Nitish Kumar calls all-party meeting for caste census: 'Will decide based on consensus'

Calling for all-party unity, Bihar CM Nitish Kumar on Monday, stated that he will soon call an all-party meeting to discuss the caste-based census. Based on mutual consensus, he said that Bihar govt will make an announcement. The Bihar Assembly has passed a resolution in 2019 and February 2020 backing a caste-census to be undertaken along with the current census.

Nitish: 'Will call all-party meeting on caste census'

His move comes months after RJD leader Tejashwi Yadav wrote to 33 top non-BJP politicians seeking support for demanding a caste census in 2021 to be held by the Centre. Stating that the Centre was stonewalling the collective caste census demand, he told the leaders to urge the Centre to conclude within the delayed 2021 census the caste census as well. Arguing that the caste census data of 2011 should be corrected, he told the leaders to send him suggestions and inputs to prepare a united plan of action.

The leaders witten to include - Sonia Gandhi, Sharad Pawar, Akhilesh Yadav, Mayawati, MK Stalin, Mamata Banerjee, Naveen Patnaik, Sitaram Yechury, D Raja, Nitish Kumar, Farooq Abdullah, Parkash Singh Badal, Dipankar Bhattacharya, Uddhav Thackeray, KCR, Jaganmohan Reddy, Mehbooba Mufti, Hemant Soren, Pinarayi Vijayan, Arvind Kejriwal, Ashok Gehlot, Bhupesh Baghel, Charanjit Singh Channi, Om Prakash Chautala, Jitan Ram Manjhi, Badruddin Ajmal, Jayant Chaudhary, O Panneerselvam, Om Prakash Pajbhar, Chirag Paswan, Akhtarul Iman, Mukesh Sahni and Chandra Shekhar Aazad.

Centre's affidavit on caste census

On 21 September, Centre filed an affidavit in the Supreme Court saying it is not feasible to collect information on Backward Class of Citizens (BCC) in the forthcoming census. Centre also said that mistakes committed by enumerators and inherent flaws in the information-collection exercise has rendered the Socio-Economic and Caste Census 2011 (SECC-2011) data unusable and cannot be relied upon for any statutory exercise such as reservations in admission, promotion or local body elections. The affidavit was in response to a petition filed by the Maharashtra government in August, seeking declaration of SECC-2011 raw caste data of OBCs.

Recently, an all-party delegation from Bihar led by CM Nitish Kumar and LoP Tejashwi Yadav met PM Modi seeking all-India caste census. Last year, Odisha joined Maharashtra and Bihar to become the third State to request to collect caste details in the forthcoming Census. On the other hand, the Union Home Ministry said that the Centre would not be including caste wise data on population other than Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes in the national Census.