SC to hear plea seeking Scheduled Caste status for Dalit converts on July 11

"Can this court, or should this court, wait when the government appoints after commission again and again? It has been 19 years since we filed this petition," Advocate Bhushan said, adding that the matter is purely legal and constitutional.

New Delhi:The Supreme Court on Wednesday adjourned for hearing on July 11 the petitions challenging the exclusion of Dalits converted to Christianity and Islam from the scheduled caste order 1950. The bench comprising Justice Sanjay Kishan Kaul, Justice Ahsanuddin Amanullah and Justice Aravind Kumar said that it will deal with various issues regarding the matter including whether or not the commission reports rejected by the government can be relied upon, and to what extent, while granting status to any religion, and whether the caste system can be imputed to Islam and Christianity.

The centre told the court today that a report of the commission headed by Justice KG Balakrishnan is awaited on the issue of granting status to converts and the court should wait for it. Advocate Prashant Bhushan, appearing for the petitioner, argued that the government keeps on appointing and reappointing commissions and the matter never gets heard. He asked if the court should wait for the reports since it is already been close to two decades and the commission still needs two years.

"Can this court, or should this court, wait when the government appoints after commission again and again? It has been 19 years since we filed this petition," Advocate Bhushan said, adding that the matter is purely legal and constitutional. It is simply a question of whether a state can discriminate on the ground of religion or not, he added.

Bhushan further said that the Ranganath Misra Commission had said that it is discriminatory but the centre had not accepted its report. Additional Solicitor General (ASG) KM Natraj, appearing for the centre, told the court that the case needs a proper study based on statistics to take a fair decision on the issue. Relevant material has to be considered, he added.

Senior Advocate Colin Gonsalves, appearing for the petitioners, argued that after 1985, a total of 60 studies were conducted and all of them showed that discrimination existed even after the Dalits got converted to Christianity or Islam. He argued that the central government has not referred to any of the surveys conducted but relied only on colonial surveys, deeming the centre's approach regarding the matter as 'very casual'.

Justice Kaul told ASG that the Commission's report was not accepted earlier as well. "And now that a new one has been constituted, its report can also be rejected by the centre if the political power changes," he said. Justice Amanullah argued that the centre saying that the Ranganath Misra Commission had not considered many aspects is too generalised a comment, and asked ASG to go through it once more. He said that the report is not perfunctory as said by the centre.

Justice Amanullah also observed that assuming people wanted to get rid of their caste identity is not correct. He said that religious stigma and social stigma are two different things. The court further said that constitutional position can be examined, but they can't rely on a report that has not been accepted by the centre.

"If a report is not accepted, what is the status of the finding or empirical data? Can we accept the imperial data from a report that is not accepted?" the court questioned. It also said that it would need to examine the religious structure, whether the caste system exists in it, and what could be its possible effects, etc. while giving a verdict on the matter. The court then proceeded to adjourn the hearing for a further date.