Living to Fight Another Day

The mood for war drummed up rather quickly in the days after militants killed 26 people in Pahalgam. As India blamed Pakistan for the attack, and both governments undertook a slew of diplomatic measures and fired at each other across the Line of Control, the narrative of “peace” in Kashmir was not the only casualty. “We had been asking for the caste census and how it would be conducted,” Ali Anwar, a former Rajya Sabha member and the founder of the Pasmanda Muslim Mahaz, an organisation demanding constitutional safeguards for Pasmanda—or marginalised-caste—Muslims, told me. Anwar, who is also a leader of the Indian National Congress, said that India’s civil-rights movement had worked painstakingly to highlight the need for a caste census at the national level, alongside other demands for social justice for Dalits, Bahujans and Pasmanda Muslims. In recent months, the Congress as well as the Bharatiya Janata Party had joined the chorus of regional parties promising a caste census if voted to power in state assembly elections. However, according to Anwar, as the military action grew imminent, the issue of power-sharing and the rights of these communities “did not just take a backseat—we zipped our lips.”

In 2018, Rajnath Singh, the home minister at the time, announced in the Lok Sabha that the government was ready to do a census of the Other Backward Classes. In the middle of the latest India–Pakistan conflict, the union government cabinet suddenly approved the counting of individuals’ castes in the next census, without providing any other details such as the timeline or the kind of data collection the census exercise would include. In light of the 2018 statement, there is a lack of clarity, and considerable fear, about whether the newly announced census will only count the OBCs or all castes. “What will an OBC census achieve?” Anwar asked, before explaining that a caste census needed to look at various socioeconomic parameters in addition to individuals’ castes. “Land is the biggest source of power. Who owns land? Who has how many jobs in the private sector? How many people in the media are OBC, Dalit, Bahujan or Muslim? Will they count all that or not? In whose hands are the factories and mines, coal and mica and iron ore? In whose hands are the big, income-generating businesses? Will there be a column for this in the census?”

“War is a right-wing agenda,” Shahnawaz Alam, secretary to the All India Congress Committee and the party’s in-charge in Bihar, told me. He pointed to a poster, shared by the BJP’s social-media handles in Chhattisgarh, showing a woman sitting next to a man’s corpse after the Pahalgam attack. The poster carried the slogan, “dharm poochha, jaati nahin”—they asked about religion, not caste—referring to eyewitness accounts that said the militants had asked people’s names and religions before killing them. The same visual and point were posted on the BJP’s Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh handles too. “It was basically an attempt to negate the demand for caste census and the agenda of proportional representation,” Alam said, suggesting that the BJP’s attempt to communalise the conflict was strategic. “Now we cannot remain focussed on Pasmandas, Dalits or Backward Classes’ issues,” Anwar said. “It is a kind of an immediate aggression. We will first try to spoil their attempt, to douse the fire of polarisation so that no communal riot spreads.”