5 days ago
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The Supreme Court was not incorrect to disregard a petition that sought to stall the caste census, which is portion of the ongoing Census 2027. The Chief Justice of India remarked, successful enactment of the caste count, that “any authorities of the time indispensable cognize however galore radical are backward and however galore request welfare”. In April 2025, the Narendra Modi authorities had made a turnaround to denote caste enumeration alongside the caller census, the archetypal specified workout since 1931. Mr. Modi had earlier derided the thought arsenic a motion of “urban Naxal” thinking, and the RSS had warned that specified surveys were attempts to fracture Hindu society. The Congress, too, had made a melodramatic turnaround successful its humanities presumption to request a caste census. Early governments of autarkic India decided not to enumerate caste with the census. The ascendant reasoning past was that counting caste communities would lone reenforce the instauration of caste that the authorities wanted to dismantle. On the 1 hand, authorities policies sought to make a casteless society, portion connected the other, they besides accounted for caste identities for affirmative favoritism successful legislative practice and employment. This dual attack to caste that was baked into the nation’s founding principles has created a paradox that continues to this day. The clamour for a caste census is the latest manifestation of it.
The Census itself has been agelong overdue. The decennial colonisation survey was primitively owed successful 2021 but was delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic and logistical hurdles. The caste enumeration volition instrumentality spot successful the 2nd signifier and volition impact asking each idiosyncratic their caste, alternatively than simply signaling whether they beryllium to a Scheduled Caste oregon Scheduled Tribe, arsenic successful erstwhile Censuses. The hold successful the Census has a bearing connected readying of each sorts. In India, a sizeable information of authorities argumentation is straight oregon indirectly linked to the caste illustration of the people group. The 1 effort astatine a post-Independence nationalist caste number came successful 2011. The open-ended caste recognition process of the Socio-Economic and Caste Census produced implicit 46 lakh chiseled caste names and 8 crore information errors, rendering the dataset unusable. Most of its findings stay unpublished. The Modi authorities is inactive grappling with the situation of uncovering the due methodology for an close enumeration of caste communities. A caste census detracts from the effort to eradicate caste arsenic it ossifies identities, but is adjuvant if viewed alongside different socioeconomic indices to amended people payment measures and guarantee representation. The annihilation of caste indispensable stay a goal, and radical indispensable beryllium allowed to classify themselves arsenic casteless if they truthful wish.
