Mallikarjun Kharge and Rahul Gandhi sent a letter dated August 20, 2026, to Prime Minister Narendra Modi objecting to the use of open-ended questions for caste enumeration in the Population Census 2027. The letter, written in Hindi and briefed to reporters by Jairam Ramesh on August 25, 2026, argues that regional variations in caste names risk fragmenting counts. The government has selected open-ended recording for the first post-Independence caste count.