The Cabinet Committee on Political Affairs (CCPA) on Wednesday that caste enumeration will be conducted along with the national census instead of surveys that are conducted by states as a practice, Union Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said. The CCPA chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi met on Wednesday afternoon.
“Cabinet Committee on Political Affairs has decided today that Caste enumeration should be included in the forthcoming census,” Vaishnaw said while announcing the Cabinet decisions.
While announcing the Cabinet decision, he claimed that the Congress governments in the past have always opposed caste census. As per Vaishnaw, in 2010, the then PM Manmohan Singh assured the Lok Sabha that the matter of caste census should be considered in the Cabinet.
Despite this, he said that the Congress only decided to conduct a survey of caste instead of a caste census. Vaishnaw also said that the caste surveys carried out in several states are “unscientific”. In 2022, the NDA-ruled Bihar became the first state in independent India to successfully enumerate all castes.
As per this survey released in October 2023, Other Backward Classes (OBCs) and Extremely Backward Classes (EBCs) together comprise 63 per cent of the state’s population. EBCs was the largest social group in Bihar at 36 per cent of the population, followed by OBC at 27.12 per cent of the total population.
Yadavs emerged as the largest OBC group with a population of 14.26 per cent, followed by Kushwahas and Kurmis at 4.21 per cent and 2.87 per cent, respectively. It also stated that the ‘Unreserved’ category constitutes 15.22 per cent of the state’s total population. While the SC (Dalits) accounted for 19.65 per cent, the Scheduled Tribes (ST) made up 15.52 per cent of the total population.
Furthermore, the Union Minister also accused the Congress and its INDI alliance partners of using the caste census as a political tool, while adding the Congress has only spread misinformation on the issue of caste.
The Congress party, especially Rahul Gandhi, were extremely vocal in support of the caste census not only during the 2024 Lok Sabha polls but also during the assembly elections in Haryana, Maharashtra, and Jharkhand.
The Gandhi scion also spoke emphatically of the caste census during the All India Congress Committee (AICC) session in Ahmedabad. He said that a caste census was initiated in the Congress-ruled Telangana a few months after he asked PM Modi in Parliament to conduct a nation-wide caste census.
Rahul Gandhi then claimed that the Prime Minister and the BJP’s ideological progenitor Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) opposed the idea, allegedly to hide minorities’ actual representation in the country.
