Politics as unusual: Who’s afraid of an all-India caste X-ray?
general elections loom, the question is whether it can evoke a rush of fervour that could spell an upset at the 2024 hustings. In the view of some analysts, just as the ascent of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) took a revolutionary path at first, with Hindu nationalism its rallying cry, so must the opposition find a heady issue, an arouser of passion, if it expects to shake today’s status quo. After all, expectations are rife of a third BJP victory.
The ruling party’s political heft is undeniable. Yet, polls aren’t over till the last vote is counted. By one reckoning, how contestable key swing seats prove in a pivotal belt of the country could depend on vote shifts among caste groups classified as Other Backward Classes (OBCs).
Little wonder that calls have arisen from the Congress and its allies for a caste census, pitched as an ‘X-ray’ of Indian life that will lay bare a crisis of caste disparity. Bihar has already taken such a snapshot. Its details, however, seem too blurry to offer voters a stark picture of haves and have-nots split by caste.
On 2 October, Bihar’s Nitish Kumar government had disclosed the outline of a caste survey it conducted by knocking on people’s doors to ask. Of the state’s 131 million people, over 63% were either OBC or Extremely Backward (a worse-off OBC segment sliced apart in Bihar). On 7 November, the state tabled the survey’s full socio-economic findings in its assembly, with Nitish Kumar using it to justify a policy of quotas going up to 75% of the pie, well beyond the Supreme Court’s 50% cap.
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