The Congress on October 3 questioned how Prime Minister Narendra Modi could claim to be a leader of the other backward classes (OBC) if his government would not conduct a caste survey.
The party also distanced itself from the now deleted comments of Abhishek Singhvi who, in a post on X, had claimed that the formula of ensuring rights “proportionate to the strength of a community” would lead to “majoritarianism”.
Addressing a press conference at the All India Congress Committee headquarters, Capt Ajay Yadav (retired), who heads the party’s OBC department, asserted that the Bihar caste survey would change the direction of politics as well as policy.
Caste census, a gamechanger
“Modi ji says that he is an OBC leader as he is from the Teli community. He must be a fake OBC, or else he would have conducted a caste census,” Mr. Yadav said.
He said that the last caste census from which data was made public was held in 1931, when OBCs were reported to be 52% of the population. “Now, the Bihar data shows it to be 63%, an 11% jump,” he noted.
Mr. Yadav added that the data would help reveal the political participation of a community, as well as their educational status, and access to assets such as housing, and transport, among others.
He claimed that the current data indicates that only 9% of professors in Central universities are from OBC communities, while their share in the judiciary is just about 4%.
‘Not the party line’
While top Congress leaders, including former party chief Rahul Gandhi, held that the rights of a community should be proportionate to its population share, CWC member Mr. Singhvi had taken a different line. In a now deleted post on X, he had said that “equality of opportunities is never the same as the equality of outcomes”.
“People endorsing #jitniabadiutnahaq have to first completely understand the consequences of it. It will eventually culminate into majoritarianism,” Mr. Singhvi had said.
Mr. Yadav rejected this formula, telling reporters at the press conference, “This is not the party line.”
In a separate post on X, Congress general secretary Jairam Ramesh also said that Mr. Singhvi’s post may be a reflection of his personal views. “...in no way does it reflect the position of the Indian National Congress — the essence of which is contained both in the Raipur Declaration on 26th February, 2023 and in the CWC Resolution of September 16th, 2023,” he said.
