The decision of the Patna high court (HC) to immediately suspend a controversial caste-based survey in Bihar could not have come at a more politically inopportune moment for the ruling coalition, comprising the Rashtriya Janata Dal, the Janata Dal (United) and the Congress. A plan to use the headcount of castes — which has never been successfully attempted since Independence — to mobilise backward communities and create an opening for a new social formation to pierce the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)’s consolidating base among marginalised castes has suffered a setback. Irrespective of how the proceedings go — the next hearing is on July 3 — the stay order means that the caste survey will certainly lag behind its scheduled completion and dissemination date.
The survey was billed as a political game changer that would revive Mandal politics in its original playground, Bihar. When hearing a batch of petitions challenging the exercise, the Patna HC framed three issues — whether the expenditure was with the due sanction of law, whether the exercise was in accordance with the law, and whether the questions asked resulted in an infringement of privacy. On the first count, the HC sided with the government, and accepted submissions made by the advocate general about supplementary budgetary grants passed in the assembly. But it accepted the petitioner’s objections on the other two grounds. The HC said that the form in which the survey was designed and conducted — an enumerator would go to a household and gather information about the caste status of all members, and 17 other socioeconomic parameters — resembled a census, which only the Union government can conduct. By ordering an exercise that was, in effect, a thinly veiled census, the state government was in danger of impinging on the power of Parliament, the court said. And third, how the exercise was being carried out ended up generating major concerns about privacy. The state argued that most of the details collected — information about caste status was gathered from the head of the household — were in the public domain. But the HC said the fact that the data will be shared with leaders of different parties gave rise to the larger question of privacy and possible violation of the 2017 Supreme Court judgment, confirming the right to privacy.
Bihar’s caste survey had the backing of all parties, but it missed no one’s attention that the ones pushing it were the two Mandal-legacy parties, the RJD and JD(U), and that the BJP was a somewhat cagey co-traveller. It is also important to note that in the months following the announcement of the survey, a nationwide caste census became a major plank of an emerging Opposition platform for the 2024 general elections. The HC order will likely force a pause in those plans, though Opposition parties can still stick to the demand for a national caste census, hoping that it will lead to a churn that will upset the BJP’s coalition. What does this mean for the politics of caste? Some realities remain unchanged — that caste remains one of the defining factors of Indian society, that its form and shape are forever shifting, that newer ways of mobilisation are emerging, and that reviving Mandal politics will need new imaginations of empowerment and redistribution, not simply a retooling of old ideas.
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