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In a
recent piece Mr. Abusaleh Shariff (‘Casting the Caste Net’, Indian
Express, 23 August 2010) has attempted an imaginative intervention
in the debate around the caste census. While he enters the debate
both in his ‘professional’ capacity as a renowned
economist/demographer (to ‘discuss alternatives for collecting caste
data’) and as a ‘communitarian’ (to ‘highlight implications for the
Muslim community’), it is not really apparent which is having the
upper hand in his articulation. Also, when he indicates that
‘Muslims are considered a caste-less community’ it is not obvious
which body of sociological knowledge he is alluding to and by whom
are they considered so. This is moreover amazing given the fact that
now organised lower caste Muslim movements, employing the trope of
dalit-pasmanda, are quite conspicuous in the public sphere, at least
in North India. With each passing day the hegemony of ashraf (upper
caste) sections within Muslims is being increasingly interrogated by
the ajlaf (shudra) and arzal (dalit) sections and the demands for
democratisation within the community resonate louder than ever
before.
But let
me revert back to his main arguments first. To start with he
advocates an ‘open-ended question method’ for the upcoming census
wherein the informants’ response to their caste-names can be filled
in and codified later. This will enable us to get the actual numbers
for each caste.
However, he posits that this method should be applied only for the
OBCs and not for the SC/STs as updated codified lists are already
available for the latter. He further casts doubts on whether such a
method will be actually adopted for this census and speculates that
the social, economic and educational data that the census would
return may not be adequate for classifying any particular caste as
backward or forward. From there he moves on to reproduce well
rehearsed and much celebrated arguments in some circles against the
methodological issues with the Mandal report (‘the absence of any
dependable data’, ‘sketchy data from the 1931 census’ and so on and
so forth) underplaying the fact that it is precisely this that
constitutes the ground for the recent demand for a caste census.
One can
have a number of issues with his argument so far but what catches my
attention is his suggestion: ‘I am of the opinion that using the OBC
list during Census 2011 to identify the size and share of the OBCs
will be highly problematic, and it will make devising inclusive
policies difficult both at the national and state levels’. So is it
really his discomfort with the Central OBC list informed by the
Mandal Report which is the inspiration for this piece? Let us stay
with his argument a bit longer.
Apart
from his issues with the identification of OBCs on the basis of
obsolete data by the Mandal Commission he has other substantive
queries as well. It is indeed ‘puzzling’ for him ‘that as per the
Mandal Commission the “OBC list” is considered a “class” category
with little sociological, cultural or economic basis to designate it
as such’. One is left wondering what he means here. If one unpacks
this sentence carefully, then since the OBC list is really a list of
castes, he is simply advancing his scepticism for this
correspondence between ‘caste’ and ‘class’. But such displeasure, we
all know, is not entirely novel. In striking contrast one can
advance the arguments of the Kaka Kalelkar Commission, various state
backward class commissions, a series of court judgements including
the famous Indira Sawney judgment in which the judges unambiguously
remarked: ‘A caste can be and quite often is a social class in
India’.
Indeed,
even Ambedkar’s position is unequivocal in this respect: ‘[what] are
called the backward classes are...nothing else but a collection of
certain castes’ [Zwart, Frank De, ‘The Logic of Affirmative Action:
Caste, Class and Quotas in India’, Acta Sociologica; 43; 235]. If
the backward classes are nothing but a collection of certain castes
in Ambedkar’s reading then what caste cluster can they be identified
with? Obviously, it could be none other than the shudras as the
extremes in the caste hierarchy, the upper castes (savarnas) and the
dalits (avarnas), except for a few exceptional cases, hardly leave
any scope for ambiguity. One only has to run through the literature
on caste and acquaint oneself with the large number of official
reports on this subject in order to appreciate the ‘sociological,
cultural or economic basis’ for incorporating shudras in the OBC
list as a ‘backward class’. If Mr. Shariff has some finer
theoretical point in mind here around the category ‘class’ then I am
simply unable to comprehend it and would readily stand corrected
were he to explain that in any forum.
