The government's decision in April 2025 on the inclusion of caste enumeration in the upcoming decennial census represents a seismic shift, ending deliberate ambivalence. This historic policy reversal directly confronts the cultivated narrative of "castelessness"—a fig leaf to obscure the deep-seated structural inequalities that continue to define Indian public life. This decision arrives at a critical juncture, amid a political climate dominated by ethnonationalist Hindutva. This Hindutva project relies on a homogenised Hindu identity, inherently requiring the weaponisation, erasure, or subsuming of internal hierarchies of caste that contradict its monolithic project of ‘varnacracy’.
BR Ambedkar presciently warned in 1955, distinguishing between power derived from democratic will and that from inherited status, "In India, the majority is not a political majority. The majority is born; it is not made. That is the difference between a communal majority and a political majority. … A political majority grows. A communal majority is born. Political majority admission is open. The door to a communal majority is closed."
The caste system embodies this inherited, closed "communal majority." Surveys indicate overwhelming upper-caste support for the BJP since its formation. The stark fact that over 90% of elite positions across government, judiciary, and higher education are reportedly held by dominant castes, which form less than 20% of the population, underscores the urgency of this reckoning.
The pernicious privilege of castelessness and the politics of erasure
Former Chief Justice DY Chandrachud observed, "Carelessness is the privilege of only upper castes." Satish Deshpande elaborates on how dominant castes, having accumulated historical advantages over centuries—advantages embedded in ritual status, land ownership, educational access, and social networks—successfully convert this inherited capital into modern social, economic, and cultural capital.
This accumulated advantage allows them to navigate contemporary society seemingly untethered from caste identity, affording a "casteless" future where their own historical privilege remains unexamined and invisible.
This strategic performance of castelessness allows upper castes to frame caste itself as a problem exclusively associated with "backwardness," demands for reservations, or assertions of caste identity as divisive. Simultaneously, their own caste positionality becomes the unmarked, normalised default—the "General Category."
As Trina Vithayathil in Counting Caste: Census Politics, Bureaucratic Deflection, and Brahmanical Power in India argues, this framing obscures and naturalises the ongoing advantages held by dominant castes, casting their privilege as the neutral baseline against which others' 'casteism' is measured.
This politics of erasure finds potent expression in policy decisions. While the current prime minister has strategically invoked his OBC marking for electoral mobilisation—particularly in UP and Bihar—his government enacted the 103rd Constitutional Amendment, which introduced reservations based solely on economic criteria for Economically Weaker Sections (EWS) but excluded SCs, STs, and OBCs from eligibility, creating a 10% quota exclusively for the upper castes.
Carving out a quota for the 'poor' Savarnas, while barring the poor from historically marginalised and grossly underrepresented communities, cynically weaponises economic criteria to reinforce caste boundaries under the veneer of castelessness.
Myth of meritocracy
The most insidious ideological bulwark defending this unequal order is the pervasive myth of meritocracy. In The Caste of Merit, Ajantha Subramanian deconstructs how the notion of merit in India has been historically constructed and deployed by dominant castes to legitimize their entrenched advantages while simultaneously delegitimizing affirmative action policies like reservations.
Merit is presented as an innate, individual quality, detached from the social context, historical privilege, and access to resources – elite schooling, expensive coaching centers, social networks – that are overwhelmingly concentrated among upper castes. This has been enabled by not recognising caste as inventory of history since caste enumeration was eschewed as a census category.
In 1953, Jawaharlal Nehru established the first Backward Classes Commission under Article 340 and he appointed Kaka Kalelkar, a Brahmin, as its chairman.
The commission found that 3,743 castes, other than Dalits and Adivasis, suffered from social and educational backwardness. Socially and Economically Backward Classes (SEBCs) were only 2,733. Dr Ambedkar called this exercise ‘petty intelligence’. Dr Ambedkar was criticising the government's decision to not enumerate castes in the first census of independent India, viewing it as an act of willful ignorance that obscured the reality of caste's pervasive influence.
The findings showed that more than 80 percent of the country was caste oppressed, a reality that threatened the powerful minorities at the top of the caste ladder.
In May 1961, the Nehru government decided that there was no need for an all India list of OBCs and favoured economic criteria instead for reservations. Ambedkar had passed away by then but the social revolution through his Constitution started.
The state governments, started appointing Commissions and took matters into their own hands drawing up a list of OBCs, much to the consternation of Nehru, a Dattareya Kaul Brahmin.
Caste in law, however, took a different trajectory where caste denialism has been default. What the law left unnamed, however, politics did not. In states Madras, Travancore-Cochin, Mysore, the caste as the basis of social capital was recognised through social movements and consequently, pioneered reservation policies during colonial times.
