Tag Archives: Islam

Nationalist Demands in the New Law

The Prevention of Insults to National Honour (Amendment) Bill, 2026 was introduced by Amit Shah in the Rajya Sabha on 24 July 2026. Its Statement of Objects and Reasons recalls that Rajendra Prasad, as President of the Constituent Assembly, said on 24 January 1950 that Vande Mataram would be “honoured equally” with Jana Gana Mana. It notes that no legal provision existed to prevent interference with the singing of the National Song and proposes to address this by amending Section 3 of the 1971 Act, which already made intentionally preventing the singing of the National Anthem, or disturbing an assembly engaged in singing it, punishable with imprisonment of up to three years, a fine, or both, with a mandatory minimum of one year for a second and subsequent conviction. The amendment extends that same offence, and the same penalties, to the National Song. Article 51A(a) names the Constitution, the national flag and the national anthem as objects of citizens’ respect; it has never named the National Song.

The amendment arrived alongside a separate, longer-running push to change what gets sung. Vande Mataram has six stanzas; since 1937, only the first two have been used at national gatherings, a convention set by the Congress Working Committee. The Ministry of Home Affairs had already moved to reverse that convention on its own, issuing a protocol on 28 January 2026 requiring the full six-stanza version at government, ceremonial and cultural events, well before this amendment existed. That protocol was advisory and, as the courts would go on to hold twice over the following months, carried no penalty of its own. Only after those two challenges failed did the government tighten the position twice more: a July 9 MHA letter to all states specifying that only the official six-stanza version could be recited whenever the song was sung in mass singing, and then, on 24 July, the amendment itself. Where both the song and the anthem are performed at one event, Vande Mataram now goes first. Schools are directed to open assemblies with it, although many schools already practiced this of their own volition. It is to be played at state functions, civilian award ceremonies, flag-hoisting events, and the arrivals and departures of the President and Governors.

The Political Fight Over the Song
The push for the full six-stanza version followed a ten-hour special discussion in the Lok Sabha in December 2025 marking the song’s 150th anniversary, in which the Prime Minister accused the Congress of having “sowed the seeds of division” by trimming the song. In 1937, the Congress Working Committee, after consultation with Mohandas Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Rabindranath Tagore, Subhas Chandra Bose, Rajendra Prasad and Vallabhbhai Patel, decided that only the first two stanzas would be used at national gatherings because of objections to the religious imagery in the later verses. Tagore had written to Nehru that the first two stanzas had “acquired a separate individuality and an inspiring significance of its own,” while the later verses, read in context, “[are] liable to be interpreted in ways that might wound [Muslim] susceptibilities.” Congress rejected the Prime Minister’s charge, pointing to this 1937 decision and Tagore’s letter and accusing the government of manufacturing the controversy for present gain in the context of then upcoming elections, a charge Priyanka Gandhi Vadra made directly. The Congress Working Committee has since reaffirmed the two-stanza position for its own party programmes.

The dispute has now also moved into a question of federal authority after the Karnataka government ordered on 8 September that only the first two stanzas be sung at state government programmes, except when the President, Vice-President, Prime Minister or Governor is present. Within days, advocate Girish Bharadwaj filed a PIL challenging the state’s authority to prescribe a shorter version, arguing that the matter falls within Parliament’s residuary legislative powers and that the state order conflicts with the 2026 amendment to the Prevention of Insults to National Honour Act. The petition also challenged the procedure by which the Karnataka Cabinet took the decision, alleging that it was approved as an “Informal Discussion” without a Cabinet Note or Law Department advice. Governor Thaawarchand Gehlot then wrote to Chief Minister D.K. Shivakumar, invoking Articles 162, 256 and 257(1) and asking the government to reconsider its order on the ground that it conflicted with the Union’s statutory and executive framework. On 16 September, BJP MLA S.N. Channabasappa walked out of a government programme in Shivamogga after only the first two stanzas were sung.

