The Supreme Court on Monday turned down a plea for direction to the Bihar government to maintain status quo and not to proceed further on caste survey in the state and posted the case for hearing to August 14.
As some of the appeals challenging the Patna high court order allowing caste survey in the state were not listed, the petitioner urged a bench headed by Justice Sanjiv Khanna to defer the hearing and club all the petitions together. One of the petitioners, however, pleaded with the court to pass an order to maintain status quo order as the state was about to resume the survey. But the bench said it would not pass an order without hearing the parties.
A batch of petitions, including by NGO Youth for Equality, has been filed in the SC to quash the Bihar government’s decision to hold caste survey in the state after their plea was dismissed by the high court. The controversy surrounding caste survey had earlier reached the apex court when the HC, in an interim order, stayed the process and the state moved SC against the order. The SC had, however, refused to interfere with the interim order and the survey remained stayed till the HC passed the final verdict.
The Patna HC had on August 1 dismissed a batch of PILs challenging the validity of the Bihar caste survey, terming the state government’s initiative “perfectly valid and legally competent”, and paved the way for the stalled exercise to resume after three months.
The verdict delivered by the division bench of Chief Justice K Vinod Chandran and Justice Partha Sarthy means the interim stay ordered by the HC on May 4 automatically stands vacated. The court backed the Nitish Kumar administration's argument that the Collection of Statistics Act, 2008 gives them the authority to carry out this enumeration in the name of social justice. It also found merit in the state government's arguments, which cited assembly debates and the Supreme Court's historic ruling in the Indira Sawhney case regarding the justification for caste-based reservations.