Congress vows to hold pan-India caste census

Shubhadeep Choudhury

New Delhi, October 9

The Congress today promised that a government led by it will conduct a nationwide caste census and implement 33 per cent reservation for women in the Lok Sabha and state legislative Assemblies at the earliest.

Kharge slams BJP’s ‘divisive tactics’

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Our nation is facing inflation, joblessness…. The ruling party’s divisive tactics pose a threat to democratic stability.

— Mallikarjun Kharge, Congress Chief

The party made this declaration in a resolution passed during a meeting of the Congress Working Committee (CWC) chaired by party chief Mallikarjun Kharge and attended by former AICC presidents Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi among others.

The resolution also promised to remove the cap of 50 per cent for the reservation of OBCs, SCs and STs in line with the population share.

Welcoming the Bihar Government’s decision to release the findings of the state’s caste survey, the CWC resolution said: “The disparity between representation and share in population revealed by the final figures of the survey highlights the urgent need to take effective steps to ensure social justice.” Rahul Gandhi said the Congress-ruled states would also conduct such a census. Four Congress CMs – Sukhvinder Singh Sukhu (HP), Bhupesh Baghel (Chhattisgarh), Ashok Gehlot (Rajasthan) and Siddaramaiah (Karnataka) – were present at the meeting.

The CWC resolution said Justice Rohini Commission’s prescription of sub-categorisation within the OBCs would remain incomplete without detailed data on the socio-economic position of various communities, which could be obtained either from the still unreleased data from the 2011 socio-economic and caste census or a fresh caste census.

Asked if the INDIA bloc supported it, Rahul said a majority of the parties backed the idea.