As the political arena in Bihar starts to slowly warm up ahead of the Assembly elections later this year, Congress leader Rahul Gandhi’s comments late last week criticising the Bihar caste survey have given the BJP and Janata Dal (United) a line of attack to target the Opposition Mahagathbandhan of which the Congress is a part. At the Congress's Samvidhan Suraksha Sammelan in Patna on January 18, Gandhi said the Mahagathbandhan government would “bring caste census, not like Bihar (caste survey) that was a way to fool people”. “We won’t do the caste census like in Bihar, which was meant to fool people. We’ll do it so it would tell us the exact share of caste groups in each field,” he said, reiterating that the Congress was in favour of breaking the 50% quota ceiling cap. When the caste survey was conducted, the Mahagathbandhan government, including the Congress and RJD, and led by the JD(U)'s Nitish Kumar, was in power. The RJD, which has had its ups and downs with ally Congress in recent months, defended Gandhi saying he meant to only ask why the Bihar government’s November 2023 decision to raise the quota for Scheduled Castes (SCs), Scheduled Tribes (STs), Extremely Backward Classes (EBCs) and Other Backward Classes (OBCs) from 50% to 65%. (effectively, the overall quota cap became 75%, adding the 10% quota for economically weaker sections) was not included in the Ninth Schedule of the Constitution, which would have guarded it from legal scrutiny. The increase in quota was announced a month after the results of the 2022 caste survey exercise were made public. The survey showed that 36.1% of the population of Bihar were EBCs and 19.65% were SCs. However, in June 2024, the Patna High Court had set aside the government’s notification raising the quota cap in government jobs and educational institutions. The state Congress also defended Gandhi. “What Rahul Gandhi ji meant to say is that the Nitish Kumar government has not been able to get the Bihar quota hike decision into the Ninth Schedule of the Constitution. Rahul ji's angst against the Bihar caste survey was because of discrepancies, such as names of several people being left out, and against Nitish Kumar who, despite being a key NDA ally, has not been able to convince the Centre for a nationwide caste survey. As for the Bihar BJP, it has no moral right to criticise Rahul ji's remarks as the BJP has been dead against caste survey,” senior state Congress leader Prem Chandra Mishra told The Indian Express. RJD national spokesperson Subodh Kumar Mehta said, “Rahul Gandhi’s statement should be taken in a broader sense. Based on the survey findings, Nitish Kumar talked about welfare measures worth Rs 2.5 lakh crore over five years. What happened to that promise? Second, with the quota raised scrapped by the Patna High Court, what stops the Bihar CM from pressuring the Narendra Modi government to put it in the Ninth Schedule to provide legal cover?” Targeting Gandhi for regularly making “irresponsible statements”, senior JD(U) leader and Bihar minister Vijay Kumar Choudhary asked, “Did he not know that the Congress had backed Bihar caste survey right from the beginning?” Another JD(U) leader said the party had officially communicated to the PM about putting the increase in quota under the Ninth Schedule. BJP OBC Morcha’s national general secretary Nikhil Anand said, “The Congress is an anti-OBC party and they have a discredited past when it comes to playing the politics of social justice of SCs, STs, and OBCs. Rahul Gandhi must answer why the Congress sabotaged the caste census of 2011 (a reference to the Socio-Economic Caste Census by the UPA government), wasting public money of around Rs 5,000 crore. Now, they are trying to play the politics of social justice with the intention of cornering parties such as the Samajwadi Party, RJD, Bahujan Samaj Party and the DMK for survival. Decisions such as giving Constitutional status to the NCBC, reservation to OBCs in NEET, a capital venture fund for OBCs, and Bharat Ratna to Karpoori Thakur ji have proved that PM Narendra Modi ji is the new messiah of social justice in India.”
