We are amidst the process of 'Census 2011' of India.. The authorities claim that this one is going to be the biggest counting exercise ever the world over.. The world’s fastest growing populace as our’s has been for quite sometime now, had already crossed the 1Bn mark long back.. all that we will be able to find out now is how close has this figure reached the next integer on the number scale.. lets hope that it doesn’t skip any in the sequence :)
In India, the census activity was started in the year 1881.. for the next 5 census since then, the statisticians fed the analysts with the detailed break up of build up of the Indian diaspora, categorizing us into classes and subclasses, castes and sub-castes, regions and religions.. Only after 1931, the Centre decided not to include any of these details (except for figures of population of SC and ST) in the census.. which means that, all the regional political parties and their mean and greedy leaders have unearthed their social, communal and political interests based only on these grounds dated back to 1931.
Not long ago, the youth of this secularist democracy had stood up against the then HRD Union Minister Mr. Arjun Singh only to remind him of our constitutional Right to Equality (A latest addition to this is the Right to Education which has come to effect from April 1).. even after staging huge protests nothing could brainwash the people overtaken by their political interests.. everyone of us knew what could have been the possible repercussions of increasing the reservations based on caste.. well.. we are now facing the heat but we are still smiling.. we are the fools who are happy to have been smart enough to have had the foresight of our doom..
Also, another ambitious activity going on in our country is the Project Adhaar.. As we all know the Nandan Nilekani led team has christened their UID project by this name.. I wonder.. what a huge database of our nation both - this census and Adhaar - would end up creating.. needless to say, this will set the benchmark for all the new policies to be made or for any amendments in the existing policies - all aiming towards the betterment of India (lets hope so)..
Again, the unmindful and always avaricious political honchos, in their quest to make it bigger than ever, dont want to miss out on this opportunity and so are asking the Committee at the Centre to carry out a caste based census.. this will give them a ready data to chew out and use and misuse it for their own benefits, create divide amongst the vulnerable people like us and thus put up an intense but awful show of their possessiveness..
So in the age when we citizens are being empowered through initiatives like the Right to Information and when the youth like you and me have all awakened.. when we are ready to rise again believing that we are all the same.. when we have realized that the problems in India are not something we should run away from by going abroad.. when we all are tending to believe that we can all be ‘one’.. when we can hope that someday we will stop going back to the annals of the year 1931.. the centre has surely given us a ray of hope by not giving in to the ‘Divide and Rule’ instincts of the wicked leaders asking for caste based census..
Let us all pray that God gives the Centre, enough strength and courage to remain firm on their stand.. Hmm.. keeping my fingers crossed..
It seems all is not bad at the ‘Centre’..
