On Monday (December 9), the Supreme Court orally observed that “Reservation cannot be on the basis of religion”. Justices B R Gavai and K V Viswanathan were hearing a challenge to the Calcutta High Court’s decision in May to strike down reservations granted to 77 classes — predominantly from the Muslim community — within the quota for Other Backward Classes (OBC).
Weeks earlier, on November 26, the Supreme Court refused to recognise the Scheduled Caste (SC) status of a woman after holding that she and her family had converted to Christianity.
Through these instances, the relationship between religion and reservations has once again been brought into focus. Since the Constitution of India came into force in 1950, both the Centre and the Supreme Court have attempted to define the extent to which religion can be considered for providing reservation benefits.
Religion as criteria for OBC reservations
No express bar exists against identifying religious groups as beneficiaries of OBC or Scheduled Tribe reservations, though efforts to include religious groups or communities within the scope of reservations have largely been in the OBC category.
Article 16(4) of the Constitution gives states the power to provide reservations “in favour of any backward class of citizens which, in the opinion of the State, is not adequately represented in the services under the State”. Kerala for instance, has provided reservations for Muslims within the OBC quota since 1956, and other states including Karnataka (in 1995) and Tamil Nadu (in 2007) have also offered OBC reservations for groups within the Muslim community.
Reservations for Muslims in Karnataka were provided after the Third Backward Classes Commission of the state, chaired by Justice O. Chinnappa Reddy, submitted its report in 1990. The commission found that Muslims “as a whole” could be considered a socially and economically backward class. The Justice Rajender Sachar Committee in 2006 — mandated by the Centre to draft a report on the social, economic, and educational status of Muslims — found that the representation of Muslim OBCs was “abysmally low” in Central Government departments and agencies, suggesting the “benefits of entitlements meant for the backward classes are yet to reach them”.
The Supreme Court’s landmark judgment in Indra Sawhney v Union of India (1992) added a new dimension to the issue. The court stated that the purpose of OBC reservations was to address historical discrimination faced by different groups, and that “No class of citizens can be classified as backward solely by reason of religion, race, caste, sex, descent, place of birth, residence or any of them”. Essentially, the court held that religion and other group identities were relevant, but could not be the sole criteria to provide reservation within the OBC quota.
Based on this ruling, the Calcutta High Court on May 22, 2024, struck down OBC reservations provided to 77 classes — 75 from the Muslim community — stating the reservations were provided without using any “objective criteria” to determine the backwardness of these classes. It also held, “Religion indeed appears to have been the sole criterion for declaring these communities as OBCs”.
Religion as a barrier in SC reservations
Article 341(1) of the Constitution gives the President the power to “specify the castes, races or tribes or parts of or groups within castes, races or tribes which shall for the purposes of this Constitution be deemed to be Scheduled Castes”. Shortly after the Constitution came into force, the President issued The Constitution (Scheduled Castes) Order, 1950 (Scheduled Castes order) which contains a list of Scheduled Caste communities in each state.
Importantly, clause 3 of the order states that “no person who professes a religion different from the Hindu, the Sikh or the Buddhist religion shall be deemed to be a member of a Scheduled Caste”. The order was initially restricted to Hindus but was expanded to include SC Hindus who converted to Sikhism (in 1956) and Buddhism (in 1990).
The order was challenged in 1983 by a cobbler named Soosai, who belonged to the Scheduled Caste Adi-Dravida community but was denied access to a government scheme for SCs as he converted to Christianity. He argued that despite converting to Christianity, he was still a member of the Adi-Dravida community.
The court in Soosai v. Union of India (1985) did not answer whether a religious convert would retain their caste status after conversion but held this would not be “sufficient” to access SC benefits. Even after conversion, a person must prove that the “handicaps suffered from such caste membership… continue in their oppressive severity in the new environment of a different religions community”, the court said.
Following this decision, the momentum behind including other religious converts — primarily Hindus who converted to Christianity or Islam — within the scope of SC reservations has seen both surges and abrupt halts periodically. In 1996, the P V Narasimha Rao government introduced a Bill to amend the Scheduled Castes order to include Christian converts in the list; it was never tabled.
In 2007, the Ranganath Mishra Commission (created by the Centre in 2004) found that “By all available evidence we do find the caste system to be an all-pervading social phenomenon of India shared by almost all Indian communities irrespective of religious persuasions”. It recommended that “once a person has been included in a Scheduled Caste list a willful change of religion on his part should not affect adversely his or her Scheduled Caste status”. However, the Centre has disputed the commission’s findings in recent years.
Questions for the Supreme Court to answer
There is also potential for change in the realm of SC reservations. In the case of Ghazi Saaduddin v. State of Maharashtra (pending since 2004), the constitutional validity of the 1950 order was challenged again. In 2011, the court delivered an order stating that it would examine its clause 3 and the constitutionality of not including Christians and Muslims alongside Buddhists and Sikhs.
In April 2024, despite objections from the petitioners, the court decided to delay hearing arguments in the case after noting that the Centre had created a commission to examine whether religious converts should retain their SC status. The Centre submitted that it had not accepted the Ranganath Mishra Commission’s 2007 report and created a new commission chaired by former Chief Justice of India K G Balakrishnan. The committee has conducted public hearings in various states and in November 2024 it received an extension till October 2025 to submit its final report.
The Supreme Court is also currently considering whether OBC reservations can be provided to a religious group as a whole. In 2005, the Andhra Pradesh government introduced a law to provide 5% reservations to Muslims within the OBC quota that was subsequently struck down by the AP High Court that same year. Similar to the Calcutta HC ruling, the court held that the government did not use “objective criteria” to label Muslims as a whole as a backward class. Though the SC stated it would hear the case after deciding the challenge to reservations for Economically Weaker Sections, which it did on November 7, 2022, there has been no movement on the matter.
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