CM Nitish set to hold all-party meet on caste census on June 1
PATNA: Parliamentary affairs minister Vijay Kumar Choudhary on Sunday wrote to the leaders of all the political parties for a scheduled meeting on the issue of caste census in the state under the chairmanship of chief minister Nitish Kumar at 4 pm on June 1.
The meeting will happen just a day after the last date for filing nominations for the Rajya Sabha polls. If there are only five nominations for the five seats, all the five - two each from the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) and one from Janata Dal (United) - will win uncontested. However, so far, only RJD’s two candidates have filed their nominations, while both BJP and JD(U) have kept it on hold so far, creating room for speculations about their likely moves.
In his letter, Choudhary, who had earlier announced that the date for the meeting will be June 1 after talking to leaders of different political parties, has written that chief minister Nitish Kumar had decided to “call an all-party meeting after the Centre expressed its inability to accept the Bihar Legislative Assembly’s unanimous resolutions to hold the census on caste lines”.
“The Vidhan Sabha had unanimously passed the resolution for holding caste census along with the 2021 census. When the Centre expressed its inability for it, the CM decided to do it in the state. The meeting has been called in this regard at Samvad (CM secretariat). You all are requested to participate in it,” he wrote.
Choudhary said that both the resolutions were unanimously passed during his tenure as Speaker and all the parties were one on the matter in the state. “The meeting will deliberate on how to go about it. All the leaders of legislature parties have been invited to the meeting, as the resolutions had been passed by the Vidhan Sabha,” he added.
BJP state president Dr. Sanjay Jaiswal has already announced that his party would participate in it, while the RJD has been
vocal with its demand for caste census and leader of Opposition
Tejaswhi Prasad Yadav even went to the extent of threatening to launch a ‘padyatra’ on the issue if the CM did not go ahead with it due to lack of response from the Centre despite allparty Bihar delegation meeting Prime Minister Narendra Modi last year.
Though the CM has also been consistently batting for caste census as a necessity for better planning on the basis of the correct population of different castes, the matter remained on the back-burner due to political compulsions and BJP’s reported reluctance. However, it reached a flashpoint recently ahead of Rajya Sabha nominations and the BJP, in a climbdown, agreed to participate in it.
Though there is no official data available on the actual strengths of different castes, all the estimates are based on projections from the old caste census, which was last done in 1931. There have often been demands for it and some initiatives were also taken, but it could not materialize, even as caste remained an overriding factor for getting the electoral arithmetic right. The socio-economic census by the UPA government also failed to serve its purpose due to large number of discrepancies.
Later, the Justice Rohini Commission proposed sub-categorisation of reservations for other backward castes (OBCs) in the government sector. The commission recommended splitting 27% reservation for the OBCs into different categories for equitable distribution of benefits among different subcastes to ensure that the benefits reached the really deprived sections.
The commission was set up in 2017. After several extensions, it submitted its report, dividing 2,633 OBC castes in the Central list into four sub-categories for a split of 27% quota into 2, 6, 9, and 10%.