Ambedkar supported caste census, not its politicisation

Ambedkar in favour of Caste census

There were at least two occasions when Ambedkar expressed his displeasure with the decision of not collecting caste-specific information. Expressing his views on the 1951 census, he wrote in the Times of India on April 23, 1953: “We only know from our census reports how many are Hindus, how many are Muslims, how many Jews, how many Christians and how many untouchables. Except for the knowledge we get as to how many religions there are… this information is of no value. What we want to know is the distribution of castes in different linguistic areas. On this, we have very little information. One has to depend on one’s own knowledge and information. I don’t think it would be contradicted if it is said that the caste set-up within the linguistic area is generally such that it contains one or two major castes large in number and a few minor castes living in subordinate dependence on the major castes”. Similarly, in his Thoughts on the Linguistic States (1955), he regretted the omission of caste tables in the 1951 census, which had been a feature of the Indian census since its beginning.

Moreover, in Untouchables or the Children of India’s Ghetto (1935) Ambedkar resented the efforts of the higher castes to oppose caste enumeration. He supported Herbert Risley, the Census Commissioner for the 1901 census, who had argued that “so long as caste continues to be used as one of the distinguishing features of an individual’s official and social identity it cannot be claimed that a decennial enumeration helps to perpetuate an undesirable institution”. Further, Ambedkar supported Risley’s much-criticised efforts to classify caste groups based on social precedence. He saw such efforts as necessary owing to the widespread presence of a “system of gradation of higher and lower”.

Not a priority?

Ambedkar did not appreciate the discontinuation of the practice of caste enumeration. In all probability, he did not take caste’s omission in the census with too much seriousness. He possibly remained preoccupied with several other issues. His resignation statement dated October 10, 1951, highlighted all the issues over which he had serious disagreements with the Nehru government, namely, the Hindu Code Bill, inadequate safeguards for SCs and Backward Classes, foreign policy, and the Kashmir issue. The non-enumeration of castes did not find a mention in his statement.

It could also be the case that he remained more or less content with the decision to enumerate the SCs. In the Constituent Assembly on December 13, 1948, and again on August 24, 1949, Ambedkar highlighted the need to particularly enumerate the SCs and STs, since their political representation would be based upon their population ratio. Understandably, at that juncture of history, he could only afford to pay attention to the most depressed section of Indian society.

Cautionary counsel against Ambedkar’s politicisation

Ambedkar was interested in an accurate census, not in an enumeration exercise informed by a vested political agenda. In Mr Gandhi and Emancipation of the Untouchables (1943), he lamented that “census in India is deliberately cooked for securing political advantages which numbers give”. In his meeting with the Cabinet delegation and Field Marshal Viscount Wavell on April 5, 1946, Ambedkar conveyed that census had become mixed up with politics. This made him sceptical about the total number of the SCs as calculated by the census. States and Minorities (1947), a memorandum submitted to the Constituent Assembly by Scheduled Caste Federation (a political party which Ambedkar had founded) unambiguously observed: “the Census of India has over a number of decades ceased to be an operation in demography. It has become a political affair. Every community seems to be attempting to artificially augment its numbers at the cost of some other community for the sake of capturing greater and greater degree of political power in its own hands”.

In today’s context, Ambedkar’s views against the politicisation of the census need to be taken seriously. The experiences of colonial censuses suggest that caste enumeration is likely to encounter several logistical and methodological issues such as overlapping boundaries between caste, tribe, linguistic and other communities, multiplicity of caste labels, contradictory identity claims, and difficulties in designing frameworks for caste classification. All these leave ample room for politicking. While in all likelihood Ambedkar would have supported the idea of a caste census, he would certainly disapprove of the current politics surrounding it.

The writer is British Academy International Fellow, School of Global Studies, University of Sussex, UK