Tag Archives: Buddhism

Dr. Milind Kamble of the Dalit Indian Chamber of Commerce and Industry said in an interview, “Capital can break caste system… Market and money will defeat anti-capital Marx and Manu.”

His argument might seem attractive, but I disagree. Capital cannot break the caste system because the market is not casteless. It carries caste into every transaction that takes place before the consumer reaches the shop. Certainly, accumulation of capital can improve economic standing, especially among marginalised sections, but it absolutely will not defeat Manu or the caste system. Dr. Kamble is confusing individual economic mobility with the abolition of caste as a social and economic structure. His entrepreneurial agenda does not resolve the concerns that structure and constrain many lives. Who owns land? Who has collateral? Who can access networks? Who can survive a period without income? Who can get a loan without family wealth behind them? Who has the social connections to find suppliers, customers and contracts? And who is trusted when they walk into a bank, a business association or a potential partnership?

Although India, under the leadership of Dr. Manmohan Singh, entered a phase of economic reforms in 1991, opening its economy to liberalised and globalised economic spaces, the trajectory changed significantly since 2014. The post-2014 phase represents a particularly aggressive intensification of neoliberal policies combined with right-wing populist politics. This has manifested through the divestment of profitable stakes in publicly owned companies and their outright sale to private ownership. In post-2014 India, Dalits are being told, again and again, to become entrepreneurs. They are even invited into the market as borrowers, as start-up founders, as “self-made” men and women who can pull themselves up through grit and a bank loan. DICCI has given it a name, “Dalit Capitalism,” asserting that “caste and capital can never co-exist.” However, to assume that capital accumulation can dismantle caste is to ignore how contemporary markets articulate and weaponise pre-existing social hierarchies to maintain structural stratification.It produces hierarchical adverse inclusion, in which Dalits are brought into the market, yet the structures that keep them subordinate remain untouched. This inclusion works through a predatory sorting mechanism where the market invites Dalit actors as economic agents while it simultaneously locks them into asymmetric low-tier commercial arrangements. Such low margin supply roles cannot challenge the pre-existing monopoly of dominant caste. As a result, entrepreneurship functions less as a pathway to mobility and more as a mechanism that reproduces existing hierarchies. Only a small minority are able to move upward through episodic access to capital and networks.

The mix of neoliberal economic policy and right-wing Hindutva politics has reshaped Dalit entrepreneurial inclusion in three connected ways. First, it encourages Dalits to see themselves as entrepreneurial subjects without redistributing land, capital, or other assets. Second, it expands formal credit on paper while leaving caste-structured barriers like collateral, networks, documentation, and bias firmly in place. Third, it depoliticises caste inequality by wrapping it in the language of opportunity, merit and self-help. In this setting, credit and entrepreneurship schemes work less as tools of emancipation and more as mechanisms of managed inclusion within an order that remains deeply unequal.

There is a mutual relationship between right-wing politics and neoliberalism that produces a strong ideological hegemony. On one side, neoliberalism generates social and economic crises that produce grievances, job scarcity, and financial uncertainty, which right-wing populism mobilises politically. Populist politics reinforces neoliberalism by creating doubt and controversy around the causes of economic insecurity, while directing public attention towards cultural and political conflicts rather than the material failures of capitalism. Through this, it delegitimises progressive economic alternatives, framing structural challenges to the free market as corrupt, globalist, or anti-national threats. Pühringer and Ötsch (2018) conceptualised this as a loop that constructs a binary worldview, effectively reorganising societal conflicts by splitting them into two polarised groups. In India, those two groups are the Hindu majoritarian masses versus the progressive dissidents and minority outsiders. Under the Bharatiya Janata Party, a right-wing Hindutva government that fiercely encourages privatisation and entrepreneurship, it is crucial to understand exactly where Dalits stand in the political economic landscape of India. Because the state is pushing for Dalit entrepreneurship by reframing credit and start-ups as the ultimate pathways to empowerment, the populist discourse successfully depoliticises caste inequality, shifting the burden of survival from the state onto the isolated individual.

A central feature of India’s material economy is the unequal distribution of assets. Around 58.4% of rural Dalit households reportedly do not own agricultural land, while at the individual level, around 71% of Dalits work as landless agricultural labourers, cultivating land owned by the dominant caste. The concentration of landlessness is particularly severe in states such as Punjab, Bihar and Haryana, where more than 85% of Dalit households reportedly own no land. At the same time, under the neoliberal policy reforms by the BJP government, the public sector enterprises that historically provided secure jobs with SC/ST-focused affirmative action are being aggressively privatised, and Dalits are being shifted to informal employment. Dalits and Adivasis account for over 40% of seasonal migrants, despite making up just 25% of the total population. In India, short-term labour migration is seven times more common than permanent relocation, and this gap widens to 16 times for these specific communities. Furthermore, these workers are frequently forced into the most dangerous, physically demanding, and toxic jobs in the country.

