An 11 member delegation from Jharkhand headed by chief minister Hemant Soren will meet union home minister Amit Shah on Sunday to place the demand for the caste based census besides inclusion of Sarana in the religion code.
Jharkhand BJP which had refused to be the part of this delegation will now join the delegation. Jharkhand BJP president and Rajya Sabha MP Deepak Prakash will represent the BJP in the delegation. Prakash left for Delhi on Saturday in a service flight.
The JMM had criticised the BJP when Prakash had officially announced that the BJP will stay away from any such delegation headed by the chief minister and the Government.
Source said that the meeting is scheduled at 4 pm at the residence of the Union Home Minister.
Other than Chief Minister and BJP president, Jharkhand Congress president Rajesh Thakur, State Minister Alamgir Alam, MLA and Ajsu party president Sudesh Mahato, minister and RJD MLA Satyanand Bhokta, MLA Vinod singh of CPI( ML), Bhuvneshwar Mehta of CPI, Suresh Munda of CPM, MLA Arup Chatterjee from Marxist community centre and MLA Kamlesh singh of NCP will be the part of the delegation.
An all-party delegation is seen as a move to put pressure on the centre to accept the growing demand of caste based census.
But the Centre told the Supreme Court that as a matter of policy the caste-wise enumeration in the Census has been given up from 1951 onwards. Hence, the castes other than SCs and STs have not been counted in any of the Census since 1951 till this date.
The Centre had pointed out that there are a number of states and union territories where there is a complex structure of Other Backward Classes (OBCs). In some states, orphans and destitutes are also declared as OBC. There are instances in some of the states where Scheduled Caste converted to Christianity have too been listed as OBC.
The Centre informed there are 2,479 OBCs across the country. But the number of OBC as per the state and union territory is around 3150. In such a situation there will be a risk that thousands of people will be excluded from OBC as it will be difficult to classify and identify such complexities.
