Tag Archives: Dalit Christian

Archival Note

Published in Dalit Voice (Vol. 24, Issue No. 5, 1 March 2005), this essay by V. T. Rajshekar takes up the demand for Scheduled Caste reservations for Dalit Christians. Rajshekar argues that caste is a social identity rooted in birth and historical oppression, and that religious conversion does not erase that identity. He uses the inclusion of Dalit Sikhs and Dalit Buddhists in the Scheduled Caste framework to question why Dalit Christians continue to be excluded.

For Rajshekar, conversion is itself part of the history of resistance to caste. Dalits who converted to Christianity, Islam, Sikhism or Buddhism, he argues, changed their religion without escaping the caste identity imposed on them. The continued exclusion of some converts from Scheduled Caste recognition therefore reproduces the divisions created by the caste order, separating Dalits who share a history of untouchability on the basis of their present religion. His argument makes the recognition of Dalit Christians a question larger than reservation: it concerns whether the Dalit movement understands caste as an identity that can persist across religious boundaries.

The question Rajshekar raised in 2005 remains central to the present dispute over Scheduled Caste status for Dalit Christians and Dalit Muslims. The revived Dalit Voice has returned to the issue in its recent discussion of the Supreme Court’s refusal to grant constitutional protection to Dalits across religions, arguing that caste continues to operate beyond religious boundaries. The archival essay shows that Dalit Voice had identified this problem two decades ago: if caste survives religious conversion, then legal protection against caste discrimination cannot depend on a person’s religion.

Below is an abridged version of the essay. The complete piece can be read in its original context here: [Read the full essay] 

Supreme Court Must Keep Off Social Problems

DV supports Dalit Christian quota: Church must force government by mobilising support

In fact, it was the Dalit Voice which first mooted the proposal of reservations to Dalit Christians. We also vigorously campaigned for it all over India.

The underlying principle is caste is our basic identity and this identity can never be destroyed even by conversion to another religion. Every socio-cultural development in this country from time immemorial has taken place by taking into consideration caste, the basic building brick of India.

Hindu gas chamber: The Untouchables, the original inhabitants of this land, became victims of Brahminism and suffered for centuries. To protest against Brahminism, the victims of untouchability crossed over to Christianity, Islam, Sikhism and Buddhism. They only changed their religion (which is like a dress) but not their identity. (V.T. Rajshekar, Caste – A Nation Within the Nation, Books for Change, 2002).

But the Brahminical rulers, to punish the Untouchables getting out of their Hinduism, fearing that their artificially floated “majority religion” would become a micro-minority religion, punished the Untouchables fleeing out of their Hindu gas chamber. But this also did not work.

Racism in India: Religious conversion is one of the powerful socio-cultural weapons of the deprived destitutes to liberate themselves. No power on earth can stop it notwithstanding the ridiculous protests launched by the jealous Hindu nazis against the American Evangelist Benny Hinn visit to Bangalore in Jan. 2005. Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar himself has recommended the conversion weapon. (Why Go for Conversion? DSA-1987)

The Muslims (15%), Christians and Sikhs (5%) did not come from outside India. At least 90% of its followers are Untouchables, Tribals and Backward Castes. Today, after going over to these egalitarian religions, they say they feel liberated and hence powerful.

It is the Dalit Christians who are mainly responsible for taking the issue of Brahminical racism in India to the United Nations at Durban and making the world aware of the worse-than-Apartheid practices in Hindu India.

Verdict of history: The Brahminical fear is that if the SC/ST reservations are extended to the converts not only the floodgates of conversion will be wide open but more than that the converted Dalits will join hands with the non-converted Dalits and together they will hammer the micro-minority Aryan oppressors, and their empire built on bluffs and blackmail will simply collapse. Every problem of India arises out of this fear.

History is not on the side of the Brahminical Social Order (BSO). Justice and Truth can never be demolished even if the BSO has the support of the Supreme Court.

It is this fear that made the BSO rulers put all sorts of restrictions on SC/ST reservations. Since the higher judiciary is loaded with upper castes, (this judiciary is the main stumbling block to the social and cultural advancement of India’s oppressed majority), the rulers have been mainly seeking the willing help of the judiciary.

