By Our Special Correspondent
New Delhi, January 31: The Congress will be commissioning caste survey in Telangana. The Congress government in Hyderabad has said that the party will fulfil promise to hold a caste survey in the state. Telangana will become the second state after Bihar to commission a caste survey.
Former Congress president Rahul Gandhi had accused yesterday that the Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar left the Opposition space because the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was scared of the caste census demands in the country. The Congress seemingly has spoken for the first time assertively on the caste census following the poll debacle in the recently held Assembly elections.
The Congress Lok Sabha MP Prabhakar Ponnam has said that the “Telangana government is working on the caste survey”. He said that the party-led state government will fulfil the promise made by the former party president Rahul Gandhi during the campaign trail of the Assembly elections last year.
Ponnam has told the reporters that the proposal to hold a caste census will be brought before the next session of the Telangana Assembly. He thanked Rahul Gandhi, Sonia Gandhi, Mallikarjun Kharge, and others for supporting the demand of the caste census.
The Congress appears unfazed with Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar leaving the Opposition block to join the BJP-led NDA. Kumar was the architect of the caste survey. He had ordered the caste survey in Bihar. The survey had revealed that the other backward castes constituted almost 63 per cent of the population in Bihar.
Odisha Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik has also promised that his government will also hold a caste survey in the state. However, the Congress-led Karnataka government is keeping the people guessing on the caste survey. The state already had commissioned a survey but the government has not revealed the data.
By pushing the caste census plank, the Congress still appears to believe that it could help the party regain space in areas where it was replaced by the regional parties. The Congress is hoping to make a strong comeback in Andhra Pradesh which is also slated to go to the Assembly elections this year. The Congress appears to believe that the party stands to gain from the social justice plank in the southern states where the BJP’s presence is negligible.
Political observers, incidentally, had faulted the Congress for pushing for the caste census in the country. They had argued that the Congress had committed a strategic mistake by embracing the caste politics which led to the party’s defeat in Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, and Rajasthan recently. But the Congress seems keen to focus on the southern states where the BJP is not in a position to stop the party from regaining the lost space.
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