[In this edition of the ‘Nehru Dialogues’, professor Satish Deshpande, who is a sociologist and has worked extensively on the issue of caste and education, talks about the implications of the recently conducted caste survey in Bihar.

He argues that the survey is a significant step towards understanding the social and economic realities of the state. He further argues that merely counting the number of castes may lead to reactionary politics that revolves around identity alone, without taking the socio-economic conditions of different castes into account.

Professor Deshpande further delves into the meaning of the words ‘casteist’ and ‘casteism’, and their covert nature that naturalised over a period of time.

He finally concludes by drawing a roadmap of where we should now proceed as a society after the survey.]

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Apoorvanand: Welcome to this series of the Nehru Dialogues.

We started this series to create a platform for dialogue. The only principle or value with which Jawaharlal Nehru can be associated is the principle of dialogue. A dialogue is not necessary only for consent or for people to agree with each other, but it should rather provide a space where people can disagree, and where there can be a dispute, but the intention is to understand each other.

The Nehru Dialogues is not only limited to a discussion on Nehru or the aspects of his personality or what he has written; it revolves around the concerns he had. We try to talk and and through that, we can say that everything in this world falls under that concern.

This series consists of independent lectures, discussions, and panel discussions. We discuss books. Those books which deserve discussion are talked about. That means we don’t just talk about sociology or literature or science or economics. We discuss every area…

There is no need to introduce Professor Satish Deshpande. All of you are familiar with him. Till now we consider him to be from Delhi and will continue to consider him in future too. Although he has said goodbye to Delhi and has now moved to Karnataka, you wouldn’t think that it has anything to do with the Karnataka election results. Its only relation is that Deshpande was probably very fed up with the pollution of Delhi and went to Bengaluru to find clean air.

Deshpande will speak with us on the issue of the caste census.

When we talk about the issue of the caste census, one of the many allegations against Nehru comes to the fore that he ignored the reality of caste and thought that if India transformed into a modern society, then the problem of caste would automatically end.

So, this is an allegation against him and there is a basis for it. But as it turns out, caste is still the biggest concrete reality, which cannot be ignored. But the most concrete truth, if we admit we want to understand it, is this: The biggest concrete truth is that you want to divide the society.

So firstly, what is the politics of this entire concept and the demand that is being made?

Second, what will it mean for democracy and what will be the consequences?

Recently, Bihar conducted a caste census and there is a lot of debate going on about it in sociology and politics. Satish has been trying to understand caste among social scientists and in the political field for a long time and is working on it, so we requested him to talk to us on this topic.

Thank you very much Satish and all of you.

Satish Deshpande: Many thanks to Apoorvanand ji.

The matter started from Nehru ji, so it is right that it should start from here. We are now aware that many allegations are being made against Nehru ji and they are being lobbed on his forehead. But this alleged fault is that he did not understand the subject of caste. I think there is a lot of truth in this allegation. But I also believe that if he had been alive today, he would have had no hesitation in taking part in this debate. Perhaps, he would not have hesitated in admitting that he had made a mistake because today we would be okay with it.

We are used to such leaders who never make any mistakes. So, if you have a leader, in any country, who is never making any mistakes, then you should be afraid because the times are not good. If a leader never makes any mistakes, then the situation is worrying.

Later, I will dwell on the question of what happened in the Nehru era regarding caste, due to which we are on the brink of where we are today. I am sorry I forgot to mention right at the beginning that in this linguistically diverse country, it is important to avoid a thinking that promotes one country, one language, one leader.

We should not speak only in one language and there will be many people here, if not many, then at least some for whom Hindi is not a natural language. If it is not a natural language, then I will try to speak in English also, and today, in 2023, we should not shy away from the fact that English has evolved into an Indian language and it is language for communication. So that’s all on the question of language.

From time to time I will also speak in English and if someone interrupts me if I continue to speak in Hindi, I would like to put four proposals on caste enumeration, especially about casteism, before you, and then some question proposals.

The real complexity lies in the question of casteism. So, we will try to settle it as soon as possible.

My first proposal is that both counting and not counting castes are political steps in themselves. These are political decisions. Our instincts become our habits. Our common sense says that counting caste is purely political, but we cannot blame anyone for not counting it. In a way, we understand that there is no politics in this. This is beyond politics. It is wrong to believe so because not counting caste is as much a political decision and step as counting caste. I will talk about this in more detail. But my first proposal is that we should also recognise the politics of not counting caste and question it too.

