayed at home or not. This argument incidentally figured in our public discourse recently when a Supreme Court verdict set down women’s contributions as a housewife must be quantified as worth at least Rs 30,000 a month.

But to get back to Census 2027, the media should take it very seriously for several reasons. Not only is it the first such digital exercise, it will also enumerate the caste dimensions of Indian society. But that’s not all. This is a census that has broken the decennial pattern which had been followed ever since 1872 when census operations first began in this country under the British Raj. The break came in 2021. Despite all the preparations for it having been complete, it was postponed. Such deferring was understandable given the pandemic that had marked the year. What is not understandable is why India didn’t pick up the census thread in 2023, unlike the majority of the world’s countries, including Pakistan, which successfully completed their enumeration.

While the pandemic excuse was bandied about by the government, what was weighing on its mind was the politically fraught exercise of delimitation which is required to be conducted shortly after the census. But could the delayed census also have been provoked by the clever backroom strategy of ethnic engineering? The media were content with the government’s official explanation on the delay but did not sufficiently link it with the intent behind the Citizenship Amendment Act which was primarily to recognise India as the natural homeland for Hindus. But to go a step further they also did not think it pertinent to recall Union home minister Amit Shah’s iconic statement made in April 2019: “Aap chronology samjhiye (understand the chronology)”…the government will first bring a Citizenship Amendment Bill (CAB) and after that we will bring National Register of Citizens (NRC).

The question the media have to ask themselves is this: Will the 2027 census be a determined step towards fulfilling the ultimate goal of a Hindu rashtra? Could census data be harnessed for such a project? Instructions to census data gatherers have........

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