By Amitabh Ranjan
Speaking at a session recently in Mumbai to mark 100 years of the existence of the RSS that he heads, Mohan Bhagwat said only a Hindu could head the organisation and that it did not follow caste-based considerations. “Swayamsevaks rose through the ranks based on their work”. He added that there was no election to the post and regional and divisional heads zero in on a deserving candidate to head the organisation as the sarsangh chalak.
Look at the century-old history of the RSS. So far, since 1925, there have been six Brahmins and one Rajput who have headed the organisation. The two castes together represent not more than 10-12% of India’s population.
Obviously, this is one of those trademark examples of doublespeak that the organisation resorts to from time to time to suit its agenda. Around the time he made this speech, the protests by members of the forward castes were in full swing against the UGC’s 2026 Equity Rules that sought to replace the 2012 anti-discrimination rules before the apex court stayed it.
Anand Teltumbde’s The Caste Con Census brings to the fore a long history of disconnect between claims on the one hand and intentions on the other of affirmative action, whereby tokenism for over a century has only solidified and widened caste divides rather than bridge them. For the author the immediate provocation is the impending caste census that the BJP-led Centre, in a U-turn, has announced. In April 2025, the Cabinet Committee on Political Affairs gave a nod for enumerating caste in the decennial census to be carried in 2026-27. Interestingly, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his party, particularly during the 2024 election campaign, had been stridently vocal in their opposition to a caste census.
This somersault begets certain obvious questions. Has the saffron party bowed to political pressure? Or is it a move to appropriate a demand for emancipation to blunt its radical edge? In an article, Teltumbde had made a case that the caste census would become a tool of division and rather than annihilating caste will only reinforce it. This book is an expansion on that article.
He presents the historical evolution of caste to sound a caution for readers about its deceptive nature whereby social justice remains a chimera even as it is used by the ruling classes to their advantage. Tracing how the colonial government institutionalised caste counts not as a neutral administrative measure, but as a deliberate response to the threat of the unity of Indians across castes and religions after the 1857 mutiny, the author says successive exercises did not merely record social realities of caste but actively shaped them, reifying and hardening identities.
Castes that once functioned as fluid, localised and context-specific formations were systematised into rigid, pan-India, theologically-sanctioned categories through six decennial censuses. It gained a fixed character that transcended its more mutable forms, and became a tool of imperial control.
Post-independence, India’s ruling classes not only decided to use that template in toto, but added their own cunning by extending it to backward classes in the name of social justice, while effectively evading its core obligation of building capacities of all people, which is a prerequisite for the success of any genuine social justice policy.
Now, as the present Union government prepares to revive the caste census after nearly a century, it is likely to yield similar consequences. Far from a neutral data-gathering exercise, the census risks reinforcing caste consciousness, exacerbating social divisions and creation of political constituencies for electoral capital.
While Teltumbde agrees that caste realities must be confronted, he is worried that the enumeration would legitimise and solidify once again the various identities that justice-seeking politics must learn to dismantle. For him, the only remedy is what BR Ambedkar called for: “the caste cannot be reformed, it must be destroyed”. The author says, “In a paradigm where the caste identities of the SCs, STs, and the OBCs are erased without annihilating caste, they would be rendered defenceless and at the mercy of the upper castes.”
So, where does the solution lie? The author has a few suggestions to make. While proportional system of election in place of the first-past-the-post sounds logical, it appears impractical in the near future. An innovative schema presented towards the end to ensure that reservation benefits percolate to more disadvantaged segments of the beneficiaries looks doable.
A suggestion to introduce quota in the private sector through an enforceable diversity and inclusion mandates in human resource and procurement policies is also made that makes sense. However, what runs like a leitmotif through the length of the book is a case made out for universal capacity building through state-sponsored quality education, affordable health facility delivery and a secured livelihood. In a nutshell, universal provisioning is not a substitute for social justice but a precondition. Without it, the State only manages inequality rather than dismantles it.
At a time when a number of scholars have aligned with the need for caste enumeration, Teltumbde’s approach stands out for its novelty. And he makes a strong case for his view. He does not allow a sense of angst mar a cohesive and incisive debate. Bringing history into perspective, dissecting the caste cauldron and conceptual nuances of reservation from the points of administrative framework and transformative intention, he offers a diagnosis, a prognosis and a prescriptive if the annihilation of caste has to be realised.
A book of rare scholarship, it would hand-hold the reader through the country’s caste labyrinth and its social, economic, and political fallouts as they have evolved through the ages.
The writer is a former journalist who teaches at Patna Women’s College
The Caste Con Census
Anand Teltumbde
Navayana Publishing
Pp 252, Rs 499