Shikha Mukerjee | Census, caste & citizenship: Spin to win in endless cycle

The timing of the leaks suggests that the politically astute Mr Modi and his BJP team probably sense an urgent necessity to strengthen the appeal of the over-used and now possibly marginally declining appeal to over-exposed voters of the decades-old slogan, newly paraphrased by Yogi Adityanath as “Batange to Katange”, that is, divided we fail, as it would instigate new confrontations about identities, citizenship, infiltrators and terrorists, targeting the Muslim community and so infusing fresh significance to the slogan. A Census with a new, updated version of the National Register of Citizens would give fresh meaning to the Hindu majority in danger of being overwhelmed by the rapidly increasing Muslim minority population, as the BJP and Mr Modi have belatedly realised the potential of the hoary tag: statistics are damn lies.

Much thought has gone into marketing the Census exercise; there are political benefits to be earned by marketing it as Mr Modi’s magnanimity. One obvious constituency of potential voters that the BJP and Mr Modi can hope to capture through the Census exercise will be women, who have been guaranteed 33 per cent reserved constituencies in state legislatures and in the Lok Sabha. By holding out the promise of more power to women through the representation route, Mr Modi is targeting women as voters and as party loyalists who can be mobilised to bring in more women into the very patriarchal BJP. Offering a share in power is going one step further than doling out cash to women through the once derided now embraced variations on the “Ladki Bahin Samman Yojana”.

The value of women’s votes was measured by the BJP in the Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh elections. It was confirmed in Haryana. With the crucial Maharashtra elections coming up, where the BJP’s ruthless tactics of buying out the Opposition by splitting and appropriating regional parties will be tested, the women’s vote matters even more.

After resisting the idea of a head count, the renewal of speculation stoked by leaked information suggests that the Modi government appears to have overcome its distrust of numbers and data generated through surveys and research, the probability that a caste enumeration would be part of the Census exercise implies that the ruling side has found political value in getting it done. It could be that the build-up of pressure from the Congress and its INDIA group partners on one hand and from within the NDA, especially Nitish Kumar in Bihar and N. Chandrababu Naidu in Andhra Pradesh, have forced Mr Modi and his team to rethink the politically sensitive issue.

By kicking off a caste and religion-sect based Census as part of the decadal head count exercise, the Modi government can take credit then it will serve to deflate the Congress, which has made the issue part of its core agenda as and when the INDIA group comes to power at the Centre. For a leader who campaigned at one point during the Lok Sabha elections that the Congress and its regional party allies were intent on dividing the “nation” and destroying the Constitution by trying to amend the provisions on reservation for Scheduled Castes, the volte face on the caste census is significant.

Either the BJP and Mr Modi by himself, or the RSS, BJP and Mr Modi may have collectively come to the realisation that the caste census issue and its data can be used to serve the Hindutva agenda of a uniform, universal, homogenised and hegemonist Hindu identity.

Critics of reservation and the politics of quotas and reservation and the tug of war over expansion of quotas and additions to the list of caste-based reservations have argued, convincingly, that the more the quotas and the additions to the “list” of castes, the greater the control dominant caste elites gain by seeding internecine and inter caste competition. The rush to raise the cut-off to Rs 15 lakhs a year for the “creamy layer” within the Other Backward Classes by the Eknath Shinde government in Maharashtra is a case in point. The Chhattisgarh government decision to create 50 per cent OBC reservation for councillors and panchayat representatives in municipalities and panchayats is a pointer that the BJP is testing how the caste census can be utilised for political gains.

The imperative to reinvent itself is understandable; neither Mr Modi as the helmsman nor his team masterminded by Amit Shah succeeded in giving the BJP a clear majority in the 2024 Lok Sabha election. The BJP won in Haryana, but it did so because the Congress failed to convert its advantage into wins and ended up snatching defeat from the predicted victory. The BJP must be under stress because it is certainly aware, probably acutely so, that the theory of marginal returns does set in once the peak is over.

Between now, that is in every state and Union territory election, in municipal and panchayat elections, and the next Lok Sabha election in 2029, the BJP will have to face the prospect that every election could be the one where the margin has been crossed and the decline has begun. In this extremely uncertain time, the BJP and Mr Modi have no choice except to overhaul the narrative of Hindutva by creating a diversion.

As Prime Minister Modi tours the country from election meetings in Jharkhand and Maharashtra to his annual face-to-face with Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel in Kevadia, where his repaired statue, twice the size of the Statue of Liberty, was unveiled in 2018, the public patiently waits for him to get to the crux of matter; how much money will he spend; not on alleviating the distress caused by chronic and incurable poverty but something much less, a tiny direct transfer into individual bank accounts. The bitter pill, therefore, needs sugar coating.

After 10 years in power and elected for another five years, the going is getting tough even for the tireless helmsman and his BJP, aided by the RSS. Spinning the bits in the kaleidoscope in what appears to be an endless series of bewitching patterns can change soon enough into a dull and dreary distraction.