Putting Bihar’s Caste-Based Census Decision In Perspective

On 1 June, Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar announced a caste survey to be conducted in the state. He was speaking to the media, flanked by Deputy CM Tarkishore Prasad Singh, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) state chief Sanjay Jaiswal, former CM Jitan Ram Manjhi and Tejaswi Yadav, opposition leader in Bihar assembly, after an all-party meeting.

The state BJP is taking a contrarian view from the centre leadership, which is not in favour of such a survey.

Kumar said, “it will take into account all the aspects related to every castes and sub-castes within all religious groups to get a clear picture of their actual status for help in planning for their uplift.”

Not a Census: As per the Union List, census is part of the centre’s jurisdiction. States are not authorised to conduct census, which is going to put in question the constitutional and legal validity of such an exercise. The modalities of the survey are to be finalised by the state Cabinet.

History of Caste-Based Census: The last caste-based census was undertaken by the Britishers in 1931. Post-independence, only the enumeration of Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes was done. The Mandal Commission, in its findings, estimated the OBC population at 52 per cent, a figure taken from the census of 1931.

In 2011, the UPA government ordered a caste census. But the data of the census has not been released owing to the inconsistencies, rendering the collected data useless.

The Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment filed an affidavit in the Supreme Court in 2021, stating, “The issue has been examined at length in the past at different points of time. Each time, the view has consistently been that the caste Census of Backward Classes is administratively difficult and cumbersome; it has suffered and will suffer both on account of completeness and accuracy of the data, as also evident from the infirmities of the Socio-Economic and Caste Census (SECC) 2011 data, making it unusable for any official purposes and cannot be mentioned as a source of information for population data in any official document.”

Maharashtra, Odisha, Chhattisgarh are already in the process of conducting caste-based census. In the coming days, one could expect the pitch for a caste-based census would only increase to revive caste-based identity politics.

In the run-up to 2024 polls, a repeat of Mandal days, which was considered an antidote to Mandir politics, could become a common refrain, especially among regional political players.

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