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In a shot in the arm for the Nitish Kumar government in Bihar, the Patna high court on Tuesday upheld the caste survey ordered by it as "perfectly valid" and "initiated with due competence".
A division bench comprising Chief Justice K Vinod Chandran and Justice Partha Sarathy passed the order rejecting a bunch of petitions challenging the survey, which was ordered last year and began earlier this year.
The bench, which had reserved its judgement on July 7, said in its 101-page-long verdict, "We find the action of the state to be perfectly valid, initiated with due competence, with the legitimate aim of providing development with justice."
The judgement began with the note: "The action of the state in carrying out a caste survey... and the vigorous challenge raised to it on multiple grounds... reveal that despite attempts to efface it from the social fabric, caste remains a reality, and refuses to be swept aside, wished away or brushed aside nor does it wither away or disperse into thin air."
The judgement, which came less than three months after the court had stayed the survey, shocked the petitioners who vowed to challenge the order before the Supreme Court.
"After studying the judgement, we will move the Supreme Court," senior advocate Dinu Kumar, counsel for one of the many petitioners, told reporters soon after the bench pronounced its verdict in an open court.
The ruling Mahagathbandhan (grand alliance) in the state, which had so far been content with a countrywide caste census being adopted as a key agenda by the opposition grouping INDIA, was predictably elated.
Deputy Chief Minister Tejashwi Yadav took to Twitter to reiterate the promised benefits of the survey while taking potshots at the BJP, which rules the Centre, for being reluctant to order a caste census while proffering "false pride of having an OBC prime minister".
Statements hailing the judgement and chiding the Bharatiya Janata Party also came from the Janata Dal-United, to which Chief Minister Nitish Kumar belongs, and the Communist Party of India-Marxist-Leninist-Liberation and the Communist Party of India-Marxist, both of which are a part of the ruling coalition but support the government from outside.
The BJP was left busy deflecting the blows, pointing out that it had "always supported" the caste survey, and backed it when the cabinet nod came for the exercise, while the party still shared power in the state.
Notably, the ambitious exercise, for which a budgetary outlay of Rs 500 crore has been laid by the cash-strapped state government, was undertaken after the Centre made it clear that headcount of social groups other than the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes would not be undertaken as part of the census.
The stand was not well received in the political circles in Bihar where the numerically powerful Other Backward Classes have dominated the political space since the Mandal churn of the 1990s.
Leaders like Lalu Prasad, the Rashtriya Janata Dal supremo who is the father of the Deputy CM, and Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, both of whom owe their rise to the Mandal wave, were of the view that a headcount of all castes was necessary since the last time such an exercise was undertaken was in the 1931 census.