Tag Archives: SC/ST Act

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.

When Parliament passed the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act in 1989, it was acknowledging a basic truth: caste violence was not an aberration but a structure. Ordinary criminal law had proven incapable of addressing it. Atrocities were not simply crimes between individuals. They were acts meant to discipline entire communities. The Act attempted to name that reality and create stronger legal consequences for it.

More than three decades later, the Act remains one of the most powerful legal instruments available to Dalit and Adivasi communities. Yet it also exists within a criminal justice system that often neutralizes its force. This contradiction sits at the heart of the law’s history. The Atrocities Act represents both a recognition of caste violence and a reminder of how limited legal remedies are in a society structured by caste power.

Upward mobility and backlash

The sociologist Dag-Erik Berg offers a useful way of thinking about the relationship between law and caste violence. He describes the Dalit experience in modern India through what he calls a recurring pattern: upward mobility coexisting with enduring atrocity.

The expansion of education, reservation policies, and political representation has enabled sections of Dalits to challenge older hierarchies. Yet each moment of assertion has also produced violent backlash. Many of the most brutal caste massacres in recent decades have targeted communities that were asserting new social or economic claims.

The Atrocities Act emerged from this historical dynamic. It was not simply the product of humanitarian concern but the outcome of decades of Dalit struggles that forced the state to acknowledge caste violence as a structural problem. Earlier laws, such as the Protection of Civil Rights Act, focused mainly on untouchability practices like temple entry. They proved inadequate for addressing organized violence, social boycotts, and collective punishment. The 1989 law attempted to respond to these realities. It listed specific offences tied to caste domination and created special procedures for investigation and prosecution. In doing so, it brought caste explicitly into the framework of criminal law.

But as Berg points out, the presence of such legislation does not automatically transform the social structures that generate violence. Reservation policies and atrocity laws operate within domains visible to the state, such as education, employment, and criminal punishment. Meanwhile, the deeper mechanisms through which caste reproduces itself remain largely untouched. Marriage practices continue to enforce caste boundaries. Land ownership remains deeply unequal across caste lines. Economic and social power in villages often rests with dominant castes. The law intervenes after violence occurs, but the social order that makes violence possible remains largely intact. This gap between structural inequality and legal remedy explains why atrocities continue even in a constitutional democracy that formally prohibits caste discrimination.

The everyday obstacles of justice

If the Atrocities Act represents recognition of caste violence, its implementation reveals how difficult it is to translate that recognition into justice.

Anthropologist Sandhya Fuchs traces what happens when survivors attempt to turn experiences of violence into legal cases. The journey often begins at the police station, where complaints must first be recorded. Here, the law encounters the everyday functioning of the criminal justice system. Police officers frequently reinterpret or dilute complaints in ways that prevent cases from being registered under the Atrocities Act. Acts of violence are reframed as ordinary disputes, family conflicts, or property disagreements.

Survivors may be pressured to withdraw complaints or accept informal settlements. Sometimes cases never reach the courts at all. Even when cases move forward, survivors must navigate a complex field of actors, including activists, lawyers, community leaders, and political intermediaries. Each of these groups may have their own ideas about how the law should be used.

Fuchs describes how atrocity cases can become sites where competing visions of justice, honor, and political strategy collide. Survivors themselves often make pragmatic choices within these constraints. Out-of-court compromises are common, even though many activists criticize them as evidence that the law is failing. For some families, however, the threat of legal action becomes a bargaining tool to secure compensation, protection, or a measure of dignity in hostile local environments.

These negotiations reveal something important about the law’s role. The Atrocities Act is not simply a legal instrument. It has also become a symbolic resource that marginalized communities use to challenge dominant caste power, sometimes inside the courts and sometimes outside them. Yet the same processes that allow creative uses of the law also expose its fragility. Police bias, political pressure, and social intimidation constantly shape whether justice is possible.

Evidence, memory, and the burden of proof

The obstacles do not end once a case reaches court. Legal procedures themselves often place heavy burdens on survivors and witnesses.

