The Patna high court clamped an interim stay on the ongoing Bihar caste survey, terming the exercise virtually a census by another name and hence “prima facie unconstitutional” as it “impinges on the legislative powers of Parliament”.
The court ordered the Nitish Kumar administration, which in a former guise had persuaded the BJP to reluctantly support a caste counting, to make sure that the information gathered thus far by enumerators doesn't leak. The following hearing will take place on July 3. A split bench consisting of Chief Justice K Vinod Chandran and Justice Madhuresh Prasad heard a number of petitions opposing the exercise and distinguished between a census and a survey using Black's Law Dictionary and other books.
Census is defined as “collection of empirical facts about individuals” and survey as “collection of opinion and perceptions of the general public”, the bench said while noting that the former was being conducted “in the garb of a survey”.
The 31-page ruling notes that the state government "has no right to conduct such a caste census in Bihar," noting that the bench did not discover any specific justification in the June 6, 2022 notification for a caste-based survey that would be "relevant for the contemporary period."
The bench held that the state government's intention to share data of a caste survey with various political parties in the state assembly raises a larger question of the infringement of the fundamental right to privacy of the people in general”. “There is also the question of data integrity and security, which has to be more elaborately addressed by the state,” the judges said.