Over the years, the government has launched multiple schemes to provide credit through loans to SC/ST persons, focusing on entrepreneurial activities. For example, through Stand-Up India (2016), it aimed to provide loans of up to ₹ 1 crore to SC/ST and women entrepreneurs. National SC/ST Hubs were formed to give them market access, help with procurement, and training. A special credit-linked capital subsidy is also in place. However, official data presented by the Ministry of Finance compiled by SIDBI (Small Industries Development Bank of India) shows a contrasting view. While Stand-Up India has sanctioned over ₹ 62,000 crore in loans to around 2.75 lakh beneficiaries since 2016, only about 1/5th of these loans has reached SC/ST entrepreneurs with the majority going to general category women.

Table 1: Stand-Up India disbursements by social category, based on Department of Financial Services data.

From 2016 to 2025, around 22.49% of all money disbursed under the Stand-Up India scheme went to SC and ST entrepreneurs together. There are also high documentation requirements and margin requirements of up to 25%. This clearly indicates that even when formal credit is available, structural barriers like collateral, networks, and bureaucratic delays filter most vulnerable Dalit applicants out. Because of the lack of traditional collateral, 82% of Dalit borrowers rely on informal lenders and high-interest borrowing parties.

Furthermore, MUDRA Bank (Micro Units Development and Refinance Agency Bank), formally established in 2015, is a prominent credit scheme of the incumbent government, but the data exposes the structural limitations of the institution’s reality that the government does not want to focus on. Around 51% of MUDRA accounts belong to SC/ST/OBC categories. However, the way these accounts are divided is staggering. Over 70% to 80% of all MUDRA loans fall under the “Shishu” category (under ₹50,000). A loan of ₹30,000 or ₹40,000 cannot build a competitive, wealth-generating start-up. It can only buy a fruit cart, a sewing machine, or open a tiny roadside tea stall. Effectively, such amounts are more suited to small-scale livelihood activities than to building a competitive, wealth-generating enterprise. The state celebrating “start-up culture” is actually promoting necessity entrepreneurship, a term for entrepreneurship born out of an absolute absence of alternative employment options. A study by Jarwal and Kahal (2022) similarly finds that the growth of Dalit entrepreneurship as an impact of liberalisation policy can be positive; however, this has resulted in a proliferation of very small business units, which are mainly engaged in survival activities. The study further states that most Dalit-owned enterprises were established out of the necessity to survive. This is because their owners did not get employment opportunities, and had they received employment opportunities, they would have been earning more than what they are currently earning through necessity entrepreneurship. This necessity entrepreneurship keeps people alive at a subsistence level, but it does not generate institutional capital or challenge upper-caste corporate monopolies. According to official Economic Census Data analysed by the Economic and Political Weekly (2025), 89% of rural and 72% of urban Dalit-owned enterprises are OAEs (Own Account Enterprises). Most do not grow into larger firms; they function primarily as a substitute for daily wage employment and household income to keep the family fed. For many Dalit entrepreneurs, entry into the entrepreneurial market is shaped less by the pursuit of a profitable market opportunity than by the limited availability of secure employment. Entrepreneurship therefore becomes a strategy for economic survival rather than a straightforward pathway to wealth creation. Thus, as scholars have already shown, market inclusion alone is not an explanation of Dalit economic empowerment.

Such divergent scenarios between governmental schemes and Dalit economic conditions make the market an unequal playing field. Along with the unequal access to financial capital, there is also a profound social imbalance: private capital in India does not operate through a socially neutral field, as a mathematical principle unaffected by social forces. Its allocation is shaped by historically embedded caste structures and institutions, concentrated among predominantly Baniya and other mercantile castes. Avichal Dhiwar, founder of 20th March Venture Pvt Ltd, said in an interview, “Despite having complete paperwork, we faced a lot of problems getting loans from banks. They made it so tough for us that we eventually realised that they had no intention of extending us any loan.” This clearly shows the need for a mandatory public credit system to prevent systemic market exclusion of marginalised entrepreneurs. However, even necessary government loans and other forms of financial assistance reach only 10% of Scheduled Caste (SC) units, clearly indicating credit starvation. Furthermore, traditional business chambers, such as FICCI and CII, and trade networks have historically been dominated by these mercantile castes, who hold a monopoly over market trust and proudly flaunt it. When massive corporate monopolies run into billions of rupees in bad loans (Non-Performing Assets), the state steps in to bail them out, absorbing the damage; here, corporate risk is socialised. However, when a marginalised Dalit entrepreneur seeks a micro-loan, the state forces them to take on immense personal credit risk in a volatile market without any state security. Rather than providing security against the risks generated by market participation, right-wing neoliberal policy increasingly encourages historically excluded groups to become market participants and assume responsibility for navigating those risks themselves. For marginalised communities such a market means “competition among wolves and lambs“, as mentioned by Dr. Ambedkar in States and Minorities (1947). As Fischer (2020) argues, social policy under neoliberal restructuring does not necessarily remove structural inequality; instead, policies designed to promote inclusion can produce what he describes as hierarchical or adverse forms of inclusion, in which marginalised populations are incorporated into markets while remaining disadvantaged within them.