The opposition, however, has also been weak in resisting the Centre’s position. In Kerala, the Congress-led UDF government initially circulated the Centre’s instruction that Vande Mataram be sung in full during the Har Ghar Tiranga campaign from 9 to 17 August. This put a Congress-led government in the position of appearing to implement the same six-stanza version promoted by the BJP-led Union government, despite Congress’s objections to treating the full version, with its references to Hindu deities, as a compulsory expression of national identity. The CPI(M) criticised the UDF’s position, with Leader of the Opposition Pinarayi Vijayan arguing that the song “in its entirety is not compatible with secularism” and that “there is nothing wrong with reciting the opening stanzas”, and accusing the UDF of surrendering to an RSS agenda. The UDF subsequently clarified that it would not follow the full version, and the state government ultimately omitted Vande Mataram from its official Independence Day function.

The song’s meaning has remained contested within the communities whose religious commitments are most directly implicated by it, a history the government’s “everybody knows what is national song” formulation simply passes over. The distinction made in 1937 remains central to the dispute: the Congress Working Committee accepted the first two stanzas for national gatherings while recognising objections to the later verses and their religious imagery. Muslim religious authorities have continued to make this distinction. Darul Uloom Deoband and Maulana Mahmood Madani have objected to the later verses on the grounds that their depiction of the motherland as divine conflicts with the Islamic doctrine of tawhid, while the All India Sunni Ulema Board ruled in 2006 that Muslims could sing the first two stanzas.

The dispute, however, has not been confined to Muslim objections. During the 2006 centenary controversy, the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee initially instructed its schools not to sing Vande Mataram, with its president arguing that it promoted a particular religion and did not fulfil the aspirations of minorities, before subsequently backing away from that position. In 2026, the Andhra Pradesh Christian Leaders Forum objected to the newly mandated full version, specifically citing its references to Durga and their implications for Christian beliefs. The question is therefore not simply whether Vande Mataram is the national song, but what religious content the state is asking people to affirm when it mandates the complete text. The Home Ministry’s circular treats that underlying question as though it had never been contested. Where it does allude to the religious objection, it reduces it to a question of Muslim reluctance, allowing a disagreement over religious belief to be recast as a question of patriotism.

The Text Behind the Mandate
The distinction between the first two stanzas and the later verses can be traced to how the song was written. Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay had written the first two stanzas in the 1870s, describing a land of rivers, fruit and gentle winds. He added four more when he incorporated the song into his 1882 novel Anandamath, and those later stanzas carry the divine imagery: the third stanza calls the motherland “protector of millions and destroyer of enemies,” the fourth names her Durga, Lakshmi and Saraswati outright, while the fifth and sixth complete the poem as a vow of devotion.

Anandamath provides the setting in which those later stanzas acquire their political and religious meaning. Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay is one of the key figures of proto-Hindutva politics in British India, and the novel is set during the Sannyasi Rebellion. Its protagonist, Mahendra, a zamindar separated from his family amid famine and unrest, falls in with the Santans, a band of ascetic soldiers who have taken up arms to liberate the motherland from Muslim rule, with the British entering the story only later. One of Satyananda’s disciples wants to “pull down the city of the renegades” and “throw it into the river.” Bhavananda, inducting Mahendra into the cause, tells him “unless we drive these tipsy long-beards away, a Hindu can no longer hope to save his religion,” and answers the question of method with “we will beat them.” He then leads Mahendra to the order’s temple, where, standing before the idols of Durga and Kali, he tries to fill him with religious fervor for the fight ahead. Elsewhere in the novel, the Santans send emissaries into villages to gather bands of Hindus, then raid Muslim settlements, which are burned “to ashes.” Characters imagine the day a mosque will be razed to build a temple to Radha-Madhava in its place. The four later stanzas of Vande Mataram were written for, and inside, this story. This is the context of the text now mandated by law.

The Limits of the Law’s Imagination
That January 28 protocol was challenged twice. In February, Muhammed Sayeed Noori approached the Supreme Court, arguing that requiring the complete version raised questions of religious freedom and conscience. On 25 March, the Court declined to entertain the petition, holding that the protocol was advisory and carried no penalty for those who chose not to sing, while leaving open the possibility of intervention if the advisory hardened into actual discrimination or coercion. A parallel challenge in the Karnataka High Court, filed by Bengaluru-based advocate Somashekhar Rajavamshi, objected specifically to the inclusion of stanzas three through six and their references to Durga, Saraswati and Lakshmi; the High Court dismissed it on 9 April on the same ground, that the protocol did not make singing the full version mandatory.

