Will 'Bahujanism' be the New Populism? How Caste Census Can Change Politics

One should insist on throwing caution to the wind and welcome the new age of caste-based politics and mobilisation.

Competitive populism is exactly what will ensue from the outset of caste census politics. Populism has gotten bad press everywhere, from the media to academia. The ideology of populism is blamed for everything bad in democratic countries around the world, be it Chavismo or Trumpism.

(Image: Namita Chauhan/ The Quint)

(India's next Census exercise, which will include caste data for the first time since Independence, will be conducted in two phases, starting 1 March 2027, with some regions like Jammu and Kashmir, Ladakh, and Uttarakhand beginning earlier in October 2026. This piece has been republished in light of the recent announcement. It was first published on 5 May 2025.)

Opposition to caste enumeration has not been confined to the Hindu Right. Since the 1930s, various segments of the upper castes — including leaders from the Congress, Left, Muslim League, liberal academics, and caste associations — have opposed it. Choicest abuses have been hurled at the idea: the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) thought it would be “highly detrimental to India’s social fabric”, Pratap Bhanu Mehta once called it a “monumental travesty”, and MN Srinivas branded it a strategy to “divide and rule”.

The Bahujan political leadership — from Kanshi Ram, Sharad Yadav, and Lalu Prasad Yadav to Mayawati and Tejashwi Yadav — were persistent, however. So much so that ignoring such a central demand has become politically untenable for any major national party.

Rahul Gandhi's endorsement of the caste census was a pivotal moment. It rearticulated a long-standing Bahujan and OBC-socialist demand into an electable slogan that even compelled a section of upper-caste liberals to take cognisance, albeit cautiously.

Meanwhile, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its ideological parent, the RSS, which have long resisted caste enumeration, are now seen by their core support base of upper castes as betrayers. “Modi is just Ambedkar with a Gujarati accent”, goes a tweet — and it was not meant as a compliment. A WhatsApp message laments the appeasement politics of the BJP. We were supposed to hit the Pakistan army general, not the Indian general category, says a meme.

By 2023, however, the RSS had adjusted to the inevitability of caste enumeration. “But”, RSS spokesperson Sunil Ambekar said, “it should be used for welfare … not as a political tool.” Afroz Alam, in a recent article in The Indian Express, echoes the same sentiment from the other side of the spectrum: a fear that it could lead to “competitive populism”. It is as if the whole field has shifted. The right-wing and left-liberal cautioning against the census now warns us against politicising the census, rather than rejecting it outright.

The Democratic Boon of Populism

Competitive populism is exactly what will ensue from the outset of caste census politics. Populism has gotten bad press everywhere, from the media to academia. The ideology of populism is blamed for everything bad in democratic countries around the world, be it Chavismo or Trumpism. Outside the press, however, populism continues to be one of the most popular ideologies. 

A case can be made, then, that populism is a positive and powerful force in democratic politics — and that populism is the least troubling aspect of the authoritarian regimes it is accused of nurturing. The ‘people’ is the sovereign category in a democracy, constructed and consecrated through centuries of struggle. Populism or people-ism is little more than the natural movement of democracy — the restoration of sovereignty to the people.

The Congress and the BJP are openly using populist rhetoric. While the former has appropriated Bahujan populism with an anti-elite bend — the unity of 90 percent left-behinds against the 10 percent have-it-alls — the latter claims a harmonious development of the nation through affirmative action measures.

These two variants of populism are natural homes for a party in opposition and one in power, respectively. The originators of the caste census demand too were unabashedly populist. Census-populism is one of those rare instances where a right-wing fascist or authoritarian party does not monopolise populism. What does this mean for democracy?

How Enumeration Can Reignite Bahujan Political Consciousness

Current strategies of many political parties are limited to proportionally disbursing MLA and MP tickets, celebrating caste icons, and reducing caste politics to squabbles over reservations. A comprehensive caste enumeration with expansive parameters could radically alter this landscape.

The publication of caste-disaggregated data on indicators like income, land ownership, employment, housing, private sector representation, and so on would expose not only absolute deprivation but also the relative disparities among Bahujan communities and between them and the upper castes.

Existing datasets—from The National Family Health Survey (NFHS), The Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS), The National Sample Survey Office (NSSO), Department of Personnel & Training (DoPT), and Oxfam—have struggled to galvanise Bahujan mobilisation or invoke moral outrage due to a lack of caste-disaggregated clarity. It is understandably difficult for a politician to say at a suburban town square, “According to Oxfam…” Who is Oxfam for the average Indian? But everyone knows the central government.

Without granular caste data, policymaking remains abstract and ineffective. Each year, we hear that the top one percent or 10 percent of Indians control a disproportionate share of the nation's wealth, yet these figures often feel distant and abstract. This should tell us that caste in India continues to serve as a primary source for community identity and mobilisations for the majority, and numbers without recognition of caste at a granular level will face roadblocks in policy formulations as well as political mobilisations.

The legitimacy of census data, reinforced by the state's official imprimatur, lends it significant political weight and would shift the terms of political engagement. Demands would move beyond representation toward redistribution and structural reforms.

