Caste Enumeration Controversy in Telangana | Srinivasulu Karli

The Congress government in Telangana is mired in a controversy pertaining to the results of the caste enumeration it made public. The Congress under the leadership of Rahul Gandhi promised caste enumeration as part of the party’s social justice agenda, later scaled up during his Bharat Nyaya Yatra, as an antidote to the majoritarian Hindutva politics. The promise that if elected to power in Telangana, the party would go for caste counting in the state and put in place a policy regime committed to social justice based on caste empowerment was reaffirmed during the 2023 election campaign through what has come to be known as the Kamareddy Declaration. It is acknowledged that this promise played a role both in activating an otherwise low spirited party rank and file in the state and also in creating a receptive atmosphere thereby paving the way for the party’s victory over the Bharata Rastra Samithi (BRS) party that was in power in the Telangana ever since the state formation in 2014.

Since the caste census is proposed as part of the Congress’ social justice-centric national agenda, it would be instructive to account for the experience of Telangana with caste enumeration and how it has been conducted. The state government calls this exercise a caste ‘survey’ instead of a caste census for the technical reason that the latter can be conducted by the office of Registrar General and Commissioner of Census that comes under the purview of Union Home Ministry. It is instructive to note the conceptual distinction between these terms that while survey is sample based, census by definition must cover the entire citizenry. What has been sought to be done in Telangana is to enumerate the entire population with a focus on the caste profile.

It is widely believed that the conduct of the population survey process in Telangana has been delayed, frustrated and evidently conducted by the Congress a year after being elected to power without any requisite publicity to spread the awareness of its importance. There have been raised serious doubts and questions by the opposition parties, the BRS, the BJP, and the Left, the civil society associations and the BC organisations about the transparency and accountability at different levels and stages of the process. With no convincing response from the Congress to the contrary, these apprehensions have been seen scaled up and become more serious.

These concerns do not seem to be exaggerated given the character of the state party leadership and positions in the government being preponderantly under the control of the dominant peasant caste of Reddys. The fact that leadership of all the political parties – national and regional - at the state level is dominated by the regional dominant peasant castes there is an expected reluctance to caste enumeration lest the logic of caste demography effect their economic and political interests as well as the social dominance, if not immediately assuredly in the long run. For, as is well known, it is the power of the arithmetic of caste that drives the electoral dynamics in India.
The factual basis of the charge of faulty rather disinterested conduct of the survey and doubtful authenticity of the data is raised by Backward Class (BC) associations. Their claim is that the estimation of the BC proportion in the state population at 46.25 percent in the present survey is much below their expected figure of above 50 percent.

To understand the validity or otherwise of the above concerns and allegations leveled by a cross section of public opinion cutting across the ideological spectrum, it would be instructive to examine the conception, operationalization and processing of the caste survey to unmask the veil of confidentiality that has rendered it opaque. The dilly-dolling on the part of the state Congress party and government for over a year after coming to power on an issue of such sensitivity and a concern of immense public interest as the caste survey in fact seems to lend credence to these apprehensions.

The survey operation involves several steps that begin with the assignment of the responsibility to an appropriate department of the government. In the present case, it was the department of planning that was given the responsibility to undertake it. There is no clarity on who – agencies and individuals - with due expertise were engaged in taking care of the framing of the questionnaire, the personnel employed as field enumerators and experts assigned the training of them, etc. There is no information on whether any pilot study is done to verify the veracity of the questionnaire schedules and preparedness of field staff. Further, it is necessary to verify the authenticity of the data collected at different levels and also by fixing the margin of error to see where this data stands in relation to the data already available with government collected for various purposes on different occasions. There is absolutely no information on the modus operandi of the whole exercise and, most importantly, the data processing -– the quantification, correlation and tabulation - an important aspect of the whole process. The entire exercise, with no public disclosure of any of the above details, has given enough scope for all kinds of speculations and suspicions.

It may be recollected that the TRS government, in its first term in office, conducted a state-wide population survey known as Samagra Kutumba (Intensive Household) Survey in a single day, that is on 19th August 2014, with sufficient publicity through a mass contact programme. This survey was conducted by the state planning department by utilising the services of four lakh government employees with public resources curiously with no cabinet approval nor any legislative sanction. This data available on the net doesn’t provide any disaggregate details on caste except in broad strokes and apparently makes no claims about its official legal sanctity nor about its reliability. Yet, it is widely believed that this survey data was used as the basis for the formulation of TRS’s populist welfare policies and also for its electoral purposes. Ironically, now, this data is often cited in the present controversy by the BRS to question the reliability of the present survey data. In spite of the increasing reference to the Samagra Kutumba Survey (SKS) data, neither the TRS nor the ruling Congress has found it relevant to release the detailed data for public scrutiny.

Now with the BRS entering into the scenario to spice up the present controversy by apart from claiming the SKS to be ‘official’ also sought to add to the doubts on the BC figure of 46.25 to be 5 point lower to the figure arrived at in the SKS and also claims that the forward caste number to have been hiked.

With mounting of the criticism the state government as a way of correction has announced that the enumeration those citizens who were not covered earlier in the survey would be conducted. But the more basic doubts and apprehensions raised regarding the whole operation and the competence of those involved in it are left unanswered and unattended.

With the public and political opinion in the state being vitiated the only option left to normalize the situation is to be transparent and open with the information on the expertise involved, methodology followed in the operationalisation of field work, computation of the data and the margin of error to the public and admit openly any shortcomings that could have happened in the process. Census operation, as we know from our long experience, is an enormous task involving a long time in preparation and a huge amount of personnel in its execution. There is no reason to shy away from admitting any errors if they happened in such a humongous task. Truthful admission of errors and their identification of where and how they happened makes it easy to rectify them apart from winning the popular confidence acceptance. Any procrastination in this regard would make it unnecessarily difficult for the regime to undo the damage in the offing.

As similar demands are emerging for caste enumeration in other states the experience of Telangana state with all the problems and shortcomings would constitute an important case to learn from to avoid them in other context in future.

(Author: Srinivasulu Karli, Senior Fellow, ICSSR, New Delhi
Professor (Retd),, Department of Political Science, Osmania University, Hyderabad)