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Who are we?
JUL 07 -
Someone I know was in a Tarai village a couple of years back asking questions as is the wont of researchers. Upon enquiring about the area’s demographics, she was pointed out a few kids hanging around and told that they had recently ‘become’ Dalits. It so transpired that the village had received a list from somewhere and accordingly some families had thenceforth been categorised as Dalits.
My guess is the listing had to do with the few benefits marginalised groups have begun to receive from the state and hence some sort of classification was necessary. Good for them if that was indeed the case.
What this little anecdote illustrates though is how our knowledge of who we are can suddenly be quite irrelevant. Or, perhaps it is also a matter of how little we know of ourselves.
I was reminded of this incident by the recent announcement that we will conduct our much-anticipated 11th census next June. Coming as it does at a time when the issue of identity has gained such prominence in our lives, the whole process is certainly going to be keenly scrutinised. From the looks of it, the Central Bureau of Statistics is trying to make the exercise as free of controversy as it can. But I wonder how far that will be possible.
Let’s take a look back at the past censuses and examine some of the results they have thrown up.
Prior to the 1991 census, we had no idea of the population strengths of the various groups. Panchayat-era censuses only listed speakers of languages and estimates on the number of individual groups had to be extrapolated from this. Thus the largest Janajati (matwali was the term still used then) group was believed to be Tamangs. The results of 1991 pushed Tamangs to third place behind Magars and Tharus (both groups had a higher proportion speaking languages other than their mother tongues).
Although disputed, the figures from the 1991 and 2001 censuses did give us a fair idea of the relative size of the many social groups in Nepal. The only problem is that we still do not know how many of such groups there are. In 1991, a total of 60 were listed; the 2001 census identified 101 and also classified 1.78 percent of the population as ‘Dalit unidentified’ and ‘caste/ethnic unidentified’.
Granted that the 10 largest groups, namely, Chhetri, Bahun, Magar, Tharu, Tamang, Newar, Muslim, Kami, Yadav and Rai, in that order, make up nearly 70 percent of the population (69.4 and 68.5 percent in 1991 and 2001, respectively). But until we can account for everyone that constitute the remaining 30 percent, any government attempt to introduce social welfare programmes such as affirmative action will encounter its own set of obstacles.
Many changes have occurred since the last census, and the post-2006 period has only added to the urgency to resolving the basic question: Who are we? Take the recommendation made a couple of months by an official committee that the government recognise 81 Janajati groups (out of the many more that had sought recognition). The new census will now have to make sure all of them figure in its report. Otherwise, we will once again face the embarrassing situation of most of the past decade of having 59 groups recognised as Janajatis by the government and its own census listing only 43 of them.
There are similar issues with others as well. In 1997, the Ministry of Local Development listed 23 Dalit groups. A few years later the National Dalit Commission (which is under the same Ministry of Local Development) came up with a list of 19 Dalit groups (of whom five objected to being called Dalit).
The case of Madhesis is no different. We saw the violent objections in 2009 by Tharus and other Janajati groups from the Tarai to being categorised as Madhesis. But even without the protests, government figures themselves are contentious. The 2001 census shows 65 Tarai groups while the government list of 2009 (that triggered the disturbances) contained 92 Tarai/Madhesi groups.
In terms of language, we are surrounded by a veritable babel of voices but not quite certain about how many of them. The 1952/54 census reported 52 languages spoken as mother tongues in Nepal. In 1961, that went down to 36. In the deep Panchayat years of 1971 and 1981, and the state-backed primacy of Nepali, only 17 and 18 languages were reported. Come democracy, the number shot up to 31 in 1991 and 92 in 2001. We are still not sure how many languages are spoken in Nepal. But at least the Linguistic Survey of Nepal is underway and by the time of the next census, we should have resolved this issue satisfactorily.
One of my favourite sections in the 2001 census report (Annex 3.4) is extracted in the table alongside:
Analysing these results, anthropologist Dilli Ram Dahal writes: ‘It is not known why the other 2.2 percent of Musalman population did not mention Islam as their religion.’ Perhaps an answer can be found in Indian scholar Ashis Nandy’s view that many groups live ‘with multiculturalism within in South Asia’. He cites the example of some 400 such groups in India that cannot be identified as either Hindu or Muslim exclusively. But I doubt if our own enumerators were struggling to resolve such existential dilemmas when they decided to count 21,265 Muslim Hindus or 11 Muslim Kiratis. It was more likely plain ignorance of Islam, Muslims or both.
Talking of ignorance, the sample questionnaire of the 2011 census lists religion as one of the personal identifiers. The choices are: Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, Kiratism, Christianity, Sikhism, Jainism and Other. The Bureau seems to be willfully ignorant of the fact that in a country in which somewhere in the region of half the electorate has voted for communist parties since 1991, there are going to be more than a few non-believers.
The UML website boasts it has 73,220 organised and 400,000 general members in its party. That’s close to half a million purported non-believers. If you take the Maoists plus the other more extreme left parties as well as the non-ideological atheists and agnostics, they would add up to a number to be officially declared as non-believers. Now, that is one figure I would be most interested in knowing and they surely constitute a group too important to be clubbed together as ‘Others’ with sundry believers.
Annex 3.4 : Population by caste/ethnic groups and religion.
Caste/ethnic
Group Total Hindu Boudha Islam Kirati Jain Christian Shikha Bahai Others
Muslim 971,056 21,265 101 949,473 11 0 172 5 0 29
Posted on: 2010-07-08 08:21
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