The Supreme Court has once again taken up long-pending petitions challenging the rule that confines Scheduled Caste status to persons professing Hinduism, Sikhism or Buddhism, thereby excluding Dalit converts to Christianity and Islam from SC reservation benefits, even though they may face the same caste-based social exclusion. The precise operative directions of this latest order were still being reported at the time of writing.
The restriction flows from a paragraph in the Constitution (Scheduled Castes) Order, 1950, issued under Article 341. Petitioners argue this religion-based exclusion violates Article 14's rational-nexus test and Article 15's bar on religious discrimination, since caste disadvantage does not vanish on conversion. Defenders of the exclusion invoke Article 25's freedom of religion, arguing SC status is tied to Hindu social hierarchy and its reformist offshoots (Sikhism, Buddhism), and caution against incentivising conversion for material benefit. Articles 46, 335 and 342 form the broader affirmative-action scaffolding, with Article 32 enabling direct Supreme Court access.
Remember: Article 341 empowers the President (Parliament by law) to specify/modify the SC list, making it a legal-administrative, not purely sociological, category. This is a decades-old unresolved debate, litigated since at least the 1980s, balancing Articles 14, 15 and 25 against the object of Article 46 — key for polity and reservation-law questions.