‘Caste Census’ announcement by GoI gives Siddaramaiah wiggle room

Siddaramaiah heartily welcomes the Centre’s move to bring caste census.

After the Union government’s announcement that it will enumerate caste in the next decennial Census, Karnataka CM Siddaramaiah could be heaving a sigh of relief. He is claiming a pyrrhic victory of sorts of “forcing” PM Narendra Modi to “imitate” his government’s move on a revamped caste-based reservation.

Pointing out that the PM and the BJP had opposed the caste census until recently on the grounds that it would lead to division of the Hindu society, Siddaramaiah asserted that Rahul Gandhi’s persistent demand regarding caste census, fulfilled by Congress governments of Karnataka and Telangana, had “now paid off” and he, as Karnataka’s chief minister, would heartily welcome the Centre’s move.

The reality in Karnataka is that the socio-economic and educational survey conducted by the State’s Backward Classes Commission in 2015 during Siddaramaiah’s last term as CM, dusted up and presented to his Cabinet a decade later as “caste census,” has met with stiff resistance from major communities.

The Lingayats and Vokkaligas, who constitute about 40 per cent of the 137 MLAs in the Congress Legislature Party, have stalled the implementation of the new reservation formula based on a “flawed” report. Deputy CM DK Shivakumar and Shamanur Shivashankarappa, who is president of the Veerashaiva Mahasabha, have strongly opposed the adoption of the report.

The OBC commission, then headed by H Kantharaju, which spent over Rs 165 crore on conducting the survey, submitted its report to Siddaramaiah in 2016. The report was never made public as the caste numbers appeared to be highly controversial.

With neither the JDS-Congress coalition government that replaced Siddaramaiah in 2019 and remained in power for only 14 months nor the BJP that “hijacked” the government with defections from both the parties and ruled for four years, showing any interest, the caste report had been forgotten.

Kantharaju was replaced by K Jayaprakash Hegde in 2020 with the coming of the BJP government headed by BS Yediyurappa but he had no work to do. With Hegde having gone over to the Congress after Siddaramaiah came back to power in May 2023, he was asked to “work on the data collected” by the Kantharaju committee and submit his recommendations.

Though it was claimed by a former official of the commission that “94% of the population had been covered during the caste census”, there was a hue and cry from across the state that “no one had heard of the enumerators visiting homes” and that the Jayaprakash Hegde committee had “extrapolated the numbers based on 2011 population census” and “lackadaisically altered the percentage of reservations” given to different castes and communities.

Some unofficial “leaks” suggesting that the percentage of population of powerful castes like Lingayats and Vokkaligas had gone down drastically, while the Muslims had overtaken them, led to widespread protests by the leaders of the two communities, forcing the Siddaramaiah government to put the report on the backburner.

Asking Siddaramaiah to dump the “unscientific” report, the powerful heads of Lingayat and Vokkaliga mutts had announced conducting surveys on their own and present “the real picture” of the caste numbers. They pointed out, for instance, that the number of Marasu Vokkaligas across the state had been shown as only around 3,859 while there were “lakhs of them in two Hoblis of Bengaluru south alone.”

The Centre’s decision to include caste enumeration along with the general census next year could enable all parties to the dispute in Karnataka to bury the hatchet for now. Preparations are on to take on the BJP more aggressively calling it a “copycat” which replicated Siddaramaiah government’s five guarantees in other states and had now decided on the caste census fearing the loss of its vote bank everywhere.

It appears that part of the reason Modi has altered his views on caste census is that the major opposition parties had managed to paint the BJP as “anti-reservation” and he had little option but to sail with the current.

As different states were coming up with their own ad hoc and unscientific methods to conduct socio-economic surveys and calling them “caste census” the PM perhaps thought that it would be better to incorporate it in the general census which would give more precise numbers from door-to-door operations of collecting data from individual houses.

The Centre has realised that though it had come up with a number of schemes for the poor in the last 11 years, the unavailability of precise caste-wise data had become a huge obstacle in identifying the socially marginalised communities and reaching the benefits meant for them.

After the BJP’s unexpected debacle in Uttar Pradesh in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, the RSS had flagged the impact of the Congress and the Samajwadi Party’s “false propaganda” that the BJP was seeking 400 plus seats to change the Constitution and deprive the OBCs and the SCs and STs of reservations.

It is significant to note that apart from visiting the Nagpur headquarters of the RSS recently, Modi was closeted with Mohan Bhagwat for about two hours in New Delhi on Tuesday before the announcement on caste census came the next day.

As the delimitation of constituencies of Lok Sabha as well as the state Assemblies are expected to follow the census exercise, the latest caste figures could also help the BJP to do marginal “tweaking” of the boundaries of different constituencies to its electoral advantage. The implementation of Women’s Reservation Act also being on the anvil, the ruling BJP would be working on multiple strategies to gain a “good harvest” of its labour in the last one decade.