Key to the Supreme Court’s decision to put a stay on the controversial OBC quota law is the 1931 Census to calculate the OBC population in the country. As the court questioned its relevance and voices for a fresh caste-based Census get louder, the government is faced with a stumbling block.

Advisor to the Human Resource Development ministry for this Supreme Court case, P S Krishnan, told The Indian Express today: “B P Mandal had himself written to three successive Home Ministers and had repeatedly requested them to conduct a caste-based Census. But he was refused saying that Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, independent India’s first Home minister, had decided in 1950 that there will be no caste-based census from 1951 onwards, when the first census took place in Free India.”

Part of Patel’s reasoning, Krishnan said, was that the country needed unity and such a census could have caused divisiveness.

Krishnan said that Mandal wrote “three DO letters to three home ministers, namely H M Patel in 1978-79, Y B Chavan in 1979 and Gyani Zail Singh in 1980.” Krishnan, who was social welfare secretary in 1990 V P Singh government when the Mandal Commission judgment came and was also the founding member secretary in the National Commission for Backward Classes from 1993 to 2000, was brought in by HRD minister Arjun Singh last year to help the government defend its position in the Supreme Court, as the OBC quota legislation was challenged.

While the UPA government to satisfy the Supreme Court will have to overturn Sardar Patel’s decision of 1950 for having a caste-based census, Krishnan says, “There is adequate data for implementing reservation for OBCs in education. Data is not a problem.”

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