Supreme Court lists pleas challenging Bihar caste survey for final hearing in September

Supreme Court of India. File Pic

The Supreme Court on Tuesday posted for September the final hearing on a batch of pleas challenging the Patna High Court order upholding the Bihar government's decision to conduct a caste survey.

A bench of Justices Sanjiv Khanna and Sanjay Kumar asked the parties to file written submissions on issues like whether the state has the right to conduct a caste survey, and on what conditions and which circumstances such an exercise is barred under law.

The bench told senior advocate Aprajita Singh, appearing for petitioners who have challenged the Bihar government's caste survey, that their arguments should deal with whether the entire data collected by the state should be available in the public domain.

Singh said her main point of challenge is that the survey conducted by the state has breached the privacy of individuals as people cannot be forced to disclose their caste.

"Individual caste survey has been barred by Supreme Court's Indra Sawhney verdict of 1992," she said, adding that Bihar's survey mandatorily imposed disclosing caste identity on everyone.

Justice Khanna told Singh that she has to bear in mind the doctrine of proportionality, which is being adopted by the Supreme Court in recent times, and deal with the question of whether the executive can conduct this kind of exercise for collection of data on its population and to what extent it is wrong.

Doctrine of proportionality says actions taken by a public authority should be proportional to the goal it is trying to achieve.

On January 2, the top court had asked the Bihar government to put in the public domain the break-up of the caste survey data to enable those aggrieved to challenge the findings.

It had refused to grant any interim relief to the petitioners who have challenged the caste survey.

On October 6, 2023, the top court had questioned the Bihar government as to why it published its caste survey data.

It had, however, refused to restrain the state government from making public further data, and said it may examine if the state has the power to conduct such an exercise.

The top court had also issued formal notices on a batch of pleas challenging the August 1, 2023 order of the Patna High Court that gave the go-ahead for the caste survey in Bihar.

It rejected the petitioners' contention that the state government has already published some data preempting a stay. They had sought a complete stay on further publication of data.

On October 2, 2023, the Nitish Kumar government released the findings of the caste survey, a move its detractors claimed was made keeping in mind the 2024 parliamentary elections.

Kumar was then heading the JD(U)-RJD-Congress alliance government. He later returned to the NDA fold.

The data revealed that the OBCs and EBCs constituted a whopping 63 per cent of the state's population.

The state's total population stood at a little over 13.07 crore, out of which the Extremely Backward Classes (36 per cent) were the largest social segment followed by the Other Backward Classes at 27.13 per cent.

The survey also said the Yadavs, an OBC group, was the largest caste in terms of population, accounting for 14.27 per cent of the total.

Dalits accounted for 19.65 per cent of the total population in the state, which is also home to nearly 22 lakh (1.68 per cent) people belonging to the Scheduled Tribes.

Besides a plea by NGO 'Ek Soch Ek Paryas', several other petitions have been filed, including one by Nalanda-resident Akhilesh Kumar, who has contended that the notification issued by the state government for the exercise is against the constitutional mandate.

Kumar's petition says, according to the constitutional mandate, only the Union government is empowered to conduct a census.

The high court had said in its 101-page 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."

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