In October 2023, the Government of Bihar in northern India published the preliminary findings from its first state-wide caste survey and released a full report a month later. The findings from the survey led to immediate revisions in state-level reservation policy. At first glance, the recent case of Bihar offers an alternative, and more positive, ending to this book—which follows the case of a failed nationwide enumeration of caste in India. I argue in this book that the executive bureaucracy protected the invisibility of caste privilege when it blocked the inclusion of a caste-wise enumeration in Census 2011—a process I call bureaucratic deflection. The recent survey in Bihar actually supports this book's argument since one of the executive bureaucracy's most successful strategies to prevent a caste-wise enumeration in the decennial census has been to decentralize the project of enumerating caste to state governments. Bihar's political leadership undertook the survey after the central government failed to publish caste-wise data.

Building off the success of Bihar's caste survey, the opposition Congress party seeks to prevent the third successive term of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in office at the center with a national policy platform that includes a caste census during the 2024 parliamentary election. On the one hand, it feels disingenuous that Congress has chosen to rally around this issue—given its long history of excluding a caste-wise enumeration in the decennial censuses of independent India. The Congress leadership had every opportunity to collect caste-wise data in the Censuses of 1951, 1961, 1971, 1991, and 2011. In fact, this book details how the Congress leadership conceded to do so in the lead up to Census 2011 only to backtrack on its promise and push the project into a survey with a long history of producing poor quality data. The executive leadership—which switched from Congress to BJP in 2014—never published the caste-wise data collected as part of a revamped below poverty line (BPL) survey. Both dominant political parties have refused to collect caste-wise data once in power at the center and have supported the senior bureaucracy's seeming disdain for a caste-wise enumeration in the decennial census. In this policy area, they share a common history of using the promise of a caste census to secure votes but never implementing one.