Leaders of the Opposition in both Houses of Parliament, Mallikarjun Kharge (Rajya Sabha) and Rahul Gandhi (Lok Sabha), have written a joint letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, demanding that the Centre scrap the existing questionnaire for the caste census. They urged the government to formulate a new questionnaire after extensive consultations with political parties, experts, and the general public.

In their joint letter, written in Hindi on August 20, Kharge and Gandhi rejected the current methodology for caste enumeration. “Your government has opted for an open-ended question format to record caste details in the census, which is misleading. Under this method, whatever name an individual provides for their caste will be recorded as it is,” the leaders said.

Addressing a press conference on the letter, Congress general secretary (communications) Jairam Ramesh characterised the government’s current efforts towards a caste census as a mere “whitewash”. Ramesh claimed this was the third letter the Congress leadership wrote to the Prime Minister on the issue, which has so far gone unanswered.

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In their joint letter, Kharge and Gandhi said that social justice policies in India cannot be effectively implemented without accurate data, and that a precise assessment of the numerical strength and socio-economic status of various castes is possible only if the caste enumeration is conducted.

In India, the same caste is known by different names, sub-castes, and linguistic variations across different regions, Kharge and Gandhi said. The Congress leaders said that if members of the same caste are recorded under different names during the census, a single caste could end up being fragmented into thousands of distinct names. This would result in a list of hundreds of thousands of caste names, rendering the entire dataset obtained from the caste census useless, they said.

“If the actual population of a community is not accurately recorded, any assessment of its status will also be flawed. This will disadvantage backward, extremely backward, and other marginalised communities, and will impact decisions related to education, employment, welfare schemes, and social justice,” read the letter.

Most importantly, this approach will fail to reveal the size of the Other Backward Classes (OBC) population in India, as the term ‘Backward Class’ is not even included in this census, they said.

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Drop-down lists of castes

Offering a practical solution, Kharge and Gandhi suggested introducing a drop-down list of castes, similar to the method used for enumerating Scheduled Castes (SC) and Scheduled Tribes (ST). They noted that such a list can be easily compiled using existing government records, such as those for socially and educationally backward classes and data from the Anthropological Survey of India. This same method was employed in the caste surveys conducted in Telangana and Bihar, they pointed out.

“We do not accept the caste census being conducted in the current manner. The government should scrap the existing questionnaire and formulate a new one after consulting political parties, experts, and the general public; this would ensure that the true numbers of every caste and community are revealed, making the caste census accurate, meaningful, and beneficial,” Kharge and Gandhi said.

Along with their letter, the leaders enclosed copies of the caste lists from the Telangana Caste Survey (2024) and the Bihar Caste Survey (2022).