M. Vijayanunni, who was now retired from the Indian Administrative Service, continued to advocate for a full caste-wise enumeration in the census in the lead-up to Census 2011. As the former head of the ORGI, or the Indian census bureau, Vijayanunni spoke from a unique position when he argued that the ORGI was the only agency with the technical experience to undertake the task. Vijayanunni's certainty stemmed from the technology available for cleaning, analyzing, and tabulating data and his detailed historical knowledge of censuses. If the colonial state could manually process, tabulate, and publish large volumes of caste and religion data, the ORGI was capable of completing a similar task in 2011. Vijayanunni argued that the question was not whether the ORGI had the capacity to do so, but whether it was willing to do so.

Politics was central in deciding the path forward. A coalition of organizations, activists, politicians, and public intellectuals— including Vijayanunni—came together to target a change in census policy on caste. This chapter describes the advocacy efforts to include a caste count in Census 2011, and then details the institutional backlash that followed the campaign's success. In examining the steps that executive bureaucrats and allied groups took to keep a caste-wise enumeration out of Census 2011, this chapter traces the strategies of bureaucratic deflection and how they reinforce castelessness in the census, the state, and beyond.

Securing the Concession: Caste Census to Document Systemic Inequality

Dilip Mandal had worked for several media houses as a writer, editor, and producer for more than fifteen years. His most recent position as managing editor for a national magazine had thrust him into the limelight. Mandal had broken a “glass-ceiling” by being one of a handful of journalists from an oppressed-caste background to enter the editorial ranks, yet his road to becoming a senior journalist had not been easy.