The politics of counting caste is good, questions are being asked about it. [It is] always being done and this is also reasonable. They should also be questioned. But let us not assume that when we are not counting caste, we are beyond politics.

We rose just as Yudhishthira’s carriage is said to have moved above the ground. Secondly, I propose that Apoorvanand ji has already said it in his foreword. This is an old myth which we have to get rid of today that counting castes will lead to an increase in casteism and vice versa, although it is true that the process itself will increase awareness [among the masses]. We will talk about the pros and cons later, but let us first assume that if we don’t count castes, then the notion that casteism will disappear is wrong.

Today, after 70 years of independence, we should not have to repeat the same concept [that if we don’t count castes, then casteism will disappear]. Castes will continue to cast its shadow.

My third proposal also challenges our common notion. It says that we should not count caste surveys as a solution to any kind of issue or an achievement or a benefit of any kind, like counting the number of beneficiaries either in a single-engine or in a double-engine-governed state. It’s not a means to an end. It’s not a key to any solution, not a missing piece of a puzzle. It’s rather a small step towards a long journey.

My fourth solution towards the caste census, particularly in the context of the one conducted in Bihar recently which is referred to as a survey due to legal obligations, is that only counting the number of castes will be counterproductive if the process stops there.

It is also important to understand the socio-economic factors. It will help us in understanding its place and meaning in society. Only counting will lead to a sense of hollow pride stopping any kind of progressive politics in its tracks. All of our governments since Independence have failed on this front.

In my state, Karnataka, a census of such a kind had been undertaken a long time ago but the results have not been published. The first unofficial survey of such kind was undertaken in Tamil Nadu but its results were not made public. We should applaud the Bihar government for making the preliminary findings public, but [in my opinion], they would fail [in this matter] if they don’t disclose the socio-economic conditions to the public.

These were my four proposals concerning the caste survey. I wanted to begin with these four propositions on the first meaningful term in the title which is ‘counting’ [of caste]. These are more or less familiar to most of us, so we don’t need to think too hard about them.

My first proposition is that both the ‘counting’ of caste and the ‘not counting’ of caste are equally political. We are habituated to think of the counting of caste as obviously inherently and often pejoratively political, and on the other hand, we think that not counting caste is somehow not political or above politics. That [this mindset] is simply wrong.

Not counting caste is as much a political step as counting it.

My second proposition is that it is high time we got rid of an old myth that not counting caste will reduce caste consciousness or casteism. The 70 years of our history of independence should show very clearly that this is not the case and that the caste groups that have been most effective in intervening in national-level Indian politics have been the Other Backward Classes (OBCs), who have never officially been counted. So not counting caste is not going to lead to any lessening of caste consciousness, assuming that caste consciousness is something that should be gotten rid of.

My third proposition is that we should get out of the habit of thinking of the caste census as some kind of a solution to a problem, as an achievement, or as some kind of a welfare good. [We should not think of it as] something that is a product or a good or a benefit. So, counting caste is only a means to an end, it is not an end in itself, and it is best thought of as the first small step in a very long journey that we have to take on caste.

Finally, my fourth proposition on the counting of caste is that if one only counts caste names, then the population of castes tells us nothing about their social or economic status, which is what we are interested in.

If the [counting] exercise stops at this point, then this will end as a reactionary exercise, because simply counting the names won’t tell us about their social or economic status.

We are not interested in simply knowing the caste names. We are interested in what membership in caste means in social, political and economic terms today. This is the meaningful information that is required [to be made public]. If that does not come out in a caste census, then the census is not a piece of progressive politics. It will feel like a dead end politics of identity that will ultimately reach nowhere.

Now I am moving on to [making] some claims, propositions, and questions on the second main question in our title and the main word in our title, which is to do with casteism or jatiyatavaad.

So now, I will present some proposals/ propositions about casteism. Think of them as proposals/questions. This issue is bigger than the census itself and we don’t know enough about them and we haven’t given these questions much thought or nuance but the time has come to correct our course and try to understand these issues. So my first proposal is….and we could think of it as a question, so my first question is, what is casteism? What do we understand by this word?

According to me, it not only exists covertly but also overtly. We are used to calling someone arrogant about their caste identity or someone who flaunts or shows off their caste every minute or exercises their privilege. We are used to these conditions. Does it not occur in other forms?

According to me, in our country, the most glaring issue we face regarding caste is that another form of casteism exists which we cannot discern at first glance.