However, he certainly has a point when he puts his finger on the
contested computation of both the Hindu and non-Hindu OBCs by the
Mandal Commission and in suggesting that there are wide variations
between the Central and State OBC lists. But then if such is the
case then the remedy to the malady should be common for both the
Hindu and Muslim OBC’s. It is here that he decides to leave the
economist behind and begins to privilege the communitarian element
in his articulation when he attempts a separate solution to the
problem for Muslim OBC’s. He accurately maintains that these
discrepancies in the lists will lead to an inflated figure for
Muslim ‘high caste-class’ and therefore a majority of Muslims will
be excluded from the ambit of affirmative action. He takes issues
with Mandal Commission for maintaining that in Hindus upper-castes
constitute only 25% of the population whereas for Muslims they
constitute as much as 50%.
According to him this ‘is because none from among the Muslims are
classified under the SC/ST category and all such Muslims with the
SC/ ST identity are actually listed as high caste/class’. Now this
is confusing to say the least because, apart from the obvious slip
in the case of ST Muslims who are actually recognised, the Sachar
Committee Report, in which he was interestingly a co-member, offers
an argument in a diametrically opposite direction. According to the
Sachar Report ‘By clubbing the arzals and the ajlafs among Muslims
in an all encompassing OBC category, the Mandal Commission
overlooked the disparity in the nature of deprivations that they
faced’ (p.195). So while Mr. Shariff maintains that the higher
percentage of upper castes within Muslims is because the dalit
Muslims (which are not recognised as SCs) are clubbed with the upper
caste Muslims, the Sachar Report on the contrary critiques the
Mandal list for clubbing the dalit Muslims with the OBC Muslims. I
am not sure if this is a factual error or whether the author has
something else in his mind that eludes me. Obviously, such a high
proportion of Muslim upper castes defies all sociological and
historical wisdom (Mr. Shariff himself speculates that the
proportion of upper castes would be only 20% of the Muslim
population), but then the rationale for such figures cannot be the
one that the author has advanced.
But
where is he actually taking us? ‘It will be almost impossible to
prepare a list of Muslim caste/class for classifying them as Muslim
OBC’s’, he argues and then readily advocates the preparation of a
‘list of exclusion’ whereby those ‘who do not match the list of
exclusion can be identified as ‘Muslim OBCs’’. Here we arrive at the
full expression of OBC Muslim as a negative identity. Only those who
fall outside the list of exclusion, an innovative device I would
say, will be deemed as OBC Muslims and that OBC Muslims do not have
any substantive reality of their own. How different is the tone and
tenor in Ali Anwar’s articulation, MP (Rajya Sabha) and one of the
leaders of the pasmanda movement, when he states: ‘Hum shuddar hain
shuddar; Bharat ke moolnivasi hain. Baad mein musalman hain’ (We are
Shudras first; we are the indigenous peoples of India. We are
Muslims later). And, how is this list of exclusion to be prepared?
The list is not to be prepared by the National Backward Classes
Commission or by ‘using the information collected by Anthropological
Survey of India under its People of India Project’ as the Sachar
Committee advocates (p. 201). Rather, it is to be prepared for each
state ‘after consultations with state-level Muslim intellectuals and
religious bodies’ which are, one could point out, thoroughly
undemocratic and unrepresentative in character from the vantage
point of lower caste Muslim articulation. Here the politics of
location fully manifests itself. Mr. Shariff makes two
interesting moves in this piece. One, he delinks the question of
Hindu OBCs with that of Muslim OBCs, and, two, he catapults the
latter question into the orbit of Muslim communitarian politics and
cumulative representation. If Muslim communitarian politics has so
far worked for the interests of ashraf sections within Muslims then
the majority of dalit-pasmanda Muslims will find his argument to be
somewhat problematic.
The author is a
researcher working on the dalit-pasmanda movement. He can be
contacted at khalidanisansari@gmail.com
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Identity,
Indian politics and caste census: 
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