For Ambedkar, this distinction was fundamental. Economic reform could not be separated from social reform. Opening the market does not create equality when the social relations governing access to that market remain unequal. Credit can provide an opportunity to enter the market, but it also creates an obligation to repay within an environment where access to assets, networks and stable markets remains highly unequal. Without control over credit, markets will become a field of monopoly and exploitation. An increase in privatisation also results in the government abdicating its responsibility to safeguard its citizens.

In Annihilation of Caste (1936), Dr. Ambedkar said,“The problem of the Untouchables is a unique problem… You cannot have economic reform unless you pursue social reform. … The division of labour under the caste system is not a mere division of labour. It is a division of labourers.” In the private informal sector, Dalits often work as low-tier subcontractors for larger firms, which is not empowerment in any politically, socially, or economically meaningful sense. Here, inclusion into the market happens without dismantling the structural barriers, such as caste networks, which keep Dalit businesses at the periphery. Therefore, targeted entrepreneurial policies under the right-wing government does not dismantle caste-based economic exclusion, but primarily facilitates Dalit participation within markets whose underlying structures remain unequal. The right-wing government is therefore simultaneously promoting Dalit entrepreneurship while leaving many of the structural conditions that constrain Dalit entrepreneurship intact.

What can be done?

Rejecting market participation because caste structures already shape the market and the inability of the government to safeguard rights is not a feasible solution. While under neoliberalism, individual entrepreneurship can function as a form of economic mobility; enterprise can be re-signified as a potent tool for collective social emancipation. Crucially, this social emancipation is not achieved through isolated individuals taking on personal liabilities in a structurally unequal market. Rather, it becomes possible only when market participation is backed by stronger public regulation of credit markets and corporate concentration, along with the development of independent, community-owned institutional capacities.

The government is meant to play a crucial role in enforcing existing policies requiring corporations, such as the policy requiring public sector undertakings (PSUs) to procure 4% of their supplies from SC/ST-owned micro and small enterprises, and entrepreneurs. They are also expected to provide concessional loans through the Venture Capital Fund for Scheduled Castes, etc. However, trusting the right-wing neoliberal regime to implement these policies sincerely or effectively is not realistic. Doing so would directly contradict its ideological alliance with corporate capital. Therefore, there is a need for counter-hegemonic power, where Dalit communities stop acting merely as scattered voters or isolated market actors and instead use their collective leverage to disrupt the system. This can be done by moving from individual credit risk to structural social democracy and by aggregating thousands of small Dalit producers into a large cooperative, so they gain bargaining power to compete against corporate monopolies. Sustained institutional action and litigation can also be used to document state non-compliance with procurement obligations and seek appropriate judicial remedies, including through PILs, while RTIs can be used to obtain the relevant records.

Finally, the Dalit community must construct its own autonomous institutional capacity to provide Dalit entrepreneurs with finance, information, mentorship and bargaining power. It will be a community-led ecosystem that integrates community-owned credit cooperatives, independent capital funds and digital business directories that pool resources to guarantee internal markets. These institutions would be unlike DICCI, which operates primarily as a networking hub within the existing structures of caste capitalism.

Building autonomous Dalit institutions does not absolve the state of its responsibility to safeguard rights and provide social security. Micro-loans alone cannot produce emancipation if they merely manage poverty without changing the conditions under which Dalits participate in the market.

Mrunal Madhuri Milind Dupte is a development economics researcher, anti-caste writer and public speaker working on inequality, Dalit and Buddhist economics.

The first Buddhist—and only the second Dalit—to serve as Chief Justice of India, B. R. Gavai held office from 14 May to 23 November 2025. On 20 April 2026, he was seen inside Bageshwar Dham. He offered prayers before Balaji, then sat down with Dhirendra Krishna Shastri. A photograph of the deity was presented to him. The meeting ran for roughly half an hour, touching—at least on the surface—on spirituality, social work, and the Gurukulam project. It was not his first visit.

But neither the setting nor the company was neutral.

In early November 2025, the same figure he met had led a travelling mobilisation across Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, and Haryana. It was introduced as a padyatra for unity: a call to end caste divisions, a call for Hindu consolidation. It also demanded that India be declared a Hindu Rashtra. Over hundreds of stops, the rhetoric sharpened. “Love jihad.” “Land jihad.” Warnings of demographic collapse. Calls for economic boycott, for expulsion. Violence, reframed as vigilance. This was not Dhirendra Shastri’s first stint at genocidal bigotry and hate speech. He is popular across the internet for precisely this.

