Nitish Kumar says committed to conduct caste census, seeks political consensus

Chief Minister Nitish Kumar on Monday said that the Bihar government will conduct a caste-based census in the state soon. He, however, said that the government will seek a political consensus on the proposed idea.

“We are committed to do a caste census in the state. We want to hold an all-party meeting to take everyone’s ideas, their experience as to how to do it. It will benefit everyone. We will start it soon and will also ensure it is implemented properly,” Kumar said today.

This comes even as the Centre effectively ruled out a caste census in 2021, and told the Supreme Court that such an exercise “would not be feasible”, and that its stance on the issue is a “conscious policy decision”.

The development may lead to friction between the JD(U) and the BJP as the former is a part of the NDA and the two parties are alliance partners in Bihar.

After the Centre denied the possibility of a caste census, Kumar led a 10-member state delegation to meet Prime Minister Narendra Modi on August 23 to discuss the demand for a caste-based survey. RJD leader Tejashwi Yadav was also a part of the delegation.

On September 23, submitting an affidavit in response to Maharashtra’s request that the data of the 2011 socio-economic census be revealed, the Union Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment had informed the apex court that the data was “unusable” as it contains many technical flaws.

Referring to that submission, the Bihar Chief Minister had stressed that ruling out a caste census citing errors in the 2011 exercise would be “wrong”. He said that such a census was needed to get “a clear idea about the situation”.

In ruling out the caste census, the Centre had reasoned in the apex court that there are multiple state and union territory lists in the case of OBCs. “In case, a question of OBCs is canvassed, it will return names of hundreds of thousands of castes, sub-castes. And it might be difficult to correctly classify such unspecified returns,” it had said in the affidavit.

Flagging his disagreement with the Centre, Nitish back then had said: “(During the census) a person might share the name of his sub-caste. Do we have any caste in the country that does not have sub-castes? So training will have to be imparted (to enumerators). Caste, sub-caste, everything will have to be mentioned.”