The 2026 amendment changes that position. The January protocol could prescribe the full version’s use; it could not, on its own, criminalise a refusal to sing it. The amendment extends the National Song to the Section 3 offence applicable to the National Anthem since 1971: intentionally preventing its singing, or disturbing an assembly engaged in singing it.

On 22 September 2026, the Supreme Court heard a petition by T. M. Krishna, with senior advocate S. Muralidhar appearing for him. The petition challenges the 2026 amendment insofar as it extends the existing criminal provision to the National Song. It also challenges the Home Ministry’s directions requiring the complete six-stanza version at official functions. The petition argues that the amended provision and the directions violate Articles 14 (equality before the law), 15(1) (prohibition of discrimination on specified grounds), 19(1)(a) (freedom of speech and expression), 21 (protection of life and personal liberty) and 25(1) (freedom of conscience and the right to profess, practise and propagate religion).

The Court refused to decide whether the National Song should consist of two stanzas or six, indicating that this was for the democratically elected state to determine rather than for the Court to prescribe. Justice Bagchi also questioned the suggestion that religious references in all six stanzas are, by themselves, incompatible with the Constitution’s secular character, pointing to the reference to God in the US national anthem. That another country’s anthem contains a religious line does not make it a benchmark for what India’s Constitution should tolerate; it only shows that one other state has also let religious language sit inside a national symbol. Whether a lingering religious motif of that kind is compatible with secularism is exactly the question in front of the Court, and pointing to a second, unexamined instance of the same thing does not answer it. The Centre has two weeks to respond, and the Court has not yet ruled on the constitutional validity of the amendment or the six-stanza directions.

At the hearing, however, the Court drew a distinction between the State’s choice of a national symbol and the use of criminal law in relation to participation in it. Nothing in the amendment says that simply refusing to sing Vande Mataram is itself an offence; the crime, as under the original Section 3, is preventing others from singing or disturbing an assembly engaged in it. The question before the Court is therefore whether the protection recognised in Bijoe Emmanuel, which concerned refusal to sing the National Anthem under that same original section, also protects a person who refuses to sing the National Song on grounds of conscience or religion while leaving others free to do so.

That leaves an odd gap. If the amendment truly does not touch a refusal that neither prevents others from singing nor disturbs an assembly, the state loses nothing by saying so outright, and Krishna’s petition should fall outside the law’s reach without a fight. The Centre resisted even the issuing of notice, and Solicitor General Mehta pressed the Court not to entertain the petition at all. That resistance points to a state interest that Section 3’s text does not itself supply: the discretion to withhold, for as long as possible, any confirmation that non-participation is safe.

Bijoe Emmanuel v. State of Kerala, which the Court said still governs the field and has never been challenged, is the case that established that refusal to sing the National Anthem, where the person neither prevents others from singing nor disturbs the assembly, does not constitute an offence under Section 3. In 1986, the Court considered three schoolchildren in Kerala who belonged to the Jehovah’s Witnesses faith. They believed that singing the National Anthem was incompatible with their religious convictions, although they had no objection to the words or sentiments of Jana Gana Mana. During their school’s morning assembly, they stood silently while the anthem was sung. After the issue was raised, they were expelled from school, despite an inquiry finding that they were law-abiding and had shown no disrespect. The Supreme Court held that their expulsion violated their fundamental rights. It also held that there was no law obliging anyone to sing the National Anthem and that their standing silently while it was sung did not constitute an offence under Section 3 because it neither prevented the singing nor disturbed the assembly.

The Court in Bijoe Emmanuel answered for the facts it had: the children stood, in silence, while others sang, and that was respect enough. Whether sitting, or some other form of non-participation, would count the same way was never argued before it, and the judgment does not say. The Court’s later National Anthem jurisprudence went further than Bijoe Emmanuel by imposing a general requirement to stand, but went no further in deciding whether an able-bodied person who chose not to comply had thereby committed an act of disrespect. In Shyam Narayan Chouksey v. Union of India, the Court initially ordered, in 2016, that the National Anthem be played before every feature film and that everyone present stand. It subsequently recognised exceptions for people unable to stand and for occasions when the anthem appeared within a film, newsreel or documentary. In 2018, it made the playing of the anthem before films optional and handed the wider question of its regulation to the government. What remained unresolved was whether an able-bodied person who deliberately remained seated when the National Anthem was played had thereby shown disrespect.

