Setting aside two orders of the Madras High Court directing the Centre to conduct a caste-based census, the Supreme Court said on Friday that even it had earlier declined to interfere in the government policy which allowed only enumeration of members of the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes but no other castes.
“Caste-wise enumeration in the census was given up as a matter of policy from 1951 onwards. In pursuance of this policy decision, castes other than the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes have not been enumerated in all the censuses since 1951,” the judgment said.
In its first decision on October 24, 2008, the High Court ordered the Census Department of the Union government to conduct a caste-based census.
The High Court reasoned that no caste-wise enumeration was held since 1931, though there had been a manifold increase in the population of the Scheduled Castes, the Scheduled Tribes and the Other Backward Classes. Hence, a caste-wise census should be done to increase the percentage of reservation proportionately. This, it said, would benefit weaker sections and help achieve social justice in its “true sense.”
In May 2010, in a separate case, the High Court reiterated its earlier decision, prompting the Census Commissioner to approach the Supreme Court.
Setting aside both High Court orders, Justice Dipak Misra, who authored the judgment for the Bench including Justices Rohinton Nariman and U.U. Lalit, asked why the High Court Bench took such an “adventurous path.”
For one, the case in the 2008 judgment concerned only an individual appointment under the Scheduled Tribe quota in Puducherry. Justice Misra noted that the particular case did not even have the Census Commissioner as party.
The Supreme Court dismissed the High Court’s direction for a caste-wise census in the name of social justice when “it is graphically vivid that at no point of time, the Central government had issued a notification to have a census conducted on a caste basis.”
The judgment referred to the Census Commissioner’s Instruction Manual to describe the “census” as a “historical tradition maintained in spite of several adversities like wars, epidemics, and natural calamities.”
