6 min readAug 11, 2026 06:17 PM IST First published on: Aug 11, 2026 at 06:17 PM ISTThe government that announced the caste census a year ago has decided to kill it. The same cold political calculus that forced a concession has now prompted a reneging on that reluctant promise. Obviously, we should not expect a formal announcement or an official funeral. Instead, the idea will be buried quietly, finely camouflaged under technical verbiage, while the charade of the caste census carries on.According to the report by Deeptiman Tiwary, first carried in this paper (‘No drop-down options, caste census format to be open-ended’, IE, August 9), the Registrar General of India (RGI), in charge of conducting the census, has decided to use an open-ended question on caste rather than a drop-down menu of castes for the population enumeration phase of the coming census of India. Simply put: When the census enumerator comes to your house, she will not offer you a list of caste names to choose from, but simply ask you to name your caste and record it the way you state it.AdvertisementNow, what’s wrong with that? And how does this seemingly trivial and super-technical decision sound the death knell of the exercise of the caste census?For this, you have to read Trina Vithayathil’s authoritative book Counting Caste: Census Politics, Bureaucratic Deflection, and Brahmanical Power in India. It is a painstaking documentation of how the caste census was sabotaged in 2011. An intense parliamentary debate led by Sharad Yadav contributed to an all-party consensus in favour of carrying out a caste census. But there was no discussion or even an awareness of how exactly caste was to be recorded in the census. This is where the social power of the Brahmanic order asserted itself and deflected the whole enterprise with two critical but managerial and technical decisions. First, caste enumeration was detached from the decennial Census of India, ostensibly not to overburden the census. A separate nationwide survey called the Socio Economic and Caste Census (SECC) was designed for this purpose. Second, caste was recorded through an open-ended question, disregarding the existing SC, ST and OBC lists. This decision and other procedural lapses meant that this huge exercise resulted in 4.7 million caste names, a perfect alibi for first delaying and finally burying the publication of caste data. According to Vithayathil, this was an instance of how Brahmanic power works in India, through bureaucratic deflections.Also Read | Sonia Gandhi writes: History will indeed remember Dr Manmohan Singh kindlyThe Indian Express report suggests that we are about to witness an action replay of the same sabotage, except that this time it will happen not under a separate survey but under the official Census of India 2027. It also confirms that the RGI’s office is perfectly aware that this caste census is designed to fail.AdvertisementIs there an alternative? How do we categorise and classify the infinite variety of castes, sub-castes and their multiple surnames? What is the alternative to asking the people to name their own caste?Fortunately, there is an alternative. It exists within the official practices of the Indian state. It has been used by the Census of India in the past. It has been successfully used recently in Bihar and Telangana. It is simply this: Instead of asking everyone to name their own caste, begin by asking their caste category (SC/ST/OBC/General) and then ask them to choose from a menu of caste names in their category. The remaining 1 or 2 per cent cases, where the drop-down menu does not work, can be placed under “others” and asked to name their caste.Do we have a ready-made menu of most Indian caste names? Surprisingly, we do. We already have comprehensive official lists of castes, which include sub-castes and synonyms, for nearly three-fourths of the Indian population, namely SC, ST and the OBC (officially called Social and Educationally Backward Classes). When the census enumerator goes to a Dalit household, she first asks them if they belong to the SC category. If yes, she then takes out the list of Scheduled Castes and places them on one of the entries in the official list. The same is the case with STs. This could be easily extended to the OBCs, for which comprehensive lists are available at the state and national level. (That these two lists do not overlap poses no difficulty for the enumerator, as long as there is no confusion about caste names).The remaining one-fourth, the “General” category, is not as difficult to count as it is made out to be. After all, the Census of India 1931 recorded all castes, including those in the General category today. It is safe to assume that not too many new castes would have come up in the last century. Besides, we have a 43-volume encyclopaedia “People of India” (edited by K S Singh), an official documentation of all castes and communities throughout the country, carried out in the 1980s. That could be used to fine-tune the 1931 list. An open-ended question could be asked to the remaining minuscule population of “others”, not to 140 crore Indians.you may likeThe real problem is not the technical alternative, but political will, or rather political ill-will. Unlike 2011, when a political decision was sabotaged by bureaucratic deflection, this time it is a clear case of a politically designed sabotage. The Indian Express report quotes an unnamed Union minister: “The Opposition has been demanding it for political reasons. We have accepted it. Let them deal with the final data”. Clearly, the bureaucratic decision has been taken with political approval, with full knowledge of the failure that awaits this exercise. Now, either the BJP has had second thoughts about the caste census, and the possibility of losing its General caste vote bank, especially after the UGC protest and youth rebellion. Or the subterfuge was planned right from the beginning.Either way, the political game is clear. The PM can throw up his arms and say to his OBC voters: Look, we tried, but nothing came out of this exercise. And he could wink to his core “upper” caste Hindu vote bank: Don’t worry, we’ve managed it. Saanp bhi mar gaya, lathi bhi nahin tooti.The writer is member, Swaraj India, and national convenor, Bharat Jodo Abhiyaan. Views are personal