We need to treat caste census as a way station on the road to social justice: Satish Deshpande

“Not conducting a caste census is damaging to the cause of social justice. But the converse need not always be true. We need to treat caste census as a way station on the road to social justice, rather than as a destination itself,” said well-known sociologist Satish Deshpande.

“Not conducting a caste census is damaging to the cause of social justice. But the converse need not always be true. We need to treat caste census as a way station on the road to social justice, rather than as a destination itself,” said well-known sociologist Satish Deshpande.

He was deliverg a lecture “Will caste census deliver social justice?” organised by Bengaluru Collective in the city on Thursday. Prof. Deshpande, who has elsewhere described caste census as a “selfie of our society”, on Thursday said it was the much-needed stock taking which can act as a “starting point” for a process of churning that will disturb the status quo.

Prof. Deshpande said a mere caste count would not suffice, and the “caste census” needs to correlate the caste count with socio-economic parameters and the results need to be published. “There have been many attempts at a caste census since 1931 and the only data to be published of such an attempt is in Bihar recently. The data from Karnataka is yet to be published,” he pointed out. Only when this data is published, it brings in an effect what he termed “awareness of number.” The awareness of numbers of a group is a social force in itself which can alter status quo, crystallise identities and stoke political action, he said. 

“For instance, India’s best kept public secret is that the upper castes are a minority. In fact, our politics today is working out the implications of this knowledge. But we do not speak of the upper castes as a minority,” he said. Prof. Deshpande argued that the awareness of number that emerges out of a caste census will put moral pressure on the upper castes, even as it will allow for an exploration of what can be done to alleviate castes that are big in number, but are backward.

However, Prof. Deshpande sounded a word of caution. “Any kind of enumeration will lead us down the road of language of numbers. This will empower the big numbers, but what will happen to the small numbers? The majoritarianism we are seeing today is also based on the same logic of numbers. So we should not lose focus on the small numbers, if our goal is social justice,” he said. 

On the question of whether a caste census will perpetuate caste further, he said since not counting caste for almost a century had not made castes vanish, this argument only strengthens the status quo.