Congress begins caste enumeration of its secretaries

Congress has started collecting caste and age data of its secretaries in a bid to strike a balance between different castes and communities in its team of office-bearers.

According to sources, the office of Congress general secretary in-charge of organisation KC Venugopal is calling all the secretaries and asking them for details such as their caste and age.

At present, there are 63 secretaries in the All India Congress Committee (AICC). 

However, the general secretaries and other office-bearers have been spared for now. 

The sources said the exercise is being carried out to ensure equal representation to all the castes and communities in the AICC. 

"The idea is to prepare a team of young leaders for the future keeping in mind the caste factor. We have seen that elections are nowadays fought only on caste equations. So, the Congress cannot remain oblivious to this reality," a senior party functionary said on the condition of anonymity. 

The move is apparently triggered by the overemphasis on caste politics by the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) since 2014.

In the past, there had been a demand by certain sections for equal representation of all the castes in the Congress Working Committee (CWC), the party's highest decision-making body. It was said that the CWC at times is heavily loaded with the leaders belonging to dominant castes.

However, a section in the grand old party argued that the caste factor should be considered only in electoral politics and not organisational matters. 

In the organisation, the leadership should consider people only on the basis of their organisational skills while the caste factor could play a dominant role in the selection of candidates in elections, said a young Congress leader from Bihar, Kesar Kumar Singh.

In 2010, the Congress faced flak after its Bihar unit came out with a purported list of office bearers with caste assigned to all of them. The matters became worse when the then Lok Sabha Speaker, Meira Kumar, was listed as 'chamar' while being appointed as a permanent invite to the Bihar Congress ignoring the fact that she was holding a Constitutional position.  

The party had also violated the SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act by using the caste names.

The Congress had then argued that political parties use caste names for internal records to ensure proper balance in their team-building exercises.