Article 51A(a) requires citizens to respect the Constitution, the national flag and the national anthem. That language concerns respect for specified national symbols, while Section 3 concerns conduct that interferes with their public performance. The Constitution speaks of an attitude of respect; Section 3 defines specific acts that the law prohibits. Bijoe Emmanuel is the only case here that actually examined a specific act of non-participation and ruled on whether it counted as respectful: the children stood silently while others sang. Chouksey, by contrast, imposed a general rule about what everyone present in a cinema hall had to do when the anthem was played, and later withdrew the requirement that the anthem be played there at all. The distinction between respectful and disrespectful non-participation has therefore never actually been adjudicated on its own terms. That leaves the discretion to decide sitting with whoever is enforcing the law in the moment, not with any settled rule a citizen could rely on in advance. And even supposing that gap could be closed, and the state produced a clean definition of respectful non-participation tomorrow, a further question is why a person should have to demonstrate respect for a national symbol through participation of any kind, rather than simply being left alone by the law altogether.

Article 51A(a) itself answers none of this. The Fundamental Duties, inserted into the Constitution by the 42nd Amendment in 1976, are not enforceable in court. No citizen has ever been prosecuted for an abstract failure to respect the Constitution, the flag or the anthem. Section 3 punishes specific conduct: preventing a performance, disturbing an assembly, even though the boundaries of that conduct can still be interpreted and policed according to the discretion of whoever is enforcing the law. Article 51A(a) supplies the word “respect” and nothing else. It does not say what respect consists of, and it does not say respect must be shown rather than merely left unviolated. The state has built a criminal statute that reaches only interference, and rested it on a duty clause that was written to describe an attitude, not to compel an act.

The Right Not to Sing
The present controversy asks a larger question about the limits of state power over national rituals. A person may have a religious objection to the text, reject the use of a national symbol altogether, or simply choose not to participate. If that refusal does not prevent anyone else from singing, what is the state entitled to demand from the person who refuses? Even as the space for conscientious objection shrinks in the shadow of ultranationalism, we must continue to ask: why should the state require that refusal to take a prescribed form of respect, and why can it not leave room for people to decline participation altogether?

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.

Madras: V. M. Velu, Secretary of the Atomic Energy Department (Government of India) SC & ST Employees Union, Kalpakkam, writes that in his office there are only 700 Dalits of the 3,700 employees. And these Dalits are the worst victims of Hindu imperialism. Hindu employees stabbed him on March 19 in broad day light and night before the police station. A. Ramakrishna, vice-president of the Association, was seriously assaulted by Hindus on the night of Nov. 30 1978. In both the cases, no action was taken by the police despite written complaints. M. Periyaswamy, leading fireman of the factory, was stabbed by Hindus on Dec. 4-80. The Hindus removed the portrait of Dr. Ambedkar unveiled by the Dalit employees inside the factory recreation club. P. Manoharan was assaulted by Hindus on Jan. 1.

In the light of these “continued naked aggression on poor Dalit employees by the Hindus,” the Dalit employees at a general body meeting on July 10 decided to quit Hinduism and embrace Islam on Aug. 15, Independence day, he says.

Madras: RSS leaders are not unanimous in their opinion on Meenakshipuram. Subramanian Swamy, who hates Vajpayee and who in an article in the “Sunday” (10-5-81) criticised Vajpayee for his “fondness for girls and drink”, says untouchables became Muslims in Meenakshipuram as they were tortured by the Hindus.

The Janata Party general secretary disagreed with BJP leader Vajpayee’s views that money played a role in the Meenakshipuram conversion. He said they were voluntary. Such conversions may take place anywhere in the country, he told pressmen here on July 17. Swami, who visited Meenakshipuram earlier said what had happened there was the result of a complex sociological process and politicians should act to correct snags which led to such conversion. Subramanian Swami said in the Courtallam a series of incidents over a number of years culminated in the conversion. (Hindu 18-7-81).

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”?

The “earthquake” in Meenakshipuram has drawn the attention of the whole country, its Government, Parliament, press, public, political parties, religious leaders and other busybodies. There is an endless discussion on the mass conversion of untouchables to Islam. Hindu society is shaking in its shoes. The tiny village has suddenly become a centre of pilgrimage to all sorts of trouble-makers.

