Congress leader Rahul Gandhi on Wednesday said it was clear that the pressure his party put on the Union government for a caste census worked.

Hours earlier, Union minister Ashwini Vaishnaw announced that the Cabinet Committee on Political Affairs had approved the enumeration of caste in the next census. The Union government did not announce when the exercise would take place.

The Opposition has long been demanding a nationwide caste census, arguing that the exercise will help identify the true population of the country’s Other Backward Classes and other castes, in turn paving the way for policies such as expanded quotas.

Noting that the Congress did not intend to stop its demands related to the exercise, Gandhi said that it was the “will of the people of India and the [Prime Minister Narendra] Modi government has no option but to follow it”.

“We will ensure they conduct a comprehensive and consultative census – a people’s census, not a bureaucratic census,” the leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha said on X. “We will continue to press for the removal of the arbitrary 50% cap on reservations.”

The 50% cap on reservations was put in place by the Supreme Court in 1992 when it ruled that “no provision of reservation or preference can be so vigorously pursued as to destroy the very concept of equality”.

The court had then said that any reservation beyond 50% would be liable to be struck down. However, it added that the cap could be breached in extraordinary situations, but extreme caution should be exercised while doing so.

On Wednesday, Congress chief Mallikarjun Kharge also said that his party “had continuously raised the demand for caste census, whose most vocal supporter was Rahul Gandhi”.

In a post on X, Kharge claimed that “Modi kept avoiding implementing this policy of social justice and falsely accused the opposition of dividing the society”.

Rashtriya Janata Dal chief Lalu Prasad Yadav said that “what we socialists think about 30 years ago like reservation, caste census, equality, fraternity, secularism etc. are followed by others decades later”.

“When I was the national president of Janata Dal, our United Front government in Delhi had taken a decision in 1996-’97 to conduct caste census in the 2001 census, which was later not implemented by the [Atal Bihari] Vajpayee government of NDA [National Democratic Alliance],” Yadav said on X.

Leader of the Opposition in Bihar and Rashtriya Janata Dal leader Tejashwi Yadav also described the decision as the party’s “ideological victory” and said that the “fight for social justice has now reached the next stage”.

“Whatever we do today, others think about it after 35-40 years,” he reiterated. “Now we will reserve seats for backward/most backward classes in Vidhan Sabha, Vidhan Parishad, Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha.”

Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav on Wednesday called the decision to implement the caste census “India’s victory” and the unity of Picchda-Dalit-Adivasi groups.

“Due to the combined pressure of all of us, the BJP [Bharatiya Janata Party] government has been forced to take this decision,” he said. “This is a very important phase of PDA’s victory in the fight for social justice.”

Communist Party of India (Marxist) MA Baby said that the decision to include the caste census as part of the general census was a belated response to the unanimous demand of the Opposition.

“However, even now there is no timeline given,” Baby said on X. “Caste socio-economic survey is essential to ensure social justice in government policies.”

When announcing the decision on the enumeration of caste in the next census, Vaishnaw alleged that the Congress and its allies had used their demand for a caste census “only as a political tool”.

“Congress governments always opposed caste census,” Vaishnaw said at a press conference. “Caste was not included in all the census operations conducted since Independence.”

The Socio Economic and Caste Census conducted by the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance government in 2011 to enumerate caste was a survey and not a Census, Vaishnaw said.

Data relating to castes in the Socio Economic and Caste Census was not made public.

Vaishnaw added that the census came under the purview of the Union government and the exercises some states had conducted to enumerate castes were surveys.

“Some states have done this well, while some others have conducted such surveys purely from a political angle in a non-transparent way,” said the Union minister. “Such surveys have created doubts in the state”.

Bihar and Telangana have released their caste survey data. Jharkhand has said it will conduct its caste survey in the financial year 2025-’26.

Vaishnaw added: “Considering all these facts, and to ensure that our social fabric is not disturbed by politics, caste enumeration should be transparently included in the census instead of surveys. This will strengthen the social and economic structure of our society while the nation continues to progress.”

The last decennial census exercise was held in 2011. In 2020, India was set to begin the first phase of the exercise – in which housing data is collected – but the Covid-19 pandemic forced its postponement.

Several allies of the ruling BJP including the Telugu Desam Party, Union ministers Chirag Paswan and Ramdas Athawale, and Maharashtra Deputy Chief Minister Ajit Pawar have backed demands for a caste census.