Congress President Mallikarjun Kharge and party MP Rahul Gandhi have written to Prime Minister Narendra Modi demanding that the government scrap the existing questionnaire for the caste census and formulate a new one after consulting political parties, experts and the general public.
Kharge, the Leader of the Opposition in the Rajya Sabha, and Gandhi, the Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha, said they did not accept the caste census being conducted in its current form and urged the government to draw on the experience of caste surveys conducted in Telangana and Bihar.
Briefing reporters on the letter, written in Hindi by Kharge and Gandhi on 20 August, Congress general secretary Jairam Ramesh said the government's current efforts towards a caste census were just a "whitewash".
Ramesh said this was the third letter written by the Congress leadership to Modi on the issue, but that they had not received a reply.
In their letter, Kharge and Gandhi said social justice policies in India could not be effectively implemented without accurate data.
They said a precise assessment of the numerical strength and socio-economic status of various castes was possible only if the caste enumeration was 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.
The same caste is known by different names, sub-castes and linguistic variations across different parts of India, they said.
Consequently, if members of the same caste were recorded under different names during the census, a single caste could be fragmented into thousands of distinct names, they argued.
This could result in a list containing hundreds of thousands of caste names, rendering the data obtained from the caste census useless, Kharge and Gandhi 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," Kharge and Gandhi said.
They also argued that the approach would fail to reveal the size of India's OBC population because the term "Backward Class" was not included in the census.
"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.
They said the same method had been used in the caste surveys conducted in Telangana and Bihar.
"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 the caste list from the Bihar Caste Survey (2022) with the letter.
Ramesh said, “Notification on caste census informed 40 questions to be asked and 10th question will be linked to caste; it is a form of self sabotage, will not ensure social justice.”
"This is the third letter from the Congress party to the prime minister on the caste census. The first letter was written by Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge to the prime minister on April 16, 2023, regarding the caste census. After that, the Congress president wrote a second, lengthy two-page letter on May 5, 2025, also regarding the caste census, and offered some suggestions, including constructive ones," he said.
"That letter was sent to the Prime Minister. Unfortunately, neither of these two letters received any response from the prime minister, the Prime Minister's Office, the Home Minister or any official. This is the third letter, and this time both Rahul Gandhi and Mallikarjun Kharge have signed it. The subject remains the same that the Congress party has been raising for the past three years," he said.
(With inputs from PTI)