'Narrative management': Congress questions Centre's intention on caste census

New Delhi: Congress on Monday questioned the Narendra Modi government's intention on conducting caste census, claiming that it only wants to "buy time, grab headlines and manage the narrative".

Addressing a press conference here, Congress General Secretary Sachin Pilot targeted the Modi government for omitting mention of caste enumeration from the notification on Census 2027 and referred to the dispensation's opposition to the idea of caste count as seen in its response in Parliament July 2021 and in an affidavit in Supreme Court in September 2021.

The government should come out clear and "not keep getting deadlines extended”, Pilot said as he questioned the "low budgetary" allocation of Rs 574 crore when the required funding for the census is around Rs 10,000 crore.

"Unfortunately, I think the intention of the government is just to buy time, grab headlines and manage the narrative", he said.

His remarks came a day after a spokesperson of the Ministry of Home Affairs said that the census will include caste enumeration and referred to three press statements since April 30.

Batting for using the Telangana template for the Census, Pilot said the objective is not just to collect data on an individual's caste but to understand the living conditions of these families.

"When we said, we wanted a caste census, the objective was to know exactly in what conditions people of India are living, those who are being deprived, who are not in the main stream, how much have they got education, how much access they have to government schemes and policy programs, in what economic condition are they living, what is an expanding, household incomes, all that is required for us to do better policy combination," he said.

"The objective of the exercise is not just to get the name and the caste of a person, that I don’t think has that much value. The real value is that you understand in what condition they are living, how successful the schemes have been so far, are the targeted budgets and policy programmes reaching the ones that we are intending for," he said.

He said the BJP had opposed the Aadhar, GST, FDI in retail and in defence but when they came to government, they implemented and took credit.

The caste census was a Congress issue with Rahul Gandhi raising it forcefully but they were called us "urban naxals" by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, as they were not agreeable to accept this demand. "Now, when they sense the mood of the country, they have accepted in principle, but I think, there is a lot of confusion and a lot of dissatisfaction in what we had asked for," he said.