May 3, 2025
Indian Information Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw announced Wednesday that the country’s upcoming census will include questions about caste, a surprising about-face for the BJP-led government that has long opposed gathering data on castes. The opposition Congress party has previously called for increased data collection on castes and applauded this week’s announcement.
Since its 1951 census, conducted four years after gaining independence from Britain, India has only collected information on scheduled castes and tribes — the most disadvantaged castes and tribes and ones that receive special benefits from the government because of their background.
The caste system relegates individuals into varying strata of society based on birth and, while practiced by Indians of various religions, has strong roots in Hindu culture. It was not immediately clear whether the new caste data collected by the upcoming census will focus on caste identification within Hinduism only or will collect caste data on Muslims, Christians, and other religious minorities as well.
Though India has outlawed the caste system for decades, it remains an integral part of society, affects nearly every area of life, and serves as a way for the ruling Hindu nationalists to dominate and pressure religious minorities.
While membership in a caste comes by birth, access to the Schedule Caste benefits is dependent on one being a Hindu. Therefore, low-caste individuals wishing to convert from Hinduism to another faith must hide their faith from the authorities or risk losing benefits that are often essential for their survival, given their limited standing in society.
Under a 1950 order establishing the Scheduled Caste social welfare system, Christian and Muslim Indians from low-caste backgrounds are barred from receiving government benefits otherwise available to them if they were Hindus. The Scheduled Caste system is a vital lifeline for many indigent Indians who require assistance for daily sustenance.
“No person who professes a religion different from the Hindu religion,” the order reads, “shall be deemed to be a member of a Scheduled Caste.” Later amendments added Sikhs and Buddhists to the list of favored religions, creating a legal hierarchy among religions and notably disadvantaging Muslims and Christians, respectively the country’s second- and third-largest religious groups.
Despite this clear legal discrimination against Christians and Muslims, Prime Minister Narendra Modi denied the existence of any legal barriers to conversion. “The benefits provided by the government are accessible to all,” he claimed. “Those benefits are available to everybody. In India’s democratic values, there is absolutely no discrimination on the basis of caste or creed.”
India’s legal structure presents a significant obstacle to conversion from Hinduism, as many individuals depend on these benefits for their survival. Civil society leaders in India estimate that this barrier prevents tens of millions of Christians and Muslims from declaring their real faith publicly when doing so would mean losing their jobs and the other benefits that come with Scheduled Caste status.
These Christians and Muslims are forced to worship in secret, making every effort to hide their real faith identity from hostile government officials with the authority to seize their benefits. Unfortunately, this often proves impossible. Whether through clothing identifying the wearer as Muslim or names identifying the bearer as Christian, government officials regularly identify and cut these religious minorities off from their benefits.
In one case, the daughter of a Dalit-background International Christian Concern (ICC) contact in India was cut off from her Scheduled Caste benefits when an official reviewing her university paperwork noticed that her father’s given name was from the Bible. When ICC visited India to research this issue, it found that cases like this abound nationwide.
Retaining access to Scheduled Caste benefits is a non-negotiable for many poor Indians. Poverty is endemic in many areas, particularly among traditionally Dalit communities. A full third of Indian children under the age of 5 years are underweight, according to the CIA World Factbook, putting India third in the world for the percentage of underweight children, better only than Yemen and Timor-Leste.
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SOURCE: International Christian Concern