BACKWARDS TO THE FORE

One more milestone has been marked in the evolving landscape of India's caste empowerment politics: a report containing an enumeration of the various caste groups that make up Telangana's 35.5 million population.

- Amarnath K. Menon

On February 4, in a special one-day session of the assembly, Chief Minister A. Revanth Reddy sought to scale it up as a significant moment in an ongoing national-level debate on the subject while offering only a controlled sneak peek at the report's findings. After much-heated wrangling, the House adopted a resolution urging the Centre to replicate the survey on a pan-India scale. The detailed 1,000-page report was not tabled, citing privacy concerns.

The caste count, officially termed the 'Socio-Economic, Educational, Employment, Political and Caste Survey', revealed that Backward Classes (BCs) constitute 56.33 per cent of the state's population, with BC Muslims accounting for 10.08 per cent (see Telangana Caste Count Findings). The figures are significant, especially because there has been no nationwide caste census since 1931, which estimated OBCs at 52 per cent of the population. The Mandal Commission used this data, but sociologists always argued that the actual numbers could be much higher. This was also evidenced by the 2023 Bihar survey, which found OBCs to constitute 63.1 per cent of the state's population.