Although I have been using the word invisible for it, the word ‘invisible implies’ acquits us of our role in its propagation, which is wrong. The covertness of casteism which I am talking about has been invisiblised by us only. It’s not a natural characteristic and we have channelised this thought process through social conditioning across generations. The way it’s ignored or the failure to recognise these while being practised under our noses is also a result of such a condition. The way we socialise has created such a situation that we fail to understand it as casteism.

So, we must understand that casteism is not only showing off or flouting one’s identity but also the social system that allows these practices to exist. Shouldn’t we call these a form of casteism, too, albeit slogans are not being shouted, and people are not rallying on the roads? But the effects of this system is that some castes are being taken advantage of regularly, which seems natural to us, which seems regular and ordinary, which in English is referred to as normalisation.

In Hindi, when people ask, how much sugar would one like, people respond with “normal”. So, normal is something that is neither excessive nor lacking and subsequently becomes invisible. This is why we haven’t been able to solve this puzzle of caste.

English is a very twisted language. Several words have silent letters but we still write them. We write ‘talk’. Here the letter ‘l’ has no pronunciation. The same is the case with ‘walk’. Similarly, when talking about caste, we are mostly talking about the ‘lower’ caste but this ‘lower’ becomes silent.

Many people celebrated the fact that with the Modi government coming into power, caste politics has been sidelined. Here caste politics meant the politics of the ‘lower’ castes. Since 2014, we have gone back to the time when politics revolved around the ‘upper’ caste. Caste politics is still at play but the strata are different now. This is an even bigger problem as this lays the foundation for our cognitive thinking.

The problem of our country with caste is that some questions have become hypervisible. One type of caste politics has gained prominence while the other one, which has been systemically underplayed, remains out of our purview. Our cognitive vision is asymmetrical. Caste is a puzzle that we are unable to solve.

According to me, the caste survey is the first step towards the long journey of solving the puzzle of invisibility and hypervisibility in our society. Our approach towards this problem is lending to its rise. For this, we must refrain from this mentality of being pulled back to the 19th century with caste politics. It is common to hear from people “We are not bothered by caste. We owe our everything to merit and not caste.” They are not lying or being cunning. They genuinely believe in this. But we ask ourselves how society has empowered them to believe this notion of merit and not caste. I used to belong to the same tribe. I never associated with any caste pride and even revolted against my family when they tried to push caste in my life. But we can never choose to have or not have caste. It is a societal set-up. You may not talk about your caste but your caste will speak and when caste speaks everybody understands.

Under the banner of merit, we tend to avoid the banner of caste. This has been made possible in the Nehruvian era. In this era, the so-called ‘upper’ caste was empowered with resources to transform their caste capital into merit capital. In the 1950s and 1960s, the enthusiasm for independence hadn’t dialled down, nor had its idealism. The notion, that development can solve anything, was in the breeze. This was propagated primarily by Nehru. He stressed development, advancement, science and technology. He believed that this could solve the issue of caste.

The government started inclining towards big industries due to its schemes after the second five-year plan. The demand for technically professional people increased. IITs were opened in the late 50s and early 60s and provided A-grade knowledge for almost free. These IITs created new professionals who got government jobs. The government was not only providing education at a nominal fee but also good jobs. This was emancipating the social status of people.

The Nehruvian era leveraged social mobility. We cannot call it an unexpected outcome but at least it did not intend to empower the ‘upper’ caste to transform its caste-based capital to merit capital. However, this was the result and I am a beneficiary of it. My grandfather was a landowner under his caste. He was able to sell off his land and send my father to an engineering college. He possessed land because of the caste strata he belonged to. He was able to buy knowledge for his son from that piece of land. And my father became an engineer and was employed in a government job. The difficulty starts with the next generation.

My childhood was spent in the Nehruvian era. We were surrounded by engineers and steel plants. They belonged to different Indian states but we didn’t realise that they belonged to a particular caste. We were just able to make out that they were Maharashtrian or Malayalam. But we didn’t know that they were all Brahmins. Maybe the women had an idea but it was never addressed publicly. This is why I thought that I was not associated with caste.

I got the opportunity to go to good schools and colleges where I earned merit. I believe in merit but it is not natural. By nature, merit may differ from person to person, but there is a difference in the way by which this merit is whetted. There is a huge inequality here, which is why a person like me overlooks caste and believes solely in merit. A person like me would believe that those asking for reservations are begging. They are lazy and do not believe in hard work. This story is not new and we have witnessed it very closely. I want to bring you to the conclusion.