Dalit Christian mistake: The simple question is when the Dalit Sikhs and Dalit Buddhists are already included in the SC/ST reservation list why this discrimination only against Dalit Christians? Is not the Brahminical mischief clear?

The Untouchables, whichever be their religion, even the more egalitarian Islam, are all our brothers and the mischievous Brahminical bid to divide Brothers from Brothers must be fought.

To hell with Presidential Order: We are fully aware that the Brahminical rulers are using the state power and the judiciary to divide us and discriminate against us. The BSO must know that it is taking advantage of our goodness and mistaking our peace-loving nature to our docility. They can fool the people for some time. Those days are over.

The Government of India and the Supreme Court should stop taking shelter under the Presidential Order (PO) of 1950. This Order is not part of the Constitution. When this Order was amended many times to include the Sikh and then the Buddhist converts, it can be amended again and again. When the Constitution itself was amended umpteen times, what is big about PO? The government [has to do this] in the interest of the people. Parliament being the highest court of the people can certainly endorse it.

The Supreme Court must note [the] social and cultural problems vexing the people, particularly the oppressed SC/ST/BCs and Muslim/Christian/Sikhs, [and therefore] it should not interfere.

Attorney-General (AG) Milon Banerji said the same thing when the matter came up before the Supreme Court on Feb. 11, 2005. He said he had written a letter to the Government to consider the case of Dalit Christian reservation sympathetically. “It is a matter of policy and legislation and the courts should keep out of it”. Well said.

We don’t know what made today’s Government of India to reject AG’s request. The previous Brahmana Jati Party (BJP)-led Government did reject the demand in 2002 because that Government was led by a set of anti-people Hindu nazi leaders like Vaidik Vajpayee. But that is not the case with the Manmohan Singh Government. Why did it repeat the same old song? Sonia Gandhi must interfere and correct the course.

Upper caste church leadership: The Christian Church leadership is to be partly blamed for not taking genuine interest in the case of Dalit Christian reservation.

Over 75% of the Indian Christians are Dalit. The Indian church itself is a Dalit church. But the leadership of the church is with the upper caste particularly the Syrian Christians.

Now that the Supreme Court has decided to take up the matter after four weeks, the church leadership must prevail upon the Government of India not to oppose the plea of the Dalít Christians. It should also prepare public opinion and produce enough literature so that the Government of India changes its mind and the Supreme Court does not get in the way.

If they refuse to see reason, then the church must get down to mass action. We are here to render any support. Because Dalit Christians are our brothers.

A complaint submitted to the National Commission for Scheduled Castats (NCSC) has brought together 30 reported cases of violence against Dalits from nine states, once again exposing the gap between constitutional safeguards and their enforcement on the ground.

Filed under Article 338(5) of the Constitution, the complaint by the Citizens for Justice and Peace (CJP) asks the Commission to investigate incidents reported between April and June 2025 in Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Gujarat, Andhra Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh, Karnataka and Maharashtra. The cases include rape, murder, assault, public humiliation, denial of access to temples and cremation grounds, and attacks on Dalit wedding processions. It also seeks action against public officials accused of failing to discharge their duties under the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989.

None of these forms of violence are unfamiliar. They have appeared repeatedly in atrocity reports, court records and fact-finding exercises for decades. What changes are the names of the victims and the districts in which the crimes occur.

The complaint cites cases such as the alleged rape of a deaf and mute Dalit girl in Rampur, the murder of a 10-year-old Dalit boy in Etah, and the assault of a Dalit groom in Agra who was allegedly forced off his horse because dominant-caste residents objected to the procession. Other incidents involve denial of cremation rights, restrictions on temple entry and caste-based abuse in public.

The incidents span states governed by different political parties. That is significant because it points to a problem that survives electoral change. The SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act has been in force for more than three decades, yet its implementation continues to depend on the willingness of local police, district administrations and prosecutors to invoke it properly. Delays in registering FIRs, omission of relevant provisions of the Act, weak investigations and failures to prosecute public officials who neglect their statutory duties remain recurring complaints in atrocity cases.