Union Minister of State for Home Yogendra Makwana’s visit to the village renamed Rehamat Nagar became a front-page news in the national press. Eve’s Weekly called it a “national crisis”. Home Minister Zail Singh was grilled by MPs Including a CPM leader and they all extracted an assurance from him that the Government of India was seized of the matter. The Shankaracharya of Kanchi Karnakoti Peetha sent a three-man team of Brahmin (religious) leaders headed by the Pejawara Swamy, president of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad. Scores of “fact-finding teams beelined” to the village. They met the Prime Minister, who according to AlCC general secretary Moopanar expressed grave concern over this. The Hindus suddenly overcome by compassion and love towards the “Harijans” decided to dig wells in Rehamat Nagar. Makwana, after a stormy visit to the areas gripped by bloody Hindu violence on untouchables, got locked in a verbal battle with Chief Minister M. G. Ramachandran over his remark that the “Harijans are not safe under the Tamil Nadu police. The well-planned visit of Makwana had raised high hopes in the Hindu communal circles that they would discover “Arab money” and the “threat” to convert the ‘poor Harijans’. But he discovered nothing. His wait turned out to be a big disappointment to the communal Hindus. On the other hand, his off-the- record talks with the press man at Madurai and Madras and Dalit leaders revealed the truth. 

Our representative present at such informal talks writes: Makwana mission was a total failure. He could do nothing with the untouchable converts to Islam. He admitted that some of them even shouted “Makwana go back” slogans. Besides the untouchables of Rehamat Nagar, Dalit representatives of neighbouring villages, particularly Dalit lawyers, teachers and other educated Dalits, told him that they ware ill-treated only because they were Hindus. Therefore, they had decided to quit Hinduism to gain social status. Makwana admitted that he had written letters to the Shankaracharyas but this was wrong on his part. The methods adopted by the Hindus would provoke even those one or two still remaining as Hindus in each family. If Hindus behaved this way, he said, nobody could stop the exodus. He feared that even if a single convert was assaulted, it might result Hindu-Muslim clash causing serious repercussions all over India. He condemned reports about Arab money. According to him ill-treated by Hindus police atrocities and the frustration of the youth were the three causes for the conversion He said very clearly that he was not against “conversion to Islam” writes our representative in Madras. 

As regards the allegations made by the RSS and other Hindu communalists that Arab money was paid and that force was used for conversion, they must be specific. Which country paid the money, who brought it and who received it and how much? All these details with their names, must be published. So, also the names of those who used force for the conversion. 

Untouchables and tribals all over India are desperate. Hinduism has made mincemeat out of them. They are suffocated in the air-tight, stinking dungeon of Hinduism. It is this desperation that is driving them out of the Hindu fold. Ambedkar had opened the gates and showed the way. Even to this day, untouchables are a set of people who are negatively defined by their exclusion from the Hindu community. This takes both religious and social forms. Their movement under Ambedkar to seek a more positive identity at the time of independence was thwarted by Gandhi and other communal politicians for political reasons. Now the Hindu community has failed to integrate them in the last 30 years of our “national” existence, they should refuse to be fooled again by the myth created by the high castes that they are Hindus. The truth is that the untouchables were never Hindus, nor will they ever become Hindus except in negative forms. So the question before them is how they should get rid of their negative identity socially and religiously. It is time that they should now decide for themselves and not allow anybody to exploit them. The only way and the best way is to quit Hinduism and announce it publicly. They may lose the crumbs of reservations which have reduced them to the level of permanent beggars before the closed doors of the Hindus. The untouchables of Rehmat Nagar have at an example by renouncing Hindus and thus gaining manhood. 

But the way this conversion episode is tackled is something unprecedented. The whole thing looks mysterious. Why did Meenakshipuram receive so much attention; Why did the Hindu press, which always used to suppress any news about conversion, suddenly go berserk over Meenakshipuram? There appears to be a method in this madness, this breast-beating by the Brahmins, the SOS of the Shankaracharyas. It looks as if the sky is collapsing over Tamil Nadu. And this cry of “wolf, wolf” is not stopping even after impartial observers declared that there is no wolf, not even a mouse. Why this scare-mongering? 

