Caste census

There are 39 members listed in the recent CWC composition, out of which at least 25 belong to the General category or Upper Caste including Rahul Gandhi, Sonia Gandhi, Rahul Gandhi, P. Chidambaram, and Abhishek Manu Singhvi.

After Rahul Gandhi reiterated the demand for a caste census on Saturday, Union Minister Chirag Paswan expressed his support for the initiative.

After netizens, several BJP leaders also attacked Rahul Gandhi for claiming that no SC, ST or OBC has ever won the Miss India contest

Rahul Gandhi said, "...I checked the list of Miss India to see if there would be any Dalit or tribal woman in it, but there was no women from Dalit, tribal or OBC. Still the media talks about dance, music, cricket, Bollywood but does not talk about farmers and labourers,"

In the article, Yogendra Yadav argues that apart from asking about caste, the census will also seek details like availability of basic amenities like electricity, water, cooking gas, housing conditions etc. So, if it is about conducting a socio-economic survey and the objective is to uplift the people standing at the last rung, then there is no need to ask about people’s caste identity.

Congress party, whose senior leader Rahul Gandhi has a track record of invoking caste in public, seems to have gotten extremely riled with BJP MP Anurag Thakur asking for the Gandhi scion's caste

From asserting that asking the caste of a person is like abusing him, Congress leader Gurjeet Singh Aujla went on to say that his party is in favour of the caste census.

What ‘caste’ was in the Vedic era, how it interplays with birth and occupation, and how it has evolved through various stages of history. An excerpt from Rajiv Malhotra’s book.

It is pertinent to mention that the RJD-JDU-led Bihar government's amendments in November last year, based on a state-wide caste census, increased reservations to 20% for Scheduled Castes, 2% for Scheduled Tribes, 18% for Other Backward Classes, and 25% for Extremely Backward Classes, with an additional 10% for the Economically Weaker Sections, bringing the total to 75%.

Rahul Gandhi reiterated his ‘X-ray’ remark saying that the Congress-led government would conduct a caste census and also scan the wealth held by different caste groups