A Dalit Was Beaten, The Court Said He No Longer Was One

In the villages of Andhra Pradesh’s Guntur district, where Madiga families have for generations tanned hides and buried the dead, Chintada Anand thought the law might finally see him. A Dalit by birth, he had converted to Christianity and become a pastor. When oppressor caste men assaulted him in 2021, dragging him by his collar and hurling slurs, he filed a complaint under the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act. An FIR was filed and the case reached the Supreme Court.

On 24 March 2026, Justices Prashant Kumar Mishra and Manmohan delivered