This is what makes us suspicious about the whole thing. We feel there is a deep-rooted conspiracy behind these exercises. Something big is in the offing-chief Minister M. G. R.. said that conversions to Islam are not new to Tamil Nadu. A report in the Hindu (July 7) says M.G. R. gave statistics to prove that “almost every year from 1969 to 1978 there had been cases of such conversion in two villages in Bodinaickanur taluk, Madurai District In Tirunelveli district too there had been such mass conversions, in 1944, in 3 villages involving  170, 40 and 27 Harijans families“. In six other villages also “Harijans as families or individuals has taken to Islam in the past. So it was incorrect to say that the conversion was a new phenomenon“, he said. Different Dalit organisations have arrived at the same conclusion. 

Then why all this un-ending deafening noise? A sort of a war-preparation? Our information is that the RSS and other communalists are planning to repeat Moradabad’s events in the South, may be between Muslims and untouchables themselves. Tamil Nadu has been so far free from communal clashes, because, thanks to Periyar, it had always voted for his followers. To wrest Tamil Nadu from the Periyar’s followers and restore the Brahmin supremacy, the twin interest-free “vote banks”-scheduled castes and Muslims – are needed. And the communal bigots cannot get a better opportunity than the current conversion controversy in which these two persecuted minorities are locked. This appears to be the game. We call both the Dalits, Muslims and Christians to beware of this fascist game and nip it in the bud. Muslims and Christian organisations all over India and Tamil Nadu in particular must immediately jump and take positions. Dravida Khazagam, DMK, Marxists and other Left elements should realise that any chance given to the Hindu communalists to poke their nose will be a setback to their respective movement. 

Bangalore:

We are flooded with letters, reports, articles, statements and speeches on the Meenakshipuram mass conversion of untouchables to Islam. It is no longer a flood but a deluge. The epidemic is spreading to Karnataka, Andhra and U.P. Earthquake, as we declared in our previous issue. The Hindu communalists have raised it to the level of Armageddon. The untouchables have tasted the benefits of conversion and more and more of them appear to be rushing to embrace Islam which did produce miraculous results.

B.J. P. president Vajpayee visited Rahmat Nagar and later told the press at Madras on July 17 the RSS version of the conversion. The Deccan Herald report (18-7) says the conversions were “master-minded by certain notorious smugglers who would like to cover up their involvement with counterfeit currency cases. These unscrupulous elements have succeeded in roping in innocent Harijans who have been made to carry fake currency on the assurance that they will not be harassed by the police once they became Muslims”. Vajpayee raised questions of involvement of a foreign agency in printing fake notes, establishment of a technical training school which received Rs. 1.5 crore foreign aid and involvement of an Indian who became a Muslim in a gulf country but is now busy converting untouchables by using foreign money. But Vajpayee was careful not to mention names of the persons doing this conversion or the company that gave the machine to make currency notes or the Arab country from where the petrodollars are pouring. Why did he not give the names? Is he afraid or does he not have the information? The RSS has supplied him the information. But he did not like to repeat the RSS charge because he wants to become the Prime Minister. And he knows that nobody can become PM without the support of Dalits and Muslims. And in these conversions, unfortunately, the very two communities are involved. RSS wants to groom him for the Prime Minister but at the same time it cannot get out of its “caste character” which makes it hate these two persecuted minorities. This was Vajpayee’s dilemma when he visited Rahamat Nagar.

What is the RSS? In the July 18 issue of the ‘Organiser‘, under the headline “inside story of Meenakshipuram”, it says “Muslim priests and leaders are working to convert 1 lakh Harians living in 500 villages spread over 3 districts of Tamil Nadu”, The whole thing is described as a “Global conspiracy to subvert India”. It recollects the Times of India (21/3/81) front-page headlines in this connection. The annual report of the “South India Islam Society had said that 8,000 Harijans had been converted to Islam”. The facts, Organiser says, are: The first conversions took place in Korayur, Ramnad district, in Feb. 1980. The person responsible for these conversions is a Ramnad District Health Officer, Dr. Manoharan who became Dr Munnawar Khan and Dr. Jayaseelan, another local Harijan doctor At Meenakshipuram, the police unearthed a big counterfeiting activity in an estate. The counterfeiting was being done according to the police, by some Christian padris with the aim of a printing machine donated by Douglas Charity of America. This has been established by the confessions of the accused persons to the police. A Christian family residing in Tenkasi Taluk, is also running an orphanage aided by the Douglas Charity. The primary purpose of this orphanage is conversion of Harijans to Christianity. This orphanage abets several Harijans to create caste tensions between Harijans and nonpartisans in several villages, so as to create an atmosphere of alienation from the Hindu society, which is necessary for conversions. The family running the orphanage is also said to have made available the machinery for counterfeiting. According to the police, printing and distribution of counterfeit currency has been going on for several years. The modus operandi is that the printing is done by the Christians and the distribution outlets are the trade channels of Muslims. The Harijans are employed to carry the counterfeit currency. The Organiser says “one Thangaraj, a notorious local goonda, changed from Christianity to Islam and became Yusuf to save himself after eloping with a Thevar girl. This Thangaraj had link with the fake note racket. The two Thevar youths who discovered this connection were murdered. Police investigation revealed the fake note racket The police were harsh on SCs and the Muslims assured them that police would not dare touch them if they embraced Islam”.  

