Six months from now the electorally significant of Bihar will go to the polls. It will be the first major test of Narendra Modi’s popularity after the four-day India-Pakistan war. After the Pahalgam carnage, it seemed that the dominant issue would be the Centre’s anticipated strike on terror bases on Pakistan to avenge the killing of 25 Hindu tourists. Modi’s dominant personality embedded in the larger theme of nationalism would shape the overriding narrative.
Indeed, when the Cabinet Committee on Political Affairs (CCPA) meeting was called on 30 April, the announcement of a strike by Indian forces was expected. Instead, Union minister Ashwini Vaishnav, the official spokesperson, came out with the surprise announcement that the government would include caste enumeration of all groupings, including the other backward classes (OBCs), in the impending census that was deferred because of the pandemic. However, no timeline was given. It was apparent that most of the PM’s ministerial colleagues were clueless about the caste census. A day before the decision was unveiled, senior minister Nitin Gadkari, a CCPA member, had derided the caste census at a book launch in Delhi, saying it was against ‘Hindutva’s core ideology’. Modi met RSS Sarsanghchalak Mohanrao Bhagwat a day before the CCPA meeting and got the go-ahead.
The BJP claimed that the decision was a ‘super surgical strike’ on the Opposition, not realising that the move was riddled with problems for the party in Bihar. The party felt that it had snatched away a political lank from the Congress -- which spearheaded the demand for a caste census under Rahul Gandhi, who flagged the issue in his Bharat Jodo Yatra -- and the splinters from the erstwhile socialist parties surviving on Mandalised politics in Bihar and UP. The BJP crowed it had ushered in Mandal 2.0, which it claimed would fortify its own OBC politics for time to come.
The RSS position
Until now, the BJP had rejected the idea outright. On the other hand, the RSS’s stated position was a caste census was acceptable as long as it was not used as a ‘political tool’ and was deployed to deliver targeted welfare schemes to the disadvantaged. The Sangh was silent on increasing the reservation quota beyond the legally mandated cap of 50 per cent in educational institutions and government jobs.
In a press briefing on 30 April, Rahul Gandhi recalled that as recent as the Jharkhand polls, Modi’s line was there were only four castes in India – women, youth, farmers and the poor. The government’s stand in September 2021 in the Supreme Court also echoed a similar theme -- “Caste-wise enumeration in the census was given up as a matter of policy from 1951 onwards”.
The BJP claimed that the decision was a ‘super surgical strike’ on the Opposition, not realising that the move was riddled with problems for the party in Bihar
Several factors prompted the compulsion behind the caste census move. Rahul Gandhi’s emphasis and his ‘Save the Constitution’ march could not be scoffed at; that time was gone. The Lok Sabha outcome in Maharashtra and UP was a reflection of the BJP’s disdain, although it escaped that fate in Bihar. The JD (U) under Nitish Kumar had done a caste survey in 2023 when the RJD and the Congress were allies. The survey revealed that 63 per cent of the population comprised OBCs and EBCs, the latter being an important constituent of the BJP-led NDA coalition.
The BJP’s advantage lies in communicating the significance of its action. To the Congress’s insistence that it had the first-mover advantage because its governments in Karnataka and Telangana had already conducted caste surveys, the BJP’s answer was that these exercises were not censuses but objects used as ‘political tools’. Under the Constitution, the census is a Union subject.
There’s no doubt that since 1989, the upper castes of north India have sworn allegiance to the BJP, with occasional departures, as in UP. With the caste census as its new mascot, the BJP can fulfil its OBC agenda only if it exponentially increases the number of tickets given to the BCs, especially EBCs, who make up 36 percent of Bihar’s population, per Nitish Kumar’s survey.
However, in implementing the move, the BJP will also have to contend with the possibility that the census move might not pass legal scrutiny with the Supreme Court’s stipulated ceiling on reservation.