New Delhi: Leaders of Opposition Mallikarjun Kharge and Rahul Gandhi have written to Prime Minister Narendra Modi over the caste census issue, demanding that the government scrap the existing questionnaire for it and formulate a new one after consulting political parties, experts, and the general public.
Kharge and Gandhi said they do not accept the caste census being conducted in the current manner and urged the government to take cue from the caste surveys done in Telangana and Bihar.
Briefing reporters on the letter written in Hindi by Kharge and Gandhi on August 20, Congress general secretary Jairam Ramesh said the government’s current efforts towards a caste census are just a “whitewash”.
Ramesh said this is the third letter written by the Congress leadership to Modi over the issue but have not received any reply.
In their letter, Kharge and Gandhi said social justice policies in India cannot be effectively implemented without accurate data and a precise assessment of the numerical strength and socio-economic status of various castes is possible only if the caste enumeration is conducted correctly.
“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 in their letter to Modi.
In India, the same caste is known by different names, sub-castes, and linguistic variations across different regions, Congress president Kharge and former party chief Rahul Gandhi pointed out.
Consequently, 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, they argued.
This would result in a list of hundreds of thousands of caste names, rendering the entire dataset obtained from the caste census useless, Kharge and Gandhi argued.
“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,” Kharge and Gandhi said.
Most importantly, this approach will fail to reveal the size of the OBC population in India, as the term “Backward Class” is not even included in this census, they said.
“An easy solution for this already exists: a drop-down list of castes should be created. This is the method adopted for the enumeration of Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes. Such a list can be easily compiled based on existing government lists such as those for Socially and Educationally Backward Classes and the list from the Anthropological Survey of India,” the two leaders said in their letter to Modi.
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
They enclosed copies of the caste list from the Telangana Caste Survey (2024) and of the caste list from the Bihar Caste Survey (2022) with the letter.