The distance between a constitutional court and such mobilisation is supposed to be absolute. Not only in law, but in conduct. When that distance contracts into a ritual visit—followed by an easy, cordial exchange—the issue is no longer personal belief. It is alignment, made visible.

The speeches delivered during that padyatra did not stay within the realm of faith. Minorities were named as demographic threats. There were suggestions that property would be taken over. Warnings that unless Hindus united, violence would spread “in every gali.” Questions about why “these people” become terrorists. Partition invoked to justify future consolidation. The idea that dissenters should leave the country was normalised. Economic segregation was not just implied; it was openly urged. Citizenship itself was recast in religious terms.

This is where context begins to matter. Because the visit does not stand alone. During his tenure, the former Chief Justice spoke of a “swadeshi” jurisprudence—one that consciously stepped away from foreign precedent. Around the same time, the Prime Minister called for India to shed its colonial mindset. Right-wing decolonization is in fashion these days, applied to laws across the board and the former Chief Justice did not want to be clearly left behind.

For many Ambedkarite and anti-caste activists, none of this comes as a surprise. The criticism did not begin with this visit; it has a longer lineage. Figures like R. S. Gavai, the former Chief Justice’s father, have often been criticised for moving away from grassroots mobilisation, for aligning too closely with dominant political formations, and for reducing anti-caste politics to symbolic presence within state structures. The outcome, critics argue, is not transformation but accommodation. Similar apprehensions resurfaced when his son assumed the office of Chief Justice.

The six-month tenure of Gavai itself offers a broader frame. Established conventions were set aside. The power of the roster was used not merely to assign cases but, at times, to shape outcomes. Precedents were revisited—sometimes sidestepped—through procedural manoeuvre. The boundary between administrative authority and judicial intervention grew less distinct. What emerged was a concentration of power in the office of the Chief Justice, with fewer visible constraints. Again and again, institutional limits appeared negotiable, with outcomes that often aligned with what the central executive stood to gain.

The consequences were uneven but telling. Constitutional challenges to executive action lingered, sometimes until they lost relevance altogether. At the same time, other matters moved with striking urgency. The pattern is familiar: delay in one direction, speed in another. The effect is anything but neutral. It stabilises certain outcomes while postponing others. Alongside this, opacity deepened. The collegium drifted further from public scrutiny, decisions were issued without recorded reasons, and even internal dissent rarely surfaced.

There were also moments when the Court’s interventions more directly expanded executive advantage. The creation of a pathway through Presidential Reference effectively offered the central executive a second chance to revisit decisions it found unfavourable. It was not framed as a privilege. In practice, it functioned as one.

Taken together, these are not isolated developments. They trace a pattern of judiciary’s growing subservience to a Hindu nationalist government. Seen against that background, the visit to Bageshwar Dham acquires a different meaning. It stops looking like a personal act. It begins to read as part of a larger alignment between institutional conduct and an expanding ideological environment. It does not matter that Gavai no longer holds the office. Like many ex-CJIs, he too will continue to dazzle in the limelight for a while, especially due to the hanging out in the corridors of this government.

The meeting itself was small. Thirty minutes. A ritual, a conversation, a photograph. But politics doesn’t always depend on scale. It also moves through signals. And this one was unmistakable.

Paresh Hate is a Bahujan queer researcher, writer, documenter and activist and the Lead Content Manager at Dalit Voice.

On 13 March 2026, the Freedom of Religion Bill was tabled in the Maharashtra State Assembly — the eleventh state that may have such legislation since independence. Ten similar laws in the states of Odisha, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, Chhattisgarh, Himachal Pradesh, Jharkhand, Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh, Karnataka, and Haryana have already been enacted; one in Tamil Nadu has been repealed. Two others in Arunachal Pradesh and Rajasthan were never enacted despite formulation. Home Minister Amit Shah has made an election promise that the law would be enacted in the State of Punjab as well. The stated purpose is a familiar trope: preventing conversions obtained through force, fraud, or inducement. The language is legal and respectable. The real targets are Dalits and other oppressed castes.

These laws have nothing to do with coercive religious practice. They are instruments designed to prevent the emancipation of oppressed castes from dominant castes’ hegemony — and to ensure that the dominant caste establishment’s social, economic, and civilizational hegemony, which that order has sustained for two millennia, remains intact.

Caste is not merely a social phenomenon. It is a religious system of control, encoded in the Manusmriti as a spiritual, social, and economic order and sanctified by Brahminical Hinduism for two millennia. It has structured every material dimension of life: occupation, property, education, marriage, and public space. Spiritual inequality was the foundational condition from which all socio-economic deprivation followed. The Dalit-Bahujan communities did not merely occupy the bottom of a social hierarchy — they were theologically assigned to it. Any faith that rejected that assignment was, therefore, not merely a spiritual alternative. It was a structural threat to those who benefited from the arrangement.

