It is now being widely reported that West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, during the last meeting of the 'INDIA' alliance in Mumbai, had blocked a joint resolution of all opposition parties to demand a nationwide caste census.
Both the ruling parties of Bihar, the Janata Dal (United) and the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD), had called for a strong resolution in favour of caste census from the alliance, and got backing from parties like Samajwadi Paty, the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagham (DMK) and Communist Party of India (Marxist), the and Congress party.
But Mamata Banerjee said that her party, the Trinamool Congress (TMC), would need more time to deliberate on this issue. Congress leader Rahul Gandhi, who has publicly stated his position supporting such a nationwide exercise, acted as a peacemaker and asked the others to give time to TMC.
According to the English daily The Telegraph, the TMC supremo’s hardline approach against caste census “was not taken kindly by many leaders who felt this position was not in tune with the overall direction of INDIA politics.”
However, there is a paradox here.
Unlike in the previous Congress and Left governments, where caste was never considered a determinant political category in the electoral realm, Mamata Banerjee as CM had played a major role in augmenting the role of caste in the social and political life of West Bengal.
Then what explains her opposition to a proposed caste census that may benefit the state in better channeling the welfare schemes and in reaching out to actual beneficiaries?
The answer may lie in the historical context in which caste was made irrelevant in the state.
Caste in West Bengal
Asok Mitra, former Registrar General of India who supervised many of the important census exercises post-independence once wrote, “There must be something odd about a state which, professedly so secular and anti-sectarian, has yet not produced a single Jagjivan Ram, Kamraj, Buta Singh or Rafi Ahmed Kidwai to hold major portfolio.”
But it is not that such figures were always absent in the political landscape of West Bengal. Jogendranath Mandal, the leader of the Dalit movement in Eastern India emerged from the same location and became a figure of prominence in the history of India and Pakistan.
However, soon after partition, the alleged decline of caste consciousness in this region owes to specific political discourse adopted by the Congress and Communist parties.
Historian Shekhar Bandhopadhyay pointed out that the partition violence and refugee influx "led to a rephrasing of the idioms of victimhood and resistance, placing less emphasis on caste and focusing more on the predicament of displacement and the struggles of the refugees."
And this is one of the reasons why Dalit refugees were increasingly drawn towards class-based politics offered by the Communist parties at that juncture.
So, even though caste discrimination did not disappear and the upper caste continued to dominate the social, cultural and political landscape of the new state of West Bengal, politics of class subsumed other concerns.
Academic Dwaipayan Sen argues, “What is clear is that from the very first days of the Republic, West Bengal’s caste elites have consistently expressed their distaste for the exceptional provisions of differentiated citizenship.”
He has a point as most of the Chief Ministers in the history of West Bengal had opposed progressive policies on caste in their time. So the first CM of the state Prafulla Chandra Ghosh in 1948 while arguing on the draft constitution among the members of the West Bengal assembly declared, "The sooner this reservation goes the better."
He concluded, "We are all free now, and there should be no reservation.’"
Many others from the ruling Congress in the assembly joined him in the chorus demanding that benefits for the Scheduled Castes must go. In 1979, when the Mandal Commission was constituted to study socially and educationally backward classes it did not receive a positive response from the then West Bengal government headed by Jyoti Basu from the CPM. There are two castes and they are rich and poor, said the government back then.
Caste Census and an Opportunity for Mamata Banerjee
Recently the decision by the Bihar government to conduct a caste census despite the legal challenges it faced in Patna High Court and in the Supreme Court of India, and from private parties and the Modi government, have given an excellent opportunity to the opposition parties to coalesce around social justice politics.
The last time an all-India caste census was done was in 1931 and thereafter, the practice was stopped in independent India despite many Bahujan leaders and court judgments expressing their opinion in favour of the exercise.
Just like Bihar government, which has correctly admitted that they do not have correct data on the Other Backward Classes, the West Bengal government should order a similar exercise in the state as the BJP is consistently targeting the CM on her OBC politics.
Recently, the BJP has again raised the pitch of Muslim appeasement by accusing the Mamata Banerjee government of manipulating data to offer OBC reservations to the Muslims in the state. Several BJP leaders including the state party president Sukanta Majumdar have raised the issue that 91.5 percent of the reservation in Bengal has been given to the Muslims in the state and Hindu OBC communities are being discriminated against.
However, if we see reports emerging from West Bengal, then many universities, even today, have failed to implement the reservation policies meant for the OBC Muslims.
The problem of identification of OBCs has come back to haunt the West Bengal government because no actual data exists on different backward class communities. The government had not prepared any list of OBCs till 1993.
Soon after a year, they prepared an OBC list in haste which had 64 caste groups, where it identified eight of them as Muslim OBCs. The last time a statewide exercise to collect data on caste and tribes of Bengal was conducted in 1951 under the census superintendent Asok Mitra.
Without updating this data, successive West Bengal governments have often recycled it to prepare their own list of OBCs. Currently, the OBC list prepared under the Mamata Government has been challenged by BJP and a constitutional body like the National Commission for Backward Classes (NCBC) who allege that 118 groups among the 179 of total OBC communities are Muslims in the state.
Again, they have particularly targeted the identification process of these OBC communities by the Bengal government who have relied on reports prepared by the Cultural Research Institute in Kolkata.
Mamata Banerjee has got a historic opportunity to counter such criticism by following the path shown by Nitish Kumar and Lalu Prasad Yadav in Bihar, and by demanding an actual caste census in her own state.
Like in other states, it may happen that such a exercise will show that in West Bengal as well, a small number of upper caste groups have cornered a disproportionate share of benefits.
But the question remains if she is going to buck the tradition of PC Ghosh and Jyoti Basu, and align with the socially progressive policies of her time.
(Adil Hossain is a faculty at the School of Development, Azim Premji University. He can be reached at @adilhossain. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)
(At The Quint, we are answerable only to our audience. Play an active role in shaping our journalism by becoming a member. Because the truth is worth it.)