“The data that we have for all castes as well as the Other Backward Classes is from the 1931 census. The population of the OBCs at that time was about 52 percent of the total population of India”.
Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge is the latest to join the band of politicians and activists advocating caste census. However, the Bharatiya Janata Party-led central government has so far stonewalled all pleas and comes across as definitely averse to the idea. Before we delve into the ostensible reasons for the reluctance, a quick look at the genesis and history of the census in India.
The census exercise was launched by the colonial government for various stated (and unstated) reasons in the realm of social engineering for their strategy of governance during the second half of the nineteenth century.
Sociologist Michael Mann in his book South Asia’s Modern History avowed that the census exercise was more telling of the administrative needs of the British than of the social reality for the people of British India.
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