Beyond Counting: What Made The Caste Census Inevitable?

It is important to understand why two national parties have pivoted to an anti-caste agenda, writes Ravikant Kisana.

The Ambedkarite consciousness mobilised at the bottom, at the grassroots, and grew upwards—from tiny saplings to giant trees reaching for the sky. 

(Photo: Aroop Mishra/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 3 May 2025.)

In the wake of the Bharatiya Janata Party's (BJP's) announcement that the next census would be a caste census (totally opposed to its earlier long-held stance), many commentaries will be written, wondering what the policy and political impact of the same would be. It is however, also important to take a moment to understand how this moment was reached in the first place.

In 2023, when the Bihar government published the results of the statewide caste census, I had written for The Quint, predicting that this momentum will eventually shift to a national stage and end the ‘Modi consensus’. The latter has been a reshaping of national political and policy discourse away from the social-justice, caste-based mobilisations, which started in the 1970s, gathered momentum during the 1990s, and peaked in the early 2000s.

Under the ‘Modi consensus’, the discourse pivoted massively towards centralising religion—primarily the ‘Hindu’ identity—as the cultural glue keeping all the different caste groups together, who often have antagonistic interests. The othering of religious minorities, particularly Muslims, became the mobilisational goal of his formation.

Parallel to this pivot was the branding of ‘caste’ political action as a vestige of primitive and antiquated social thinking. This branding was carried out by the cultural intelligentsia, which remains almost exclusively savarna. For them, the future was supposed to be a ‘valhalla’ of ‘development’, with IT, bullet trains, and super-power status, which could only be achieved through market reforms and not caste action.

Development Dreams vs Social Reality

It was a seductive dream that was sold. But it started coming apart at its seams, primarily because of the lack of material benefits to the vast masses of India’s marginalised.

As the scarcity intensified, the public sector employment safety net shrank and income inequality worsened. Even the biggest champions of the ‘development dreams’ began turning to their caste leaders and kin for access to the few remaining opportunities. A down-and-out Congress got seemingly a second wind as it reinvented itself with a caste-justice oriented agenda.

Under pressure and dependent on allies, the BJP’s volte-face decision to conduct a caste census is therefore not surprising. In fact, it appears predictable with the Bihar Assembly elections due later in the year.

Bihar has historically been a state where power depends on caste-based social justice—even the Bihar BJP had supported the increase in reservation ceiling from 50 percent to 65 percent, based on the Bihar state caste census results. With fresh state elections looming, and the national government reliant on Nitish Kumar’s 12 MPs, perhaps the timing of its shift on this issue was rushed.

The Long Arc of Ambedkarite Assertion

But it is important to understand why two national political parties, with historical savarna roots, have pivoted to an anti-caste agenda in recent years.

It has not been due to the largesse of their hearts. They have both been humbled—and compelled—to do so by a slow-moving, disaggregated, diffused but powerful grassroots consciousness mobilised under the broad umbrella of the Ambedkarite movement.

While the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) as a political force may be fading, the vestiges of its ‘Bahujan’ mass outreach from the 1980s to the 2000s has created, sustained, and evolved its own pressure-group consciousness. An entire generation of professionals, activists and volunteers mobilised nationally do not disappear into thin air or wilt with the political decline of their party.

The ideology lives on and is carried forward with them—into whichever formation they enter. The past five or six years have witnessed a strange phenomena: the massive rise of Ambedkarite celebration and assertion in the public domain, even as the political parties which once embodied these symbols have withered.

It is an organic rise, which has seen no serious cultural analysis: where did it come from, and how did it acquire such a critical mass?

Across tens of thousands of villages and towns in India, in places whose names are not known in big cities to people educated in English medium schools, Ambedkarite battles have been fought by the most vulnerable communities, to install Babasaheb Ambedkar’s statues in public spaces, to build Buddh Vihars, to sustain and organise resistance as a mission of educating and training the next generation.

These have been continuous community, mobilisations across the country, often run on their own initiative and will power, emergent even in geographies where Ambedkarite political parties have had no serious footprint. 

Proportional Representation as Democratic Fulfilment

At the core of this lies the idea that democracy is a function of proportional (caste) representation. To achieve that ideal would require loosening of the vice grip of a numerically minority savarna groups, who are socially omnipresent in powerful positions, driving culture, economy, policy and politics.

So much so that for most of India's postcolonial republic’s young history, policy discussions on caste-based inclusion and representation have been hotly contested, discredited, and dismissed by the savarnas who almost singularly constitute the national ruling elites. To undo that could not have happened from a frontal top-down movement. Instead, the Ambedkarite consciousness mobilised at the bottom, at the grassroots, and grew upwards—from tiny saplings to giant trees reaching for the sky. 

This new assertion also builds upon earlier Lohaite experiments and socialist political traditions, especially in North India, which pioneered in bringing together caste coalitions to face the patron-client satrapies of Nehruvian Congress, which once enjoyed a near-complete hegemony.

These were among the first electoral democracy innovations that breathed life into the young Indian republic. It is innovations like the Janata coalitions—its legitimising of the Jan Sangh & the BJP notwithstanding—that saved India from the fate of many postcolonial nations where the elites captured the statecraft.

From Kanshiram to Today

It was truly the zeal and identity assertion as a political claim, weaponised by Kanshiram’s movement, that gave this process real democratic and cultural momentum.

In doing so, it animated the fundamental truth of the Indian democratic experiment: this nation remains predominantly a nation of Scheduled Castes (SCs), Scheduled Tribes (STs), and Other Backward Classes (OBCs) masses, ruled by a small minority of savarnas.

The political consciousness of electoral numbers, linked with social dignity and constitutional assertion, is a movement which can move only in one inevitable way.

It is, therefore, not ironic but telling that the great-grandson of Nehru, who himself shut down the caste census, has emerged as the most ardent advocate of it, and Narendra Modi—the strongman Prime Minister who never, according to his supporters, backs down from his word, has gone back on it to promise a caste census. 

Even the sections of savarna intelligentsia who came out on the streets in the 1990s and 2000s to oppose caste-reforms, have themselves largely accepted that caste is the core evil in India. The icon of Dr Ambedkar, once erased from public spaces and invisibilised in academic syllabi, has organically emerged as the locus for social assertion and cultural resistance to autocratic regime mandates.

Only some sections remain bitter—trolling and abusive online—but even they now appear devoid of the patronage their savarna movements once provided.

The census is, in itself, merely a counting. There is reasonable doubt about the veracity of this promise and its faithful completion down the road. But the announcement itself is an inexorable proof of the inevitable momentum of the Ambedkarite assertion that has been mobilised across communities and party lines.

Beyond the counting, the policy implications of the census will surely lead to an expansion of reservation based on data. The private sector, as well as higher administrative positions in the judiciary, industry, and academia, will possibly become the next battlegrounds. In that fight, the momentum is likely to move in the same direction as the caravan that has brought us here.

(Ravikant Kisana is a professor of Cultural Studies and his research looks at the intersections of caste with structures of privilege and popular culture. He is available on Twitter/Instagram as 'Buffalo Intellectual'. The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not reflect or represent his institution. Further, The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the author's views.)