That is the context in which every anti-conversion law, which includes conversion to any faith, must be read.

The legislative history begins not in 1967, when Odisha enacted India’s first anti-conversion law, but in 1950, when the Presidential Order quietly excluded converts to minority faiths from the reservation protections established under Article 341 of the Constitution. The Constitution (Scheduled Castes) Order, 1950, originally limited SC status to those professing Hinduism, and later extended it to Sikhism and Buddhism. Converts to Christianity and Islam, which form the bulk of non-Buddhist converts, lose SC status under this order, as affirmed by recent Supreme Court interpretation citing the 1950 Presidential Order in a case pertaining to Andhra Pradesh, even as a petition concerning reservation benefits for Dalit Muslims and Christians has been pending before a three-member bench of the Supreme Court since January 2011.

In 1950, this was not debated. It was not declared. It was done quietly, and widely attributed to K. M. Munshi, a Constituent Assembly member with known Manuwadi leanings, who openly opposed extending reservations to those who left the Hindu fold. The purpose was malignant.

The most consequential test of that logic came six years later. On 14 October 1956, B. R. Ambedkar — the man who had written the Constitution those same dominant caste legislators are now subverting — converted to Buddhism along with approximately half a million of his followers in Nagpur. Ambedkar had spent decades arguing that caste could not be reformed from within Hinduism because it was not an aberration within Brahminical theology but its direct product. Conversion was not apostasy. It was the exercise of the precise freedom the Constitution guaranteed. The 1950 Presidential Order had already moved to penalise that choice economically. Had these state anti-conversion laws existed in 1956, Ambedkar’s event at Nagpur — the largest mass act of religious self-determination in modern Indian history — would have required prior government approval under the very constitutional order he had designed. The extension of SC status to Navayana Buddhism only happened in 1990 under the V. P. Singh government. That is not an irony, it is the point. These laws are aimed, in their structure and intent, at preventing socio-economic outcomes exactly like what Ambedkar fought for in that spiritual and social context.

Christianity’s presence in India is not a colonial imposition. St. Thomas arrived on the Malabar Coast in the first century AD. Catholicism spread along India’s western coast after the Portuguese conquest of Goa in 1510, and later inland, focusing on the emancipation of oppressed castes, even as they had their own interests in doing so. During colonial rule, Protestant missionaries added to the work Catholics were doing — running schools and hospitals where none existed and agitating against oppressive caste practices, among them the requirement in parts of South India that Dalit women leave their breasts uncovered as a mark of caste subordination. The tangible improvements these missions delivered to Dalits are documented. The Savarna response to those improvements has also been documented, including in the form of every anti-conversion law that followed.

The rhetorical device used to delegitimise this history is the accusation of “ricebag Christians” — the claim that conversions were purchased with food rather than chosen in conscience. When people are starving, providing food alongside a theology that affirms their equality before God is not inducement. It is the practical application of that theology that responds to social reality.

In 1956, the Madhya Pradesh government appointed a committee under Hindu nationalist former judge M. B. Niyogi to examine missionary activities in the state. The Committee was formed in response to the Bharatiya Jana Sangh’s “Anti-Foreign Missionary Week” protest. Set up by a Congress government, it recommended legally prohibiting conversions that were not fully voluntary, but the proposal was not implemented at the time, as it would have been difficult to enforce without violating constitutional religious freedoms. The Niyogi Report was not an inquiry. It was a brief for the prosecution, prepared in advance of charges not yet formally filed. It catalogued missionary schools, hospitals, orphanages, and social service institutions — and then attributed to all of it a calculated programme of conversion through inducement. It did not disprove the emancipatory value of these institutions to oppressed castes. It simply recast that value as evidence of conspiracy. The Niyogi Report provided the ideological and legislative scaffolding for the Odisha anti-conversion law of 1967, and its logic has been reproduced in every state law enacted since.

The constitutional foundation for these laws was established by the Supreme Court’s 1977 ruling in Rev. Stanislaus v. State of Madhya Pradesh, which held that the right to “propagate” religion under Article 25 does not include a right to convert another person. This distinction, applied carefully, is reasonable. Applied as it has been in practice, it is not. The right to convert another person was never what the church claimed.

By constructing its judgment around the prevention of an act that was not in dispute, the Court gave legislative cover to restrict the proclamation of faith itself — and since the state now determined what constitutes illegitimate persuasion, any message compelling enough to move oppressed caste persons toward a different understanding of their own worth can be prosecuted as inducement. The Allahabad High Court has recently reaffirmed the right to propagate and proclaim one’s faith, which amounts to an implicit rebuke of how the Stanislaus judgment has been operationalised.

