Ranbir Singh Pathania
Caste census in India is the political buzzword nowadays. Highly-loaded state of Bihar offered a seismic zone with its Assembly passing a resolution. And Chief Ministers of Orissa, Jharkhand and Tamil Nadu and a rainbow of political parties and pressure groups relentlessly rallied behind. Nitish Kumar led a 10-member all-party delegation to the Prime Minister at National Capital. Going by the words of Nitish Kumar,” Decision lies with Prime Minister”.
If we cut to the Prime Minister’s speech of 2019 victory which says, there are only two castes in India now: the poor and those able to garner the resources to help the poor, second wear the secular mask and have been defeated.
PM Modi’s wishful slogans dominating the Indian political landscape for almost a decade ‘Sabka Saath, Sabka Vikaas and Ek Bharat Shreshtha Bharat’ do exuberate the philosophy and locus of BJP.
Had it not been so? a tea-seller of Gujarat could not have been able to spring a surprise in Lok Sabha Polls-2014, while wiping out Grand Old Party from the political horizon of India. Some caste and community zealots have been running helter skelter and ultimately lying low till date in some obscure corners.
Those standing in support argue that a wide gambit of scholarly works by sociologists, historians and researchers will lay unused while implementing welfare policies of the government. They further say that without tabulating caste, socio economic status and deprivations, abolition of derived caste based privileges and better distribution of resources cannot be achieved.
But the larger argument is – India a mixture of races, religions stands united as a monolith today. Voices of dissipation and disintegration Khalistan, separate Bodoland, Separate Tamil state, Separate Kashmir have almost died out. History is also witness to the fact that a confusing and complex maze of caste, community, language, area divisions offered a smooth-sail for Afghans, Turks, Mughals and East India company too.
Maharashtra Government tried to reach out to Supreme Court seeking gathering of information on Backward Class of Citizens (BCC) in Census 2021.
In response whereof, Modi Sarkar, treading a cautious tightrope, took an informed stand that a caste based census could not be done as a ‘policy decision’ on account of administrative, operational and logistics counts. It elaborates that while the central list contains 2479 castes there were 3140 castes as per the lists of all the states and UTs together. As a caste related query is never ending and never concluding argument, people will turn thousands of castes as sub-clans and Gotras.
In 2011 also a SECC survey had been done by the government which revealed that India has as many as 46 lacs different castes. And almost 98 % of them have population of less than one hundred. In Maharashtra, number of SC/STs/OBCs is only 494 but the 2011-SECC returned a finding of as many as 428677 castes. While the state’s population was 10.3 crores out of which more than 10 percent i.e. 1.7 crores were those who did not have any caste. So on account of the unworkability of the data the government took a principled stand to not to make public the caste data as per SECC-2011.
Madras High Court in 2020 has already junked a plan of ‘Vanniyar’ seeking caste census while calling it as ‘a colossal transgression of powers’.
Anyhow, stand of the Government in the Supreme Court constitutes, on one hand, the dominant mood, while on the other side, need of the hour.
Census on caste lines will have its permutations and combinations beyond the visible. Focus should be lessening of gaps between castes and religions. Plucking strings of caste and religion could bring detrimental repercussions.
No fission is fusion of the mood today. Let us sit and strive together to constitute to built brick by brick ‘India of my dreams’. And the teststone is the golden quote of Rabindranath Tagore,
“Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls;
Where words come out from the depth of truth;
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;
Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake”.
(The columnist practices law at the J&K, High Court of Judicature.)
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