When Counting Comes at a Cost

In 2018, crowds descended on a small village in the Indian state of Maharashtra to mark the 200th anniversary of the legendary Battle of Koregaon, in which lower-caste Indian troops fighting on behalf of the British East India Company successfully overcame local upper-caste rulers. Ironically, given that their victory fortified British colonial power, the battle came to be remembered as a win for the oppressed—a symbol of India’s desperate struggle against caste prejudice.

In a country where ancient animosities never stay in the past, the 2018 gathering turned into a political powder keg. Violence broke out between Hindu nationalists, who still saw the centuries-old battle as a national betrayal, and Dalits, those most discriminated against in caste terms, and often consigned to working as scavengers, street sweepers, and latrine cleaners. To the concern of human rights groups, 16 intellectuals and Dalit rights campaigners were subsequently arrested, accused of having links to the militant far left. Among them was the author Anand Teltumbde.

The Caste Con Census, Anand Teltumbde, Navayana, 252 pp., $20, November 2025

In a country where ancient animosities never stay in the past, the 2018 gathering turned into a political powder keg. Violence broke out between Hindu nationalists, who still saw the centuries-old battle as a national betrayal, and Dalits, those most discriminated against in caste terms, and often consigned to working as scavengers, street sweepers, and latrine cleaners. To the concern of human rights groups, 16 intellectuals and Dalit rights campaigners were subsequently arrested, accused of having links to the militant far left. Among them was the author Anand Teltumbde.

The 31 months he spent in prison awaiting trial became a galvanizing experience for Teltumbde. Now a feverishly prolific writer on caste, his latest book confronts an issue central to any country that suffers caste, ethnic, or racial inequality: Is it better for a government committed to social justice to carry out minority counts, or not?

In 2025, the Indian government announced that its next decennial census in 2027 would include a caste tally for the first time since 1931. But in The Caste Con Census, Teltumbde makes the persuasive argument that tallying caste risks cementing divisions between groups, pitting them against each other in the fight for government resources and offering incentives for ruthless politicians to target voters based on caste.

Raised in an impoverished family of manual laborers and educated in a cattle shed, Teltumbde possessed prodigious talent, which helped him build successful careers in academia and the petrochemical industry. He brings firsthand experience and rigorous scholarship to the debate, which, like the Battle of Koregaon, is not a simple matter of good versus bad. While Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s populist Hindu nationalist government is introducing the caste census, it is those on the progressive left—particularly the opposition Congress Party—who have been lobbying for it. They insist that having precise caste data will make marginalized groups more visible, giving them greater political power and forcing policymakers to push more resources their way.

Although Teltumbde’s book doesn’t address race-based affirmative action in the United States at length, this argument will feel familiar to Americans. Introduced in the early 1900s, India’s “reservations” system sets aside jobs and university places for those belonging to disadvantaged castes, much as affirmative action policies in the United States increased opportunities for minorities (before suffering various rollbacks in the last few years, starting with the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling against race-conscious university admissions). In India, quotas have been a linchpin in the country’s equality efforts, injecting at least a little more caste diversity at the top of a society in which cultural change would otherwise have been glacially slow.

Members of the Dhobi caste, are interviewed outside their home in Chandigarh, India, for a socio-economic caste census on August 24, 2011.Kate Geraghty/The Sydney Morning Herald/Fairfax Media/Getty Images

But, as Teltumbde argues, progressives overlook the risks that come with retaining caste as a bureaucratic tool. He reminds readers that it was the British who last carried out exhaustive caste censuses. Their goal was to foment division among Indians and weaken resistance to colonial rule. (The Battle of Koregaon is one such example, when the British had Indians fighting not them, but each other.) By the time of the 1881 census, he writes, “caste had become central to the colonial classificatory schema.”

Before the British arrived, Teltumbde adds, the Indian caste system was more context-specific and less rigid—but colonial rule “disrupted the dynamic nature of caste” and inscribed it into the bureaucracy of the state. In the same way that segregation in the United States and apartheid in South Africa circumscribed people’s freedoms based on how the state racially classified them, the British Empire determined which roles Indians performed based on their caste: menial labor, administrative work, military service.

So it was that “colonial power not only produced a taxonomy of caste but also installed it into the grammar of governance,” Teltumbde writes. The question for us in the 21st century is: What is gained by keeping that grammar in place? For the British, the answer was simple: to divide and rule. Today, the logic of a caste census is to redress historic harms.

Unfortunately, as the late economist Meghnad Desai noted, reservations turned out to be a quick and dirty fix. In India, where government jobs are coveted but scarce, the system took no time to sour. Dominant subgroups among disadvantaged castes were the first in line, while communities higher up the caste ladder lobbied to be included under the same umbrella. “Instead of treating reservations as temporary correctives within a wider project of universal advancement, the Indian state has normalized them as perpetual fixtures,” Teltumbde writes. “The idea of an India without caste has been rendered not just utopian but unthinkable.”

Teltumbde’s other fear is that the current government cannot be trusted with caste data. He warns that there are already signs that Modi’s ruling party will be selective with the statistics it makes public to paint the most flattering picture of itself. Politicians on both sides have not been above exploiting caste divisions to secure votes, promising different groups a larger share of the reservations pie in return for electoral support.

Teltumbde’s contention is that if social equality is truly the objective, almost every progressive policy outcome could be achieved without classifying or counting anyone. If the problem is uneven access to education, the answer is surely free high-quality education for everyone. If the problem is poverty, the answer must be a more robust welfare system for everyone. France and the Netherlands do not ask citizens their race on census forms but still have laws prohibiting hate crimes based on race. Without the universal basic rights of education, health care, housing, and employment, Teltumbde notes bitterly, “social justice risks becoming a managerial tool for caste reproduction,” a petty war for rights and recognition among those at the bottom.

Quoting the great 20th century Indian social reformer B. R. Ambedkar, Teltumbde argues that the end goal should always be the annihilation of caste, not its entrenchment. This fascinating and impassioned book, informed by a life at the sharpest possible end of inequality, is a sober reminder that, as useful as it may seem, counting people comes at a cost.