“We were in disbelief that we won,” explained a caste census activist. After months of organizing, the campaign to include a caste-wise enumeration in Census 2011 had culminated in the Lok Sabha, or the lower house of Indian parliament, in early May 2010. The debate spanned three afternoon sessions in which nearly every speaker across the political spectrum supported the collection of caste-wise data in the upcoming decennial census. The leadership of the Indian National Congress Party (hereafter Congress), in power at the time through the coalition United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government, found itself backed into a corner and reversed its long-standing opposition to a caste-wise enumeration in the census. A remark by prime minister Manmohan Singh at the end of the debate, followed by finance minister Pranab Mukherjee's comment to reporters the next day that “caste will be included in the present census,” publicly confirmed that the UPA government would collect caste-wise data in the census for the first time since independence. The finance minister reiterated the government's position during a trip to Chhindwara the following day when he told reporters, “[T]he caste-based census was last conducted in the year 1931 and the practice should have continued in post-independence period also but it did not happen. Now the UPA government has taken an initiative in this regard.” Decennial censuses in independent India have limited data collection to Scheduled Castes (SCs) and Scheduled Tribes (STs)—two administrative categories consisting of Dalits, or “ex-untouchables,” and indigenous communities that have faced extreme indignities, violence, and structural exclusion—to determine the size of each group's affirmative action, or reservation, quota. Activists who had worked tirelessly for months to expand the caste-wise enumeration in the census were elated. Their coordinated campaign had involved public forums, conferences, speeches, rallies, and collaboration with political leaders to build a base of support at a time when both Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) opposed a caste count in Census 2011. Their success was tremendous given that since the 1950s, a range of commissions and organizations seeking to dismantle caste hierarchy had unsuccessfully advocated for the decennial census to collect and publish caste-wise data. Decades of effort finally met with success.