The recent decision by the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government to add the column of caste in the next census is a historic move given the impact it may have on the construction of communities and quest for social justice.
Just before the Independence, in 1931 and in 1941, the colonial state conducted the censuses with caste enumeration and counted over 4,147 castes and sub-castes associated with all religions of the nation. The data from 1941 was not tabulated or published due to difficulties that arose out of World War II, leaving us with authoritative data on caste groups only from the 1931 census.
Following Independence in 1947, the Nehruvian state continued with the colonial practice of conducting a decennial census, but caste-wise data was kept out of its ambit, as the new ruling elite felt such an exercise would only aggravate caste consciousness and social cleavages in the ‘modern nation.’
However, due to the constitutional mandate on affirmative action, the new state had to collect data on the number of Scheduled Castes (SC) and Scheduled Tribes (ST) in the postcolonial census exercise that began in 1951.
The census is just not about putting statistical tables and numbers; it also shapes our world through administrative categories and definitions. Historically, the census helped shape fuzzy communities with porous boundaries into enumerated communities, which later became political communities competing in the claim-making process vis-à-vis the state.