Legal scholar Achintya Anita Gurumurthy highlights this problem through the example of the Test Identification Parade, a procedure used during criminal investigations to confirm whether eyewitnesses can identify suspects. In theory, such procedures are meant to strengthen evidence. In practice, they can be used to discredit survivors. Courts sometimes treat minor inconsistencies in witness testimonies as signs of unreliability. Delays in conducting identification parades or technical procedural lapses can weaken cases, even when violence is widely known within local communities. In atrocity cases, this evidentiary framework often collides with the realities of trauma, fear, and social pressure faced by Dalit witnesses.

The result is a pattern in which the credibility of survivors becomes the central issue, while the broader structure of caste power fades into the background. The legal process turns into an examination of memory rather than an inquiry into domination.

Gurumurthy argues that evidentiary practices cannot be treated as neutral procedures. They operate within social hierarchies. When police investigators, prosecutors, and judges overwhelmingly come from dominant castes, the interpretation of testimony inevitably reflects those power relations.

Recent legal developments have not fundamentally altered this situation. The Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam, which replaced the colonial-era Evidence Act in 2023, largely preserves existing evidentiary structures, including the continued reliance on identification procedures like the Test Identification Parade. The formal language of reform has therefore not significantly transformed how evidence functions in caste atrocity cases.

For survivors, this means that the struggle for justice often involves confronting not only perpetrators but also the institutional habits of the legal system itself. Despite sensitive case law in Malkhansingh v. State of Madhya Pradesh and Kulwinder v. State (NCT of Delhi), which reflects the work of Dalit lawyers and activists, much more remains to be done in criminal justice reform if the goals of the Atrocities Act are to be realised.

Contestation and dilution

The Atrocities Act has always faced political resistance. Dominant caste organizations have repeatedly portrayed it as a law prone to misuse. This narrative gained national attention during the controversy surrounding a 2018 Supreme Court judgment that introduced restrictions on arrests under the Act, citing concerns about false cases. Dalit protests across the country forced Parliament to amend the law and restore its original provisions. The episode demonstrated both the vulnerability of the Act and the power of collective mobilization.

Such struggles are part of a longer history. Every expansion of legal protection for marginalized groups has been accompanied by attempts to dilute it, delay its implementation, or reinterpret it in ways that limit its reach. The Atrocities Act is no exception.

At the same time, the law has become deeply embedded in Dalit political consciousness. Activists, lawyers, and community organizations have built networks around it. Survivors often approach the law not simply as a technical instrument but as a statement that their suffering deserves recognition.

This dual character explains why the Act can appear both powerful and fragile, as Fuchs calls it. It is powerful because it names caste violence explicitly and creates legal consequences for it. It is fragile because its effectiveness depends on institutions that remain shaped by the very hierarchies the law seeks to challenge.

What law can and cannot do

For many survivors of atrocities, the most painful realization is that law alone cannot transform social relations. As Fuchs shows through her study of rural Rajasthan, families affected by brutal violence sometimes describe the law as something distant. Court cases may continue for years without changing the attitudes of the communities that carried out the violence.

This does not mean the law is meaningless. Legal action can bring compensation, punishment, or recognition. It can create new networks of solidarity and political mobilization. It can signal that caste violence is not a private dispute but a public injustice.

But law operates within a society where caste remains deeply embedded in everyday life. Courts cannot reorganize land ownership. Police procedures cannot dismantle endogamous marriage networks. Criminal punishment cannot eliminate the desire for status that sustains graded inequality. The persistence of caste therefore exposes the limits of relying solely on legal remedies.

Beyond the courtroom

The history of the Atrocities Act makes one thing clear: law has rarely initiated social transformation in India. More often, it has been forced into existence by movements that refused silence. Dalit and Adivasi struggles compelled the state to recognise caste violence, defend the law when it was diluted, and push institutions to act when they would rather look away.

Seen from this perspective, the Atrocities Act is not the source of justice but one instrument within a larger political struggle. It provides language, leverage, and sometimes protection. But the force that gives the law meaning lies outside the courtroom.

The fight against caste atrocities has never been won by statutes alone. It has been sustained by collective resistance, by communities that organise, testify, and refuse the social order that treats their lives as expendable. When the law works at all, it is usually because those struggles have compelled it to.

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