Opposition leaders urge PM to scrap caste census questionnaire

Leaders of the Opposition in both Houses of Parliament have jointly written to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, demanding that the Centre withdraw the existing questionnaire for the caste census. Mallikarjun Kharge, the Leader of the Opposition in the Rajya Sabha, and Rahul Gandhi, his counterpart in the Lok Sabha, have urged the government to prepare a fresh questionnaire after broad consultations with political parties, experts, and the public.

The letter, dated August 20, criticises the current methodology for caste enumeration. The leaders argue that the open-ended question format is misleading, as it records caste names exactly as provided by respondents. They warn that this approach could fragment a single caste into thousands of distinct names due to regional, linguistic, and sub-caste variations, potentially yielding a dataset of hundreds of thousands of entries that would be unusable.

Kharge and Gandhi emphasised that accurate data is essential for effective social justice policies. They noted that a flawed enumeration would disadvantage backward, extremely backward, and other marginalised communities, affecting decisions on education, employment, welfare schemes, and social justice. They also pointed out that the current census format does not even include the term 'Backward Class', which would fail to reveal the true size of the Other Backward Classes (OBC) population.

As a practical alternative, the leaders suggested using a drop-down list of castes, similar to the method employed for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes. They noted that such a list could be compiled from existing government records, including data from the Anthropological Survey of India. They cited the caste surveys conducted in Telangana and Bihar as examples of this approach and enclosed copies of those lists with their letter.

Congress general secretary Jairam Ramesh, addressing the media, described the government's current efforts as a 'whitewash'. He said this was the third letter from the Congress leadership on the issue, with no response received so far.