SC STATUS TO DALIT CONVERTS - POLITY
News: Govt.
committed to providing all facilities to Panel for SC status to Dalit converts
What's in the news?
● “The
government is fully committed to providing all the facilities to enable the
Commission to function effectively,” Social Justice Minister Virendra Kumar
told the Lok Sabha when asked about the functioning of the Commission of
Inquiry to examine the Scheduled Caste status of Dalit Christians and Muslims.
Key takeaways:
● Currently, the
Constitution (Scheduled Castes) Order, 1950 provides that only Dalits of Hindu,
Sikh, and Buddhist faiths are entitled to be categorized as SC.
Balakrishnan Panel:
● The
Union Government has set up a three-member Commission for Inquiry to look into
giving Scheduled Castes status to Dalits who have converted to any religion
other than Sikhism or Buddhism.
● The
Commission will be headed by former Chief Justice K.G. Balakrishnan and will
have as its members UGC member Prof. Sushma Yadav, and retired IAS officer
Ravinder Kumar Jain.
● The
Government has set a time of two years
for the Commission to submit its report.
Working of the Commission:
● The
Commission will also examine the changes Scheduled Caste persons go through on
converting to other religions in terms of their customs, traditions, social and
other status discrimination and deprivation, and the implication of the same on
the question of giving them Scheduled Caste status.
Petition in SC:
● Recently,
the Supreme Court sought the most recent position of the Union Government on a
batch of petitions challenging the Constitution (Scheduled Castes) Order of
1950, which allows only members of Hindu, Sikh and Buddhist religions to be recognized
as SCs.
● The
petitions arguing for inclusion have cited several independent Commission
reports that have documented the existence
of caste and caste inequalities among Indian Christians and Indian Muslims,
noting that even after conversion, members who were originally from SCs
continued to experience the same social disabilities.
● The
closest a government got to including
Dalit Christians as SCs came in March, 1996, when based on a recommendation
of the then Ministry of Welfare, the P.V. Narsimha Rao government first brought
a Bill to amend the Constitution
(Scheduled Castes) Order accordingly. However, the Bill could not be
passed.
Go back to basics:
● The
petitions challenging the religion criterion for inclusion have cited several
independent commission reports since the First
Backward Classes Commission headed by Kaka Kalelkar in 1955 that have
documented the existence of caste and caste discrimination among Indian
Christians and Indian Muslims, concluding that Dalit converts continued to face
the same social disabilities even after leaving the Hindu fold.
● These
include the Report of the Committee on Untouchability
Economic and Educational Development of the Scheduled Castes in 1969, the HPP
report on SCs, STs, and Minorities in 1983, the Ranganath Mishra Commission
Report, among others.
● Currently,
the Constitution (Scheduled Castes) Order, 1950 provides for only those
belonging to Hindu, Sikh or Buddhist communities to be categorized as SCs.
○ When
enacted, the Order only allowed for Hindu communities to be classified as SCs
based on the social disabilities and discrimination they faced due to
untouchability. It was amended in 1956 to include Sikh communities and again in
1990 to include Buddhist communities as SCs.
● The
Union Government had also said in the 2019 affidavit that Dalit Buddhists
cannot be compared to Dalits who converted to Islam or Christianity because in
case of the former, conversions were voluntary “on account of some innate socio-political
imperatives” and in case of the latter, the conversions might have taken place
“on account of other factors”.
● Justice Ranganath Misra
Commission:
○ The
2007 report of the Justice Ranganath Misra Commission for Religious and
Linguistic Minorities, which recommended
that Dalits who converted to Islam and Christianity to escape caste oppression
in the Hindu religion should be permitted to avail of Scheduled Caste (SC)
reservation benefits in government jobs and educational institutions.