With the BJP’s rise to national power in 1999 and its consolidation under Narendra Modi in 2014 — whose political formation within the Sangh Parivar is defined by the goal of a Hindu Rashtra, which implicitly requires the maintenance of the caste hierarchy that Brahminical Hinduism produced — seven additional states enacted anti-conversion laws. Each successive iteration grew more elaborate in its administrative requirements.

The most recent versions require prior government approval, inserting a state official between a citizen and a decision of personal conscience in direct tension with Article 21 of the Constitution. An oppressed caste person who wishes to leave the faith that theologically sanctions their subordination must now obtain permission from an apparatus largely controlled by the communities that have historically benefited from that subordination.

The Tamil Nadu precedent is sometimes cited to argue that anti-conversion legislation crosses party lines. In 2002, the AIADMK government enacted a similar law. This requires little explanation: the AIADMK was then a coalition partner in the BJP-led NDA government and enacted the law to sustain that alliance. Tamil Nadu has one of India’s oldest and most rooted Christian populations. The law was repealed in 2004 when the UPA came to power, under pressure from Christian communities — confirming that it had no independent political logic in the state and was adopted purely as a coalition obligation. Nonetheless, this signals the state’s willingness to compromise constitutional freedoms for political expediency.

When the complete sequence is examined together — the 1950 Presidential Order, the Niyogi Report, the Stanislaus judgment, and the cascade of state laws — the pattern is coherent and consistent. The RSS, Jana Sangh, Janata Party, and BJP share an unbroken ideological lineage rooted in a Brahminical Hindu nationalist vision, combining a project of social dominance over internal subaltern communities with a resistance to religious influences perceived as external threats.

Over seventy percent of India’s population — the Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, and Other Backward Classes combined — belong to communities that Christian social and educational institutions most consistently serve. It is precisely the emancipation of these communities — economic, educational, and spiritual — that strikes at the material interests of the Savarna establishment that has historically thrived on their exploitation. The Mandal Commission’s implementation dismantled the Savarna monopoly over state employment and political power. The Church in India, through civil society institutions, has been eroding their civilisational dominance for far longer. Anti-conversion laws are the establishment’s response to both.

The Church is not above scrutiny in this account. Caste has penetrated Christian institutions in India in ways that contradict the theology that made those institutions work for oppressed caste communities in the first place — separate cemeteries, separate seating, upper-caste dominance of church hierarchies still continue in diminishing measures, with Dalit theology now in vogue in seminaries, gradually dissipating these anomalies. That contradiction is real and must be named.

Yet this does not change the fact that the laws are designed not to reform Christian institutions from within, but to prevent oppressed caste communities from accessing them at all. The internal failures of the Church are a problem the Church must answer for. The anti-conversion laws are a problem the state must answer for. Conflating the two serves only those who drafted the legislation.

There is a reason no central anti-conversion law has been passed at the national level: it would face a full constitutional bench and would not survive the judicial test. The state laws function as instruments of attrition — they harass clerics and communities, deter others from exercising their rights, create a climate of legal uncertainty, and signal to oppressed castes that the price of emancipation will be as high as the state can make it. Their authors are not constitutionally naive. They know better than to invite a definitive national ruling.

The multiplication of these laws since 1999 is evidence that they are not impeding Christian emancipation efforts. If oppressed castes had stopped choosing emancipation, new laws would be unnecessary. If earlier laws had effectively blocked the exit, elaboration would be redundant. The inclusion of administrative approval requirements in the most recent iterations — including the Maharashtra Bill now passed in both the Houses and awaiting Governor Jishnu Dev Varma’s assent — confirms that those prosecuting this project are aware it is failing socially and are escalating in response. Escalation in the face of failure is not a sign of strength. It is a sign that the outcome they feared is continuing regardless.

A nation that directs its legislative energy toward preventing the emancipation of the majority of its population — the Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, and Other Backward Classes who together constitute over seventy percent of India’s people — in order to protect the privileges of numerically smaller Savarnas at the top cannot expect that arrangement to produce equitable development. The evidence is already visible in the widening gap between India’s claims to being the world’s fifth-largest economy and the material conditions of the oppressed castes whose labour has always underwritten that economy.

The courts will, hopefully, eventually confirm what the constitutional record already shows: these laws were not enacted with confidence in their constitutionality. They were enacted with confidence in political impunity to impede the emancipation of oppressed caste communities. That foundation is far more fragile than it appears.

The emancipation of oppressed castes is not a process that can be permanently arrested by administrative procedure. Ambedkar understood this. The six hundred thousand people who walked with him in Nagpur in 1956 understood it. The millions who have followed in the decades since understand it. History does not offer a single example of a project designed to lock human beings into inherited degradation that finally succeeded. The architects of this one will find no exception to that record.

Oliver D’Souza is a former journalist and an author.