This is the RSS version of the whole story which Vajpayee repeated at Madras. The Organiser refers to the Tanjore district conversion led by Ambikapathi father-in-law of Thasi M. Karunanidhi, a DMK MP from Nagapattanam. He converted 20 other Dalits. A famous street is renamed Madina street. The Organiser gives the following details of conversion in Tamil Nadu: total is 1,369. The conversions have nothing to do with social reasons. “They have much to do with the feeling that there is money and power in being a Muslim”. The Organiser later propounds 12 bogus schemes to avert conversions and save “Harijans”. However, some Dalit friends have thrown a challenge: If the Arabs can pay Rs. 500 per convert, the RSS, the Shankaracharyas and the Birlas, who together can command crores of rupees, can offer Rs. 1,000 per head and reconvert them, but as Brahmins. They said they are ready.  

RSS leaders who became so nervous by these conversions have virtually started pissing in their pants. The national executive of the RSS met in Delhi for two days from July 11, Babasaheb Deoras presiding. The full text of the resolution passed at the meeting was published on the front page of the Organiser. We have carefully gone through the resolution and would like to tell our Dalit friends not to be deceived by these crocodile tears of this high caste fascist organisation. Except saying that caste distinction must be buried and the “pernicious practice of untouchability must be ended”, there is nothing concrete. We have had enough of these humbugs from the days of Gandhi. 

Tiruchi:

Dr. Ameeruddin Ahmed – a noted eye-surgeon of Trichy, writes in the editorial of his monthly English journal, “Ad-Dawaa“, of June 1981, that Muslims are not interested in the conversion of untouchables. 

As Dr. Ahmed, a noted Muslim leader of Tamil Nadu, is working close to the area where conversions have taken place and is familiar with the whole situation, his remarks will be of much significance. The editorial says:

“The national press was making a lot of noise to create reaction in the minds of the majority community and this may have repercussions leading to even communal conflicts.  

No doubt every faith has a right to present its philosophy, belief, moral, ethical and national and international values to the world at large. But to blame the poor Indian Muslim community for these conversions is without moral justification. In fact, the Indian Muslim community is afraid of conversion nor they have any missionary or a body to undertake this task as some other communities are doing, we don’t even have an organisation or a set-up to give or distribute free Islamic literature as missionary institutions are doing. In fact, our dawath starts with Biriyani and ends with feerni. The Muslim community at large and the Indian Muslims in particular are indifferent to their own faith. But we would like to point out that if some members of the Harijan community have chosen to accept another faith for sheer emotional brotherhood of man nobody can help it or prevent it. In fact, people are attracted towards Islam for various reasons and only those people who had come over to the Islamic faith, alone shall explain as to why they changed their faith. By changing their faith especially, the Harijans are losing plenty of economic advantages and become inheritors of suffering and consequence of adverse history. But man does not live by bread alone. As we had pointed out in the earlier paragraph, there is no conversion missionary with us. So at Meenakshipuram, what has occurred is not a phenomenon of conversion, but a case of acceptance of Islamic faith for which the older Muslims are not at all responsible. The Harijan brothers have joined the Islamic faith for the reasons best known to them. So, it is better not to play this game of playing up in the press. The only difference between a communist and a non-communist state is the freedom of conscience. Let us uphold the same as the most tolerant of the religions in the whole world”.