Congress Demands Withdrawal of Caste Census Questionnaire

Congress President Mallikarjun Kharge and Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi have written to Prime Minister Narendra Modi demanding the withdrawal of the current caste census questionnaire, arguing its open-ended format is misleading and will produce inaccurate data. In a letter dated August 20, 2026, the senior Congress leaders urged the government to scrap the existing process and formulate a new questionnaire after consulting political parties, experts, and the public.

The central criticism, detailed in the letter and reiterated at a party briefing, is that the current method allows individuals to self-report their caste name without a standardized list. Kharge and Gandhi warned that this would lead to the same caste being recorded under thousands of different names, sub-castes, and linguistic variations across regions. This fragmentation, they argued, would render the dataset useless for analysis and policy-making. "If the same caste is recorded under different names and sub-castes, the data will be scattered," Kharge wrote, cautioning it could result in hundreds of thousands of distinct caste names.

The leaders stressed that accurate caste data is...