New Delhi: Congress leader Jairam Ramesh launched a sharp attack on the Narendra Modi government on Tuesday (August 18), accusing the prime minister of trying to sabotage the caste census.

Calling Modi a ‘U-Turn ustaad’, Ramesh asked why the Union government had not provided a drop-down menu of standardised caste names in the 2027 census form despite advocating for it in 2021.

“On September 21, 2021, the Modi government filed an affidavit in the Supreme Court explicitly rejecting the demand for a caste census,” Ramesh wrote in a post on X.

Quoting from the government’s affidavit, Ramesh said, “However, paragraph 12 (d) of that affidavit stated: “No registry of castes was prepared before the 2011 census. It would have been better if a drop-down menu had been provided for selecting castes, through which some consistent data could have been made available, which could be relied upon.”

Pointing out the discrepancy, Ramesh asked why this drop-down menu was absent from the 2027 census form. He said that such a list had been prepared ahead of the Telangana and Bihar caste census, adding that such a menu had also been suggested by Congress President Mallikarjun Kharge in his letter to the prime minister on May 5, 2025.

“The conclusion is clear: The Modi government wants to directly sabotage the caste census,” he wrote. 

“The prime minister had announced the conduct of a caste census on April 30, 2025, taking a complete U-turn – the very same caste census whose idea he had previously attacked by calling it ‘urban Naxal.’ Now, he has taken another U-turn on his earlier U-turn and buried the very idea of a caste census without saying a word,” Ramesh added.

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Problems in the open-ended format

The Registrar General of India (RGI) had earlier this month decided against using a drop-down menu of castes, including lists drawn from existing central and state classifications. Enumerators will instead record responses as stated and will not attempt to classify surnames, sub-castes or other responses into broader caste categories, the Indian Express had reported, citing sources in the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA).

“It has been finally decided that no dropdown menu or any other means will be used for caste enumeration. People have to just state their caste and the same will be recorded as it is,” a senior MHA official told the paper. The official said enumerators would not be expected to categorise a surname or sub-caste into a particular caste category.

The RGI had earlier considered using a drop-down menu drawing from central and state lists of castes, particularly for Other Backward Classes (OBCs). 

The choice of an open-ended format is likely to produce problems similar to those encountered during the 2011 Socio-Economic and Caste Census, when respondents were allowed to report their caste without being restricted to a standardised list. That exercise produced nearly 46.7 lakh distinct caste names, compared with 4,147 castes recorded in the last comprehensive caste census in 1931. The Union government subsequently withheld the raw caste data.

The caste enumeration will be carried out alongside the population enumeration phase of Census 2027.

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