The conclusion is that dialogue on the subject of caste becomes impossible. This is because people like me believe that they have nothing to do with caste. The role played by caste in making me what I am is perpetually ignored by me and even others. On the other hand, some people will not get anything unless they proclaim their caste. This makes the dialogue between these two groups very difficult. Thus, solving this issue within the democratic framework becomes impossible. We owe this ‘Great Transformation’ to the Nehruvian era. This era provided one group with the means of modernising their caste capital while forcing the other group to identify themselves with their caste to receive any kind of benefit.

When merit was being distributed, some were forced to disappear while others got the lion’s share. This privileged lot refuses to believe that their merit has anything to do with their caste. This has made dialogue on this issue impossible. The only way to come out of this is to make this section of people believe in the omnipresence of their caste. A caste census is a kind of a collective selfie where some believe that they do not have a caste while others hold a contrary belief. To begin the dialogue, we need to ask, ‘What is your caste?’

And the right to conduct a caste census lies with the government. This is the only survey where we can’t even begin to imagine someone else having an answer. We cannot ask this question in person, but failure to answer in a census can lead to imprisonment, because it is a legal practice.

And the right to exercise it only belongs to the government. Therefore, if you are asked about caste during a census, then you are free to answer that you don’t belong to any but there should be an answer nonetheless. You cannot say, “Think of it like an ordinary situation where you ask an ‘upper’ caste person, particularly men, “What is your caste?” and he answers “Don’t you know who I am”. You cannot answer an enumerator in the same way. Maybe he knows but he has to ask the question. This process might not ensure a change of heart or guide us towards heaven, but this small step is something we must take.

Lastly, let us come to the last and most complicated issue which is that if we mix caste and census, we will return to the core issue of numbers/ population, because at the end of the day, it’s about keeping count and counting and what will this step lead to a figure, perhaps.

What has this figure got to do with democracy? It’s very important to ask this question today because as we know, we are facing a multitude of questions such as how Prime Minister Narendra Modi questioned [Congress leader] Rahul Gandhi about the participation of politicians proportionate to the population and diverted the narrative to 80% Hindu population and their claim to participation. We should be wary of such a narrative of this union between numbers and power.

A caste survey will highlight the numbers but if only a numerical value is highlighted, then that may be counterproductive. If other parameters such as social and economic conditions are factored in, then it will be progressive as it will allow us to identify the conditions of a particular caste at present and its participation in power politics.

The next question is, are we not reducing our politics to a numeric value? Of course, it is a looming condition that scares us but it should not stop us from counting caste. This, according to me, will also mean taking a step backwards. We have to face this challenge because the steps that are being taken at the ground level, [or] what we are witnessing during the election, the vote bank that emerges out of caste identity – all of this is a lazy concept to me, because it implies one will vote for a particular party attested to this identity which has never happened since 1952.

M.N. Srinivas, who coined the term “vote bank”, said that the zamindars he spoke to doubted the loyalty of their servants regarding their voting choices, or if they voted according to their instructions. So, vote bank is not something that guarantees that the number [of castes] will translate or transform into politics. Vote bank tries to scrap out the politics out of the politics itself and turns it into an automatic process where people are told to vote in accordance with their identity. This is obviously not possible as the socio-economic divisions get overlooked when we are only focused on numbers, like the internal disparities that exist within different groups belonging to OBCs you are aware of. This kind of disparity exists in every community. Highlighting these disparities and their amalgamation into politics is very important to us, so that we can move on from identity politics towards welfare politics.

On the other side of welfare politics lies the politics of justice, which will take a long time to achieve, but the counting of caste is our first step as we embark on this long journey. This may seem far-fetched that we will reach there if we conduct a caste survey but if we don’t do the counting, then we will never reach the destination. So, I believe if we are to touch the ideal image of a democracy, and who knows if anyone has ever been there, these are all unanswered questions, but if we are to proceed towards that direction, our first step should be to eradicate the roadblock parity that exists in our society and ask every citizen “what is your caste”. Therefore, this caste survey is the only way to tackle not only overt casteism but also covert casteism according to me.

Apoorvanand: Thank you so much Satish and thanks to all of you.

(Transcribed and translated from Hindi to English by Debarun Choudhury. Courtesy: The Wire.)