Did the Congress hit back by using the caste census card before the Karnataka elections?

before karnataka election Rahul Gandhi After consultation with other supporters of this move, caste census has been demanded. Nitish Kumar and Tejashwi Yadav. The Congress was against such a study for almost 60 years till a study was done in 2011. In Karnataka, former chief minister Siddaramaiah did not release a caste census report until 2018, despite a promise to release it.

The 2011 survey was conducted after several senior ministers in the UPA cabinet, such as P Chidambaram, Anand Sharma, and Pawan Kumar Bansal, as well as senior Congress MPs, objected to the caste census and never reached the Group of Ministers (GoM) Was. Conclusion on that. But the UPA government finally caved in to its regional allies and reversed its declared policy of not conducting caste census for decades. The survey took five years to complete at a cost of over Rs 4,000 crore but was riddled with technical glitches and was never made public. Rahul Gandhi now wants this caste census of 2011 to be made public.

The demand was made by the former Congress chief in the poll-bound state of Karnataka, where former CM Siddaramaiah had also initiated a caste census in 2015 in his first term as chief minister, but the data was never collected before the 2018 assembly elections that year. Not released, realizing it would be detrimental to his party’s prospects. Siddaramaiah now claims that the exercise of caste census was completed later in the Congress-JD(S) government itself, but the then CM Kumaraswamy did not accept the report.

Siddaramaiah is seeking to make public the caste census conducted under his government in Karnataka, but the Congress is opposed by the BJP over distributing the 4% Muslim reservation quota among Lingayats and Vokkaligas in the state.

Between 1951 and 2011, Congress prime ministers such as Jawaharlal Nehru were against the caste census, while prime ministers such as Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi shelved the Mandal Commission report. When the caste census was finally launched in 2011, there was a huge delay in starting the enumeration work and slow preparation of many states.

The BJP government did not release the caste data after it was prepared in 2016, citing technical glitches in it.

BJP leaders say Rahul Gandhi’s demand also echoes Hindi belt allies like the RJD, JD(U) and the Samajwadi Party demanding a caste census to break Hindu consolidation of the electorate and bring back ‘mandal politics’. have been ‘ Yug by luring the castes back into his fold. BJP’s politics has been the opposite, through various schemes to unite all castes under one umbrella of welfare and Hindutva.

A recent meeting between Rahul Gandhi, Nitish Kumar and Tejashwi Yadav in Delhi seems to have warmed the Congress too in the quagmire of caste census. Nitish, while still with the NDA, led an all-party delegation from Bihar to the Prime Minister last year and demanded a caste census, but the Center did not agree to it.

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