JOIN USThere was no option for the government but to postpone the 2021 census and related operations, and when it made the announcement last week, it did not come as a surprise. Census 2021 was scheduled to be carried out in two phases. House listing and housing census work, including the updating of the National Population Register (NPR), was to begin in April and conclude in September. The actual population enumeration was to be done from February 9 to 28 next year. The schedule has become unworkable because of the nationwide COVID-19 lockdown. The lockdown may continue in some form or the other, and even after it is lifted it will take many weeks or months for normalcy to be restored. Holding an exercise like the census, which involves personal contact between many thousands of enumerators and millions of people, may not be possible in the near future.
The census and the NPR exercises had become controversial with the central government and a number of state governments taking different positions on them. This was a reflection of the differences between the BJP and many opposition parties on the aim and content of the NPR process. The census as such was not contentious, but the NPR was seen as a process to collect information about people which would later be used to deny them citizenship rights. The passage of the Citizenship (Amendment) Act last year, which took a discriminatory view of the right to citizenship, and the proposal to create a National Register of Citizens (NRC), which was not entirely denied by the government, exacerbated those fears. There were protests against the CAA in many parts of the country and the launch of the NPR exercise in such a situation would not have been right.
A number of states, such as West Bengal, Kerala, Punjab, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh, which are ruled by opposition parties, have opposed the NPR. The governments of Bihar and Tamil Nadu, which are friendly to the BJP, have also expressed reservations about some questions that appear intrusive and unnecessary in the present format of the NPR. Home Minister Amit Shah’s assurance in Parliament last month that providing such information is not mandatory and that nobody’s citizenship would be considered doubtful in the absence of such information has not allayed apprehensions. So, the start of the NPR and census operations now would have poured into the fires lit by the anti-CAA protests. There will be enough time to ponder over those issues and reach an agreement over them after the nation gets through the crisis created by the pandemic and wins the battle against it. Unity is the need of the hour now.