We would no longer revolve around symbolic recognition but demand concrete redistributive policies: challenging the 50 percent cap on reservations and advocacy for quotas in the private sector are already gaining traction. Demanding equitable access to land, education, and employment will be more streamlined. The smaller OBCs and neglected General category jatis will have no option but to turn towards more entrepreneurial approaches to solve their problems.

The historical resonance of Kanshiram's "85 versus 15" slogan exemplifies how numerical assertions can reshape political narratives. A disaggregated caste census today could achieve far more, fueling unprecedented political awareness and demands.

Crucially, the dissemination of this data by Bahujan caste organisations and political parties will elevate grassroots political consciousness. It will move discourse beyond cultural tokenism and symbolic representation to insist on accountability and material justice. Because large sections of the Bahujan population share similar socioeconomic conditions, the political logic will gravitate toward cross-caste coalitions and shared policy frameworks.

The ripple effects will also be felt at the regional level. Dominant landed OBC groups that have prospered politically and economically will face new challenges from lower OBCs and SCs. This trend is already visible in Karnataka, where recent caste surveys have provoked political debates over the entitlements of Lingayats and Vokkaligas.

Simultaneously, as caste becomes a central political axis for distributive justice, it opens up avenues for marginalised Christian and Muslim communities to stake claims on socio-economic grounds rather than being confined to religious identities. Crucially, this shift will catalyse demands for democratisation in public discourse, media representation, and access to private sector opportunities — spaces currently monopolised by upper castes.

A Laissez-Faire Caste Politics

All these scenarios seem to confirm what the critics of the census warn us about — a wanton, universalised struggle in which every caste is pitted against every other. This laissez-faire casteism is feared only by those who think they stand to lose by it: the upper castes and upper-casteists. We surely would not see an immediate Bahujan unity from the caste census. Evn the Mahagathbandhan government in Bihar fell apart as soon as it completed a statewide caste survey in 2023.

Rather, we would likely witness an acceleration of caste politics. It took repeated trial and error in electoral experiments to know which caste could cooperate, share power, and rule together. With census data, parties and organisations can clinically plan and execute alliances, outreach, and strategies in a transparent environment.

In short, caste politics would move from a game of cards to a game of chess. Card games rely on informational opacity; poker cannot be played if everyone knows everyone else’s cards. Chess, on the other hand, relies on informational transparency.

Both sides know exactly what the space looks like. Much like chess, this form of politics will be an open struggle, precisely why we should welcome it and not suppress it. Mao considered war to be politics by other means. Michel Foucault flipped it around and claimed politics is war by other means. It is better to have caste politics now than a caste war later.

In this political space, we would likely see Bahujanism as an Indian variant of populism. The political category of the ‘Bahujan’ would be up for grabs, with parties fiercely and violently trying to appropriate it. A Hindu-majority country being politically mobilised by a Buddhist principle — the idea of ‘Bahujan’ stems directly from Buddha’s teachings — is a remarkable achievement in itself. It is even sweeter that it is a historically peaceful category. It is the exact opposite of the German Volk, which replaced the German ‘people’; the Volk was primitivist, the Bahujan is democratic-revolutionary.

Resisting the Count: Caste Enumeration and the Politics of Evasion

Marshall McLuhan notes an incident in India in the 1970s where the introduction of hot and cold water in a village created two antagonistic camps and had to be eventually withdrawn. One does not usually think of water temperature as being a riot-sparker. One can be even less sure about census data. Enumeration could create a civil war, as alarmists warned us. It is just that such improbabilities cannot be reasonably accounted for.

Nor can any large-scale census in a country as diverse as India be devoid of anomalies. Mistaken identities and unclear nomenclature will almost certainly be a part of the first census. We already got a glimpse of it in the 2011 census, which recorded lakhs of jatis and could not sort them out — or so the official explanation goes. Similarly, in Karnataka, there are ongoing debates, quite heated, over the methodology and categorisation.

As Joel Lee's Deceptive Majority illustrates arbitrary decisions by enumerators often erase complex religious identities, and people are clubbed under Hindu and Muslim categories despite asserting independent claims.

Additionally, census data on religion is politicised by right-wing forces from time to time to stoke fears of a Muslim demographic surge, yet this has never been grounds to stop counting religious identities.

Such processes of caste fusion, fission, and clarification ought to be left to eventually emerge. The key here is to ensure the regular repetition of the census. Over time, discrepancies and contestations in caste clusters and sub-castes can be resolved through expert consultation and institutional learning. Ultimately, the true implications of caste enumeration will only be visible once it is conducted and the data is in the public domain. Only then can one engage in an informed debate on the nature, course, and implications of caste enumeration.

But census politics has already begun and is well on its way. It has let loose Bahujanising parties — those who do the tedious task of turning disparate jatis into cohesive political blocs. Rest assured that if the NDA government refuses to count any caste or insists on obfuscating categories, there will be many Bahujan-ist parties, not just the Bahujan Samaj Party, willing to challenge them purely for electoral benefits. And that’s a good thing.

(Sumeet Samos is a master's graduate in Modern South Asian Studies, University of Oxford. Arjun Ramachandran is a research scholar at the Department of Communication, University of Hyderabad. This is an opinion piece. The views expressed above are the authors' own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)