On 24 March 2026, the Supreme Court of India delivered a judgment that appears, at first glance, to simply restate settled constitutional law. Scheduled Caste status, it held, is limited to Hindus, Sikhs, and Buddhists, and conversion to any other religion results in its “immediate and complete loss.” In doing so, the Court upheld an earlier Andhra Pradesh High Court ruling that denied a Christian pastor protection under the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act after he alleged caste abuse and threats to his life. The reasoning was categorical. Caste, for the purposes of constitutional protection, cannot survive religious conversion. Christianity, the Court asserted, does not recognise caste. The legal consequence is stark. A person born into caste oppression can lose the law’s recognition of that oppression simply by changing faith.

This judgment is not merely a technical reiteration of Clause 3 of the Constitution (Scheduled Castes) Order, 1950. It is a political act that redefines the relationship between caste, religion, and the state. It insists that caste is a bounded, religion-specific phenomenon rather than a pervasive social structure. It collapses the distinction between theology and lived reality, and in doing so, it weakens one of the most significant legal architectures available to confront caste violence in India.

Pastor Chintada Anand Paul approached the courts alleging casteist abuse and threats under the SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act. His argument was simple and empirically grounded. Caste is a matter of birth, social location, and historical disadvantage. Conversion does not erase stigma, occupation, or the violence that structures everyday life. The Court rejected this claim. It held that one cannot simultaneously profess Christianity and claim Scheduled Caste status, as the two are “mutually exclusive.” It further imposed a stringent burden on those who seek reconversion, demanding proof not just of religious change but of total dissociation from the prior faith and acceptance by the original caste community. The effect is to transform caste from a lived structure of oppression into a matter of formal religious identity. This move is conceptually flawed and politically dangerous.

Caste in India has never been reducible to theology. It is a system that organises labour, space, marriage, and dignity across centuries. It determines who cleans, who owns land, who is touched, who is excluded, and who is killed. Conversion may alter belief, but it does not alter these material conditions. A person who has historically been forced into sanitation work does not cease to be socially marked because they now pray in a church or a mosque. Their neighbours do not forget. Their employers do not forget. The state itself does not forget, as evidenced by the continued concentration of Dalit-origin communities, including Muslim and Christian groups, in sanitation labour.

We need a clearer understanding of what conversion has meant in anti-caste politics, particularly keeping in mind the legacy of B. R. Ambedkar, whose political choices have defined anti-caste possibilities for many of us. Conversion was never a naive belief that caste would simply disappear with a change of religion. It was a political act, a refusal of graded inequality, and an assertion of dignity against a system that denied it. What the present judgment reveals is not the failure of that strategy, but the persistence of caste as a social structure that exceeds religious boundaries, and the state’s refusal to recognise that persistence.

Empirical evidence across regions confirms this persistence. Studies of Muslim and Christian communities show entrenched hierarchies, occupational segregation, endogamy, and practices analogous to untouchability. Dalit Muslims report being denied access to shared burial grounds, segregated in schools, and excluded from social interaction by both Hindus and upper caste Muslims. Rural poverty and landlessness among these communities are significantly higher than among upper caste Muslims, placing them at the bottom of an already marginalised population. Similar patterns exist among Dalit Christians. The continuity is not accidental.

The Court’s assertion that Christianity does not recognise caste is therefore beside the point. The question is not whether religious texts endorse caste, but whether social life reproduces it. By privileging theology over sociology, the judgment adopts an abstract view of religion while ignoring empirical reality. It mistakes doctrine for practice and, in doing so, denies protection to those who continue to experience caste violence.

This denial has deep historical roots. The Constitution (Scheduled Castes) Order, 1950 restricted SC status to Hindus, later expanded in 1956 to include Sikhs and in 1990, under the V. P. Singh government, to include Navayana Buddhists. Muslims and Christians had been excluded since the beginning, with a petition seeking reservation benefits for Dalit Muslims and Christians pending before a three-judge bench of the Supreme Court since January 2011. This exclusion was not a neutral reflection of social reality, but a product of political choices that sought to contain caste within a “Hindu” frame. It allowed the state to acknowledge caste where it was unavoidable while maintaining the fiction of a casteless modernity elsewhere. The result has been a long-standing invisibilisation of caste among religious minorities.

This invisibilisation has served multiple purposes. It has enabled upper caste dominance within minority communities by suppressing internal hierarchies. It has allowed the state to deny the universality of caste oppression. And it has fractured anti-caste politics by creating differential access to legal recognition and protection.