The need to strengthen implementation has also found expression outside courtrooms. At a recent community vigilance training programme organised by the Dalit Bahujan Shramik Union in Andhra Pradesh, government officials, lawyers and activists stressed that awareness of the SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act remains inadequate even as untouchability, social discrimination and caste violence continue. Advocate P. Chittibabu called for quicker filing of charge sheets so that cases under the Act do not languish in the courts, while participants highlighted the continuing vulnerability of Dalit women and children. The discussion reflected a familiar reality: India has a strong legal framework on paper, but access to justice continues to depend on how consistently that framework is implemented.

Official crime statistics capture only part of this picture. The complaint refers to National Crime Records Bureau data showing tens of thousands of pending investigations and more than 2.6 lakh pending trials involving atrocities against Scheduled Castes, with conviction rates remaining below 40 percent. Those figures indicate that access to justice remains slow even after a case enters the criminal justice system.

They do not, however, capture the full scale of caste violence. The SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act applies to members of Scheduled Castes recognised under the Constitution. Dalits who have converted to Christianity or Islam are excluded from the Scheduled Caste category under the Constitution (Scheduled Castes) Order, 1950, and therefore cannot invoke the Act. Where caste motivates violence against Dalit Christians or Dalit Muslims, such cases are generally prosecuted under ordinary criminal law. As a result, violence rooted in caste often disappears from official atrocity statistics despite the caste motive remaining central to the offence.

The question of implementation has acquired another dimension in recent years. Several incidents involving the custodial torture or death of Dalits have drawn attention to the difficulty of enforcing the PoA Act when the alleged perpetrators are police personnel themselves. In such cases, the institutions responsible for registering offences and conducting investigations are also the institutions facing allegations of abuse. The recent Tamil Nadu trial court judgment sentencing nine police personnel to death for the custodial torture and deaths of P. Jayaraj and J. Benicks during the COVID-19 lockdown is a rare instance of accountability. Yet such outcomes remain exceptional and do little to address the institutional conditions that allow custodial violence to persist.

At the same time, the Supreme Court has reiterated that the SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act cannot be invoked mechanically. In Keshaw Mahto @ Keshaw Kumar Mahto v. State of Bihar (2026), the Court held that merely abusing or threatening a person who belongs to a Scheduled Caste does not automatically attract Sections 3(1)(r) or 3(1)(s) of the Act. The prosecution must establish that the insult or intimidation was intentionally directed at humiliating the complainant because of their caste. The ruling, which builds on the Court’s earlier decision in Shajan Skaria v. State of Kerala, emphasises that caste identity alone cannot substitute for proof that the alleged conduct was motivated by caste.

Read alongside the complaint before the NCSC, the Keshaw Mahto ruling highlights a different challenge. While the Supreme Court has reiterated that the PoA Act cannot be invoked mechanically without establishing the statutory ingredients of a caste offence, rights groups continue to document delays in registering FIRs, omission of relevant provisions of the Act and weak investigations even in cases where caste is central to the violence. The issue, therefore, is not simply one of implementation, but of whether the law and its interpretation are adequately equipped to capture the varied and often indirect ways in which caste operates today. If caste discrimination increasingly manifests through readily provable intent, the question is whether the existing legal architecture is sufficient to respond to these evolving forms of caste power.

The complaint asks the NCSC to direct state governments to ensure prompt registration of FIRs, monitor investigations, initiate disciplinary proceedings against officials who neglect their duties, secure compensation and rehabilitation for survivors, and identify atrocity-prone areas requiring sustained monitoring.

Whether the Commission acts on these requests remains to be seen. Similar demands have accompanied previous compilations of caste atrocities, while concerns over delayed investigations, weak prosecutions and official inaction have continued.

The 30 incidents documented in the complaint are spread across different regions and involve different forms of violence. They also expose the limits of how caste violence is officially recorded and addressed. Until implementation of the SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act becomes more consistent—and until caste violence against Dalit Christians, Dalit Muslims and victims of custodial abuse is recognised within the wider conversation on caste justice—official numbers will continue to tell only part of the story.

Mangesh is a law student from Mumbai, Maharashtra.

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.