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The Times of India
The Times of India
National
Amit Anand Choudhary | TNN

Have rejected report to give dalit converts quotas: Government in Supreme Court

NEW DELHI: Opposing a plea to bring Dalit Christians and Dalit Muslims within the ambit of Scheduled Castes to grant them reservation, the Centre on Wednesday told the Supreme Court that it rejected the findings of the Justice Ranganath Mishra Commission to include them in the SC list as the report was prepared within the “four walls of a house” without any field study and consultation.

Solicitor general Tushar Mehta told a bench of Justices Sanjay Kishan Kaul, Abhay S Oka and Vikram Nath that the Centre has appointed a new three-member commission under former Chief Justice of India K G Balakrishnan to examine whether SC status could be accorded to new persons who claim to have historically belonged to the SC community but converted to other religions. The other members of the commission are former IAS officer Ravinder Kumar Jain and University Grants Commission member Sushma Yadav.

Finding fault with the 2007 report submitted by the National Commission for Religious and Linguistic Minorities headed by former CJI Mishra, Mehta said that there was no quantifiable data collected and no consultation was held.

The Centre told the court that Dalits who converted to Christianity and Islam could not be given SC status to get benefits of reservation as there was no backwardness or oppression in those religions. The ministry of social justice and empowerment said the Constitution (Scheduled Castes) Order of 1950 does not suffer from any unconstitutionality and it is legal and valid. “In fact, one of the reasons for which people from Scheduled Castes have been converting to religions like Islam or Christianity is that they can come out of the oppressive system of untouchability, which is not prevalent at all in Christianity or Islam,” it said.

However, in the case of those who converted to Buddhism, the Centre said, “Scheduled Castes embraced Buddhism voluntarily at the call of Dr Ambedkar in 1956 on account of some innate socio-political imperatives. The original castes/ community of such converts can clearly be determined. This cannot be said in respect of Christians and Muslims, who might have converted on account of other factors, since the process of such conversions has been taken place over the centuries.”

The Centre was responding to a plea of an NGO seeking extension of reservation to Dalits who had embraced Islam and Christianity.

The SG urged the court to defer the hearing till a report was filed by Balakrishnan Commission. “It is submitted that the Commission appointed by the Central government will establish, one way or the other, whether the oppressive severity of backwardness remain the same or not, and till the time the said is established, it cannot be said that the impuigned classification is discriminatory,” the Centre said. The court thereafter adjourned the hearing and said that it would take a call on whether to wait for the report or to decide the case on the basis of material of record.

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