Veerappa Moily to head Congress panel on caste census

On August 23, Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar led an 11-member delegation and met Prime Minister Narendra Modi to demand caste-wise enumeration of OBCs in the census.

Congress president Sonia Gandhi on Friday set up a committee headed by former Union minister Veerappa Moily to look into the issue of caste census, after many parties have demanded a caste-based census and sub-categorisation of castes in the country, though the Centre has remained non-committal on the sensitive issue.

Former Union minister M Veerappa Moily to head newly formed Congress committee to look into the issue of caste census. (HT PHOTO.)

The panel will also have Abhishek Singhvi, Salman Khurshid, Mohan Prakash, RPN Singh, PL Punia and Kuldeep Bishnoi, a Congress release said.

The communication from the party said the committee will “study the matter related to caste-census”. Panel chairman Moily told HT, the last publicized caste census was done during the British Raj, for the past many years, all political parties depended on manipulated figures of OBCs and made both political and economic programmes based on distorted figures. Even the Mandal Commission was based on imaginary figures.

“As there was no data, the UPA decided to have a socio-economic caste census to make its social and welfare programmes more fruitful. That’s how the SECC was ordered. A caste census is necessary as we are building a castle without foundation,” said Moily.

The clamour for a caste-based census has also risen in the wake of the upcoming polls in UP, Punjab and other states in 2022.