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As the Centre announced the inclusion of caste enumeration in the next census , opposition parties said it is a victory for their long-standing demand and sought time-bound implementation.
They claimed that the Bharatiya Janata Party has been compelled to ‘bow’ to the will of the majority and demanded that the Centre now work towards increasing reservation.
According to PTI, Welcoming the Narendra Modi dispensation’s ‘sudden’ decision to include caste enumeration in the census exercise after ’11 years of opposing it’, Leader of Opposition in Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi said they support the government but want a timeline for its implementation.
“We want to know by when it will be done,” he said, adding funds should be allocated for the caste census.
“This is the first step and Telangana is a model for caste census,” the Congress leader said and reiterated the demand for removing the 50 per cent cap on reservations.
Former Bihar chief minister and Rashtriya Janata Dal chief Lalu Prasad Yadav said the ‘socialists’ have been advocating it for the last 30 years.
Those who called us casteists for demanding a caste-based census have received a fitting reply. There is still much left to do. We will keep making these Sanghis dance to our agenda,’ Yadav said in a post in Hindi on X.
He said the ‘first-ever caste-based survey’ in the country was also conducted in Bihar during the 17-month Mahagathbandhan government.
‘What we socialists thought about 30 years ago reservation, caste census, equality, fraternity, secularism, etc. others start following decades later,’ he said.
The RJD chief said he and his party had demanded for a caste census to be conducted in 2001, but the then Atal Bihari Vajpayee-led National Democratic Alliance government did not do it.
“In the 2011 census, we again raised a strong demand in Parliament for a caste-based census. I, along with the late Mulayam Singh Ji and the late Sharad Yadav Ji, stalled Parliament for several days over this demand, and only after the assurance from the then Prime Minister, the late Manmohan Singh Ji, to conduct a socio-economic survey did we allow Parliament to function,” he said.
Congress chief Mallikarjun Kharge alleged that Prime Minister Narendra Modi had been shying away from implementing this policy of social justice and had ‘falsely accused the opposition of dividing society’.
He demanded that the government allocate funds to initiate the caste census with ‘complete transparency’.
Communist Party of India-Marxist general secretary MA Baby welcomed the decision but stressed that it should be completed in a time-bound fashion.
