New Delhi, Aug 25: Leaders of the Opposition in both Houses of Parliament, Mallikarjun Kharge (Rajya Sabha) and Rahul Gandhi (Lok Sabha), on Tuesday urged the Prime Minister Modi-led government demanding that it should withdraw existing questionnaire, terming those “misleading” and and a new one prepared to ensure accurate enumeration of castes after consultations with experts, political parties.
In their letter dated August 20, both leaders also rejected the current methodology for caste enumeration.
Addressing a press conference on the contents of the letter, Congress general secretary and communications in-charge Jairam Ramesh said that the government’s current efforts towards a caste census as a mere “whitewash”.
He claimed this was the third letter the Congress leadership wrote to the Prime Minister on the issue, which has on two occasions gone unanswered.
The Congress leaders said, “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.”
In their joint letter, Kharge and Rahul 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.
“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,” the two leaders wrote in their 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, the Congress leaders said
The Congress leaders also suggested that introducing a drop-down list of castes, similar to the method used for enumerating Scheduled Castes (SC) and Scheduled Tribes (ST).
They pointed out 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 highlighted.
“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).
