Re-Cast(e)ing the State Policy: Ascription, Identities, and Democratic Politics

The post-Independence Indian state has had an ambivalent attitude towards caste. Even though the presence of caste as a structure of social disability and hierarchy was widely acknowledged, it did not enter the imaginations of India’s development establishment. It found no place in the vocabulary of economic growth spelt out in the planning models of the Nehruvian state. For the modernist elite, ascriptive structures like caste tended to disappear with the spread of education, exposure to urban culture, and broader processes of economic growth, as had presumably happened in the already developed countries of western Europe. The announcement to enumerate caste as part of the national census marks a significant turning point. Beyond mapping the demographics of jati [caste] communities, counting caste is bound to generate a large volume of data on caste’s correlates with economic status, creating possibilities of new policy narratives and politics of development/ distribution. India has indeed been counting its Scheduled Castes. However, the listing of all others as belonging to the ‘general’ category ipso facto suggested that their position in society was not detesrmined or influenced by their caste identity, that is, their location in the hierarchical social order. The decision to include all caste identities in the national census reflects the unfolding of a wide range of political and social processes. Through a critical overview of the existing literature on the changing nature of caste and the dynamics of its relationship with democratic politics, this article argues for the need for a re-envisioning of state policy and a need for engagement with caste as a structure of material inequalities.