The judicial pushback against caste based reservation, started in 1950 from Champakam Dorairajan, a Brahmin woman who ‘felt’ discriminated against because of the Madras government’s affirmative action policy.
The Supreme Court, being caste-denying due to its composition, unequivocally ruled that quota was a source of discrimination. The judges held that quotas denied Brahmins their “greater aptitude for certain types of education” and stigmatized them as “inferior.”
The afterlife of this remarkable statement that described the quota system as a form of discrimination is still evident in upper-caste claims to merit. It laid the groundwork for subsequent arguments about upper-caste rights as consistent with democratic principles of equality and non-discrimination and lower-caste rights as a violation of these principles.
Reservation was an exception and antithetical to equality till upper castes had their own reservations in 2019 without the kind of orgy of violence seen during the Mandal Commission implementation in the 1990s and 2000s.
This created an imbalance: reservations acknowledged caste discrimination as the basis for non-achievement but left unnamed the caste-based inheritances underpinning upper-caste achievement. This asymmetry reinforced the myth of upper-caste merit being purely individual talent, detached from history.
Empirical data consistently refutes this narrative. Analysis of UPSC civil service examination cutoffs between 2019 and 2024, for instance, frequently reveal that candidates qualifying under the EWS quota (based on economic disadvantage but restricted to upper castes) often had lower scores than candidates qualifying under the OBC quota.
This directly punctures the "death of merit" argument routinely invoked by dominant groups to oppose reservations for OBCs, SCs, and STs. It demonstrates how merit in a deeply unequal society is not a neutral measure of capability but is profoundly shaped by inherited social and economic capital.
Refusing to count caste for the last seven decades has enabled the tyranny of meritocracy, effectively denying equal moral and constitutional citizenship to lower castes by relegating them as unmeritorious.
Unfinished social revolution
The Indian Constitution intended nothing less than a social revolution. Power and inequality were dispersed along intersecting lines of caste, religion, and gender.
Reservations are theoretically meant to protect the political majority from the alleged tyranny of a powerful elite minority. The Constitution's substantive equality mandate requires empirical grounding. The landmark Indra Sawhney judgment (1992) firmly established that reservations are not poverty alleviation schemes but remedies for historical social disadvantage intrinsically linked to caste, rejecting purely economic criteria by a 7:2 majority.
The majority articulated the intertwining of caste, poverty, and traditional occupation, justifying reservations as reparations.
In M Nagaraj (2006), the Court mandated the State to produce quantifiable data demonstrating both backwardness and inadequate representation to justify reservations. The critical role of empirical data in validating reservation policies before the judiciary is starkly highlighted by the 2019 Supreme Court decision in BK Pavitra & Others v. Union of India & Others (II).
The Karnataka government sought to implement consequential seniority for SC/ST employees in reservation in promotions. The Supreme Court upheld Karnataka's 2018 Act precisely because the state, learning from a previous legal challenge, had undertaken an extensive exercise to collect quantifiable data. This successful defense underscored how data can be pivotal in substantiating the need for and legality of affirmative action measures like reservations in promotions.
Conversely, the Supreme Court's 2020 judgment in Mukesh Kumar & Anr. v. State of Uttarakhand & Ors. illustrated the Supreme Court’s reservation as an exception and for charity school of thought. The case arose from Uttarakhand government's decision not to provide reservations in promotions for SCs/STs.
While the Court affirmed that states are not constitutionally obligated to provide reservations and that there's no fundamental right to such promotions, it reiterated: if a state does choose to implement reservations, that decision must be justified by quantifiable data showing inadequate representation in public employment.
Thus, while Karnataka used data to successfully defend its policy providing reservation, Uttarakhand highlights the political willingness to stymie reservations.
Uttarakhand, which has a duopoly of Brahmin and Thakurs, has been vehemently anti-reservation since inception- a Savarnocracy Uttarakhand: What it takes to build an upper-caste state. Thus data (or lack thereof) for social justice is crucially linked to regional histories and demography.
Justice Ravindra Bhat in his dissent argued that the EWS quota was engineered to deliberately exclude individuals from Scheduled Caste (SC), Scheduled Tribe (ST), and Other Backward Classes (OBC) communities.
Highlighting that these groups constitute the vast majority—around 82%—of India's population, he declared that the Supreme Court was, for the very first time, sanctioning a governmental policy that was openly and intentionally exclusionary and discriminatory on the basis of caste. This gravely undermined the foundational principles of the Indian Constitution which does not "speak in the language of exclusion."
The absence of caste based census since independence led to this cynical fraud, a dynamite to Ambedkar’s Constitution.
