Obstacles apart, caste census puts CM Siddaramaiah on track to deliver 75% quota promise

Bengaluru: The caste census may help Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah upend the 50 per cent ceiling on reservation, in line with the promise Congress leader Rahul Gandhi has been making nationally.

DH has reliably learnt that the Karnataka State Commission for Backward Classes (KSCBC) has advised the government to consider hiking OBC reservation to 51 per cent, up from the current 32 per cent. 

This will give Siddaramaiah the opportunity to politically consolidate the backward classes and delivering on his pet social justice plank. 

Hiking reservation will mean breaking the 50 per cent quota ceiling, for which the caste census will come in handy to furnish empirical data.

Giving OBCs 51 per cent reservation, 17 per cent for SCs and 7 per cent for STs will make it a total of 75 per cent, a promise Siddaramaiah had made in April last year, just before the Assembly polls. 

During his first term in office, Siddaramaiah had spoken about increasing reservation to 70 per cent. 

At present, Karnataka has 32 per cent quota for OBCs, 15 per cent for SC and 3 per cent for ST - totalling to 50 per cent. 

The previous Basavaraj Bommai-led BJP government increased the SC/ST quota by six percentage points, breaching the 50 per cent cap fixed by the Supreme Court. However, there is still no clarity on its application. 

An official source pointed out that Haryana, Telangana, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh and Maharashtra have passed laws breaching the 50 per cent ceiling. So, Karnataka is not the first state to attempt the quota breach. 

The Commission has recommended a 1 per cent reservation to orphans in education and employment. Also, it has recommended bringing under the reservation bracket 57 castes whose population is small and live in remote places.

"With an assurance of 51 per cent reservation, the Congress can reap its benefit," former KSCBC chairperson CS Dwarakanath said. "This is what Rahul Gandhi has been saying...politically, it'll help Congress." 

But will Siddaramaiah bite the bullet? 

According to political analyst Chambi Puranik, the caste census can potentially become a parallel to the 'separate Lingayat religion' campaign that damaged the Congress' prospects in the 2018 Assembly election. "The caste census may unite the Lingayats and Vokkaligas. Therefore, I feel that Siddaramaiah may delay the implementation of the caste census,” he said, adding that the fate of the caste census would depend on the role Deputy Chief Minister D K Shivakumar, a Vokkaliga, will play.