In her article, ‘ Why India’s Census Will Ask About Caste for the First Time Since Raj’, ( 8th June 2025), Amrit Dhillon gets in a real muddle and I am sure the Times readers have found it incoherent. I will first deal with her mentioning a memorandum presumably written by a British civil servant during the first census conducted by the British in India in 1872.
The memorandum says:
‘The natives of India, as a rule, are altogether ignorant of their own ages and have no means of estimating the exact timing of their birth’. However the natives of Britain were also ignorant of their ages at the time. Before the Births and Deaths Registration Act of 1836, birth records were mainly kept by parish priests in baptismal registers. They were then struck by the vague answers to seemingly simple questions such as: “How old are you?” Up to the 1800’s there were hardly any birth records in the UK due to illiteracy. The shift from the Julian calendar to the Georgian calendar in 1752 also meant many Births were wrongly calculated.
Continuing with her story about the first British Census of India in 1872 Amrit writes: ‘Some female enumerators took their husbands along for moral support, only to find them warmly welcomed as punters. The use of the word Punters here is baffling to me.’
Now to the Amrit Dhillon’s muddle. Her following missive does not make any sense at all. Amrita says: ‘Modi, who was born into a lower caste, has now been accused by the opposition of giving in to political pressure by including the caste question in the upcoming census’. Rahul Gandhi, the leader of the opposition Congress party, said it showed the prime minister had a “habit of surrendering”. Instead of Modi being hailed as a statesman who has agreed to the demands of the opposition, Amrit turns this into a criticism of the PM. Amrit repeats the usual inuendo of Modi being Hindu nationalist leader.
Never heard Amrit talk about a Muslim or Christian nationalist leader. In between Amrit’s article we see a message in blue saying, ‘ Narendra Modi’s quest to reshape India for a thousand year’s.‘ What has this got to do with the article?
One can see once again that the main thrust in most of Amrit’s articles is to please the English readers by portraying Indians as somewhat laughable.
Nitin Mehta
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