The Bihar caste survey (2023) offers a glimpse of the kind of data a national census could provide. It found OBCs and Extremely Backward Classes (EBCs) together constitute a massive 63% of the state's population. It revealed stark poverty disparities, 42.93% of SC families and 42.7% of ST families live below the poverty line.
Most significantly, regarding representation, it showed that upper castes (around 15.5% of the population) held roughly 6.41 lakh state government jobs, almost the same number as the much larger OBC-EBC population combined (around 6.7 lakh jobs).
This picture of disproportionate power concentration mirrors the situation at the Centre, where forward castes dominate upper echelons of power. This empirical evidence directly confronts assertions like Justice JB Pardiwala in the EWS majority opinion, suggesting denial of opportunities based on criteria other than open competition denies the "qualified and deserving what is or at least should be their due."
The data compels us to ask, what exactly is "due" to groups whose representation in powerful positions is already multiples of their population share, achieved not through neutral meritocracy but through accumulated structural advantage?
Why the Caste Census matters: Democratic accountability
The upcoming decennial census including caste is fundamentally different from voluntary surveys or exercises like the SECC conducted in 2011. It operates under the statutory authority of the Census Act, 1948. Section 8 of this Act legally binds every person residing in India to answer the census questions truthfully, with penalties for refusal or providing false information.
While this legal compulsion counters overt evasion, effective implementation demands careful questionnaire design and rigorous enumerator training. Enumerators must be equipped to navigate the 'Janus-faced' reality where dominant caste individuals, often casteless in public, meticulously invoke caste and gotra in private spheres like marriage—a significant challenge for accurate data collection.
This universality is crucial. It performs an egalitarian marking, compelling all citizens, including those from dominant castes who typically reside in the unmarked 'General' category, to state their caste identity.
This act challenges the implicit hierarchy where only marginalised castes are marked while dominant castes remain the invisible norm. It reinforces the constitutional understanding that Caste, as used in Articles 15 and 16, applies across the social spectrum.
Systematic documentation transforms caste from a matter of private knowledge ("neighbours know your caste," as Justice Sanjiv Khanna observed during the Bihar caste survey hearing) into statistical fact. This creates an empirical basis for holding institutions accountable for representative disparities.
Caste power persists most strongly when it remains invisible, unnamed, and unchallenged, allowing privilege to masquerade as merit and discrimination to operate with impunity, often shielded by the rhetoric of castelessness.
As Pritam Singh argues, historical census data, despite its colonial origins, often empowered movements by lowered-caste groups providing the empirical evidence needed to disrupt "sovereign order of caste" and demand substantive equality. Tellingly, in the 1941 census, it was primarily members of upper castes who reportedly claimed, 'no caste,' revealing the privilege embedded in the ability to opt out of the system's markers. It is akin to the recent Karnataka caste survey too where upper castes chose castelessness- ‘no caste’ during enumeration.
Towards a social democracy
Ambedkar, in his final address to the Constituent Assembly, delivered a warning about entering a "life of contradictions," granting political equality ('one person, one vote') while denying social and economic equality ('one person, one value'). He cautioned that unless this contradiction was resolved, "those who suffer from inequality will blow up the structure of political democracy."
Fellow constituent HJ Khandekar echoed this, bluntly blaming upper castes for their unfitness to rule justly and framing reservations as a necessary safety valve against violent upheaval—a point Justice BS Reddy reiterated decades later, warning of a social emergency.
A methodologically sound, comprehensive caste census is not a magic bullet for India's deep-seated inequalities. However, it represents indispensable democratic knowledge production. For it to fulfil its potential, the government must commit not only to collection but also to full transparency, ensuring the timely release of data in accessible formats for research, policy formulation, public debate, and crucially, for citizens to hold power accountable.
The ghost of the 2011 SECC's unpublished data looms large as a warning against bureaucratic deflection and political obstruction.
India needs moral introspection and confrontation with caste in which empirical honesty is fundamental to realising the Constitution's Preamble pledge of "Justice, social, economic and political" and "Equality of status and of opportunity."
The decades-long statistical invisibility imposed upon the OBCs and the obfuscation surrounding upper-caste dominance has severely hampered evidence-based policymaking and democratic accountability. By finally counting caste across the board, India takes a critical step towards fulfilling Ambedkar's vision of a genuine social democracy. Caste may politically trump the current majoritarian project built on oppressive invisibility of caste power and perpetuate the rule of the communal majority.
Views expressed are the authors' own.
Benarji Chakka is Dean and Professor of Law, VIT-AP School of Law.
Surendra Kumar is Assistant Professor of Constitutional Law at Ramaiah College of Law. They both are British Chevening Scholars.