A troubling dimension of this moment is the relative silence, and at times loud opposition, from sections of anti-caste movements themselves. This hesitation is often rooted in a politics of scarcity, where access to reservations and legal protections is treated as a finite resource to be defended rather than expanded. In this frame, the inclusion of Dalit Muslims and Dalit Christians is seen not as a necessary correction of historical injustice, but as a potential dilution of already inadequate entitlements. This logic mirrors, in unsettling ways, the very arguments long deployed by upper caste groups against reservations, where claims of merit, competition, and limited opportunity are mobilised to resist redistribution. When anti-caste politics adopts this grammar, it risks reproducing the exclusions it seeks to dismantle. Instead of challenging the state to expand its commitment to justice, it internalises constraint and turns marginalised communities into competitors, when the demands of justice should be deployed toward the state, which fails to adequately provide mechanisms of dignity for all. The consequence is a fragmented politics that weakens the collective force required to confront caste as a structural system, allowing decisions like this judgment to stand with far less resistance than they should provoke.

The present judgment intensifies this fragmentation. By insisting that caste is only related to Indic religions, it effectively tells Dalit Christians and Dalit Muslims that their oppression is either illusory or legally irrelevant. By denying them access to the SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, it removes a crucial mechanism for addressing violence that is explicitly caste-based in nature.

This has serious consequences for anti-caste politics. The SC category has historically functioned as more than a system of reservations. It has been a framework through which the state acknowledges caste as a structural injustice. It provides what has been described as a minimum moral and legal vocabulary to name oppression. To restrict this framework along religious lines is to weaken its conceptual foundation. It suggests that caste is not a pervasive social system, but a bounded religious phenomenon. This undermines the possibility of building solidarities across communities that experience similar forms of violence.

The judgment also produces perverse incentives. It penalises those who sought escape from caste through conversion by stripping them of legal protections. It creates a situation where individuals must choose between religious freedom and access to justice. This is in direct tension with the constitutional guarantees of equality and freedom of religion. It also ignores the historical reality that many conversions were attempts to escape caste oppression, not evidence of its disappearance.

Further, the Court’s approach to Scheduled Tribes reveals the inconsistency of its reasoning. While SC status is treated as rigidly tied to religion, ST status is assessed through social and cultural criteria, including community recognition and continuity of practices. This distinction implicitly acknowledges that identity is not reducible to formal religious affiliation. Yet the same logic is denied to Scheduled Castes. The result is an incoherent framework that treats similar questions differently without sufficient justification.

The requirement of “unimpeachable proof” for reconversion further entrenches exclusion. It places an onerous burden on individuals to demonstrate not only a change in faith, but acceptance by caste communities that have historically excluded them. It effectively grants caste groups the power to determine who can re-enter, reinforcing the very hierarchies the law is supposed to dismantle.

At a broader level, the judgment reflects a deeper anxiety within the Indian state, which has more and more started resembling the ‘Republic of Caste’. Recognising caste across religions would require acknowledging its totalising presence in society. It would necessitate expanding the scope of affirmative action and anti-discrimination measures beyond what has been available since Ambedkar’s time. By maintaining the current framework, the state, lazily at best and maliciously at worst, avoids these challenges.

Caste is a system of graded inequality that structures life chances across communities. To deny its existence in certain contexts is to deny the experiences of those who live it daily. The Supreme Court had an opportunity to move beyond the limitations of a 1950 framework and align constitutional interpretation with these realities. Instead, it has reaffirmed a restrictive reading that privileges formal categories.

If anti-caste politics is to remain meaningful, it must resist this narrowing. We must insist that caste is a shared structure of oppression that cuts across religious boundaries. We must demand that legal frameworks reflect this reality. And we must challenge the idea that dignity and protection can be contingent on faith. The question, ultimately, is not whether caste exists within a particular religion. It is whether the state is willing to recognise and confront caste wherever it operates.

Paresh Hate is a Bahujan queer researcher, writer, documenter and activist and the Lead Content Manager at Dalit Voice.

Meenakshipuram has rocked the Mindu sanatanists. From North come hordes of Hindu religious leaders and religio- political leaders, to the South to exhort Hindus against conversion. In three districts, Tirunelveli, Madurai and Ramanathapuram, “Harijans” embraced Islam. Still the process is going on. In Ramnad, the Government had filed criminal cases only against untouchables. They are on conditional bail in far off places-a cruel punishment. They find no food or support there. In Salem District also untouchables have threatened to join the stream of conversion. Around Madras some thousands of untouchables have decided to join Budhism.

(Letter to Editor)

Durai Anbalagan, Dalit Panthers President, Dharavi unit, Bombay:

We came to know during our tour of Tamil Nadu that more than 10,000 people in the State are planning to embrace Islam to get equal status.

We admit that conversion to Islam will bring status. But at the same time, Muslims are less in number. By joining Islam our strength will go down. Therefore I suggest the Dalits to get converted to Buddhism. Ambedkar had shown us the path.

The truth is that Dalits need no ‘religious conversion’ but ‘spiritual conversion’.

Dalits should think over this. By going over to Islam they will never solve their problem. On the other hand, Dalits will lose their strength in population.

Is there any guarantee that in future our converted Dalits will not be called “Harijan-Muslims and they continue to be untouchables like “Harijan-Christians”?