In court, Centre defends excluding Dalit Muslims, Christians from SC list

It told the Supreme Court the Ranganath Mishra Commission, which had recommended the inclusion of Dalit Christians and Dalit Muslims in the SC list, took a myopic view of the issue and was 'flawed'

The Centre has told the Supreme Court that the Scheduled Caste status was never granted to those groups who claim to have been Dalits but later converted to Christianity or Islam as the historical data shows they never faced backwardness or oppression.

In a 70-page affidavit filed in the Supreme Court, the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment defended the exclusion of the two communities from the SC list. It urged the court to quash any legal challenge to the Constitution (Scheduled Castes) Order, 1950.

According to this order, the constitutional right to reservations in jobs and education is extended only to SC community members from the Hindu, Sikh or Buddhist faiths.

Several petitions, including by an NGO named the Centre for Public Interest Litigation, have been filed in the top court, seeking to extend reservation and other benefits to people from Dalit communities who later converted to Islam and Christianity. They argued that excluding Christian and Muslim Dalits from the SC list was discriminatory.

Defending its position, the ministry also said that the identification of scheduled castes is centred on a specific social stigma -- and the backwardness connected with such a stigma -- limited to the communities identified in the 1950 order.

The order was "based on historical data which clearly established that no such backwardness or oppression was ever faced by members of Christian or Islamic society", the ministry said.

It underlined that the 1950 order, challenged by the NGO, "does not suffer from any unconstitutionality" because the oppressive system of untouchability, which led to economic and social backwardness of some Hindu castes, was not prevalent in Christian or Islamic societies.

"In fact, one of the reasons for which people from scheduled castes have been converting to religions like Islam or Christianity is so that they can come out of the oppressive system of untouchability which is not prevalent at all in Christianity or Islam," the ministry said in the affidavit.

It said the Ranganath Mishra Commission, which had recommended the inclusion of Dalit Christians and Dalit Muslims in the SC list in 2007, took a myopic view of the issue and was "flawed". It said the report was prepared without conducting any field studies.

Last month, the ministry said, it formed a three-member panel headed by the former chief justice of India, KG Balakrishnan, to examine whether Dalit Muslims and Dalit Christians should be granted SC status.

On August 30, a Supreme Court bench led by justice Sanjay Kishan Kaul asked the Centre to explain its stand on the petitions that raised this issue.

(With inputs from PTI)