Rush Hour: Congress wants current caste census questionnaire dropped, UN panel rebukes India & more

Opposition leaders Rahul Gandhi and Mallikarjun Kharge wrote to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, urging him to scrap the current caste census questionnaire and prepare a new one based on a verified list of castes.

Gandhi and Kharge said that the government had chosen an open-ended question to record caste details, which they argued could result in the same caste being recorded under different names, sub-castes and with regional variations.

They proposed creating a drop-down list of castes, similar to the method used for enumerating Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes. Read on.

The Supreme Court sought responses from 20 rebel Trinamool Congress MPs on a plea by party leader Abhishek Banerjee challenging the delay by the Lok Sabha speaker in deciding the disqualification petitions he has filed against the legislators. The bench did not issue notice to Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla, who is the main respondent in the case.

Ahead of the Monsoon Session of Parliament in July, Birla accepted the request of the rebel MPs to sit separately in the Lok Sabha. However, the speaker has not yet recognised the group’s merger with the Nationalist Citizens Party of India. Read on.

The Calcutta High Court directed that no coercive action be taken against Trinamool Congress leader Abhishek Banerjee in three first information...

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