Caste survey puts OBC count in Bihar at 63.13%

Backward communities comprise nearly two-thirds of Bihar’s population, the results of a landmark caste survey in the state announced on Monday, marking the completion of an exercise that has the potential to upend heartland politics and propel caste into the core of the electoral discourse in the 2024 polls.

This is the first time that all castes have been successfully enumerated in a physical government headcount since Independence. India’s decennial census only counts the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes.

The preliminary results of the exercise — which was rushed after the Patna high court suspended the survey for three months this summer — threw up significant, though not surprising, results.

It showed that extremely backward communities — which comprises 112 castes — constituted 36.01% of the population, and backward castes — formed by 30 communities — made up another 27.12%. Together, other backward classes (OBC) — the umbrella group consists of backward castes and EBCs in the state — is 63.13%, confirming estimates by exercises such as the National Family Health Surveys. Scheduled Castes form 19.65% and Scheduled Tribes 1.68%.

Upper castes constitute 15.52% of the population, in line with what leaders such as Kanshi Ram predicted decades ago. Among backwards, Yadavs were found to be the biggest caste group, forming 14.26% of the population, while Kushwaha and Kurmi are 4.27% and 2.87%.

“The data collected during the exercise, conducted in two phases, would help the state government plan developmental strategy in future,” said acting chief secretary-cum-development commissioner Vivek Kumar Singh as he read out the survey results from a sheaf of paper.

Muslim caste groups were also included in the list of 215 names notified by the government ahead of the exercise.

The data on other socioeconomic parameters collected — 17 criteria ranging from employment, education and marital status to land holding and property ownership were part of the survey’s questionnaire — was not released. This data could be crucial in understanding how castes are benefitting from reservation, and how intra-caste bloc divisions are evolving.

“We have taken the financial condition of every family... Tomorrow in all party meetings we will keep everything in front of everyone... The government will take all the necessary steps after taking everyone’s suggestions in the meeting...,” chief minister Nitish Kumar said on X.

The historic but controversial exercise could trigger the beginning of a political churn that many experts call the second Mandal moment, a reference to the implementation of reservation for OBCs in 1990 that coalesced OBCs into a potent electoral bloc and sparked the rise of a clutch of regional parties which changed the face of heartland politics.

The 26-party Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance (INDIA) has pushed for a nationwide caste census, hoping that just as the first Mandal movement countered the Ram Janmabhoomi movement and helped regional parties craft alliances to hold on to power for nearly two decades, a second similar churn could pose a challenge to the dominant Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). This sentiment was reflected in the response of the so-called Mandal parties to the survey.

“When our government is formed at the Centre in 2024, we will conduct a caste census in the entire country and oust the Dalit, Muslim, backward and extremely backward-hating BJP from power,” said Rashtriya Janata Dal patriarch Lalu Prasad on X.

But the ground realities have shifted since the 1990s, with the dominance of the BJP built on its successful strategy to mobilise less-dominant backward and Dalit groups into a broader Hindu umbrella. The BJP has also consciously injected marginalised caste leaders into its ranks, effectively countering an earlier perception that the party was primarily focused on its traditional vote base, upper castes.

The party reacted to the survey cautiously. The BJP state unit president Samrat Choudhary called the report “half-baked” and said that the government should complete the socio-economic aspect of the survey and release its findings as well for a true picture.

The exercise — which saw 320,000 enumerators fan out across the state to register the data of 130.7 million people across 17 parameters — will have political ramifications for Bihar, one of India’s most populous states that sends 40 members to the Lok Sabha. The Janata Dal (United) and the RJD are looking to mobilise marginalised castes — especially EBCs, considered a group loyal to Nitish Kumar — ahead of the 2024 general elections.

It could also act as a springboard for demands to expand reservations, especially for OBCs.

The findings of the caste survey can very well become a basis for the Bihar government to grant fresh reservation benefits, subject to the legal challenge that it may eventually face before a constitutional court if the quota breaches the 50% ceiling fixed by the Supreme Court in the 1992 Indra Sawhney (famously known as Mandal Commission) case.

Tamil Nadu, presently, has a law providing for 69% reservation for identified classes. Although a challenge to this law remains pending before the top court, it has been saved so far on the ground that the law received a presidential assent in 1993 and was also put in the Ninth Schedule of the Constitution, which ensured a limited scope of judicial review.

The November 2022 judgment by the Supreme Court, ratifying the 10% EWS quota, had also weighed in on the 50% ceiling on reservation.

The majority verdict at that time held that the 50% ceiling on reservation is “not inviolable or inflexible”, marking a paradigm shift from the thumb rule that has governed reservations in India, preventing states from enforcing quotas that take the proportion above 50%, as laid down by a nine-judge bench in the 1992 judgment. The 3-2 view noted that the 50% ceiling applied only to the provisions of the Constitution that existed at that time and cannot extend to the 2019 amendment to any subsequent law.

Counting caste has always been a contentious ask in India. British-era censuses counted caste in minute detail but the last one to enumerate all castes was conducted in 1931. Independent India abolished the practice and subsequent censuses only counted scheduled castes and tribes. Though unofficial estimates exist, especially of the numerical strength of backward groups, there is no official count.

In 2011, the central government announced that alongside the regular census, a socioeconomic and caste census will also be conducted. But the caste data was never made public and the government later told Parliament that methodological infirmities held up an accurate analysis.

The first rumblings of the survey began in 2021, when Nitish Kumar was still in alliance with the BJP, and snowballed once he moved to join hands with the RJD and Congress.

The first round of the survey was conducted between January 7 and 21, when officials listed the households in their respective districts and numbered them. In the second phase, enumerators documented the socio-economic indicators as well as the caste status of roughly 130 million people.

But three weeks after the exercise began on April 15, it ran into legal troubles after a raft of petitioners approached the Patna high court, arguing the survey was too similar to a census that only the Union government can undertake. They also said that details sought violated the right to privacy.

On May 4, the high court temporarily suspended the survey but on August 1, ruled in favour of the government, saying the census falls solely within the prerogative of the Union government but state governments are not prohibited from collecting data for welfare schemes and affirmative action.The petitioners approached the Supreme Court, which in the last week of August refused to suspend the exercise.

Congress leader Kishore Kumar Jha attributed the fall in upper caste count to their relocation to other states for employment, better lifestyle and peaceful living. “Bihar witnessed a lot of violence due to caste tensions and lawlessness in the past. Besides, a lot of people migrated for better educational facilities for their children. And more importantly, the legitimacy of the data collected in the survey is also a big factor,” Jha said.

Political strategist Prashant Kishore said that the data alone would not solve Bihar’s problem. “The fact known to everybody is that Bihar is a state with 13 crore population and ranked at the bottom of the development ladder for decades. The legal sanctity of the data is not there, as there is world of difference between a survey and a census. Anybody can get a survey done, and what has come out is no different from what is already known,” he said.

Former director of AN Sinha Institute of Social Studies DM Diwakar said that the data on caste census would generate a cry from across the country to raise the reservation bar in jobs from 50% to a higher level. “The survey report has come out as authentic source for castes constitution of the society, as the government was so far relying on 2011 data for want of the national census. It is expected to bring such castes among the EBCs like Kumhar, Barhai (carpenter), Kanu, Hajam, etc, who were marginaised in the BC politics after acknowledging their strengths,” said Diwakar.