By consistently championing the issue of having a caste census, various Opposition party leaders of the Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance (INDIA), from Nitish Kumar to Rahul Gandhi, have set the agenda on this one issue at least — which they have otherwise failed ever since Narendra Modi emerged on India’s national political scene. From demonetisation to the idea of simultaneous elections, it is Prime Minister Narendra Modi who has established a monopoly over agenda-setting in India’s political discourse. In response to the INDIA coalition’s persistent demand for a caste census, Mr. Modi has argued that he only believes in poverty as being the only caste and that serving the poor is his sole priority. The irony in Mr. Modi’s claim is that the poor have no ascriptive identity either in caste or religion or race and is indeed a variation of a Marxian argument. Its more elegant expression was found in the slogan, “‘the proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win....” It is the political reality of India that has forced Mr. Modi to fall back subconsciously on this famous reasoning, which is the irony of our time.
According to scholars who work on Indian poverty, there are two kinds of poverty, i.e., economic and institutional. Caste plays a pivotal role in the perpetuation of institutional poverty because, historically, it determines occupation and skills. In the modern Indian economy, most occupations are network driven in which caste plays decisive roles in driving those networks, which is why a caste census is vital. This is also why Rahul Gandhi’s observation that such a census ‘is like the X-ray of India’ makes some sense. By not recognising that caste has bred poverty, Mr. Modi is turning a blind eye to a deeply painful reality of Indian society. It is not just Mr. Modi, but even the trickle down approach of the Nehruvian model, which economist Sukhamoy Chakravarty used to describe as the Nehru-Mahalanobis model of development did not recognise either. Therefore, non-recognition of the organic relationship of caste and poverty has been a long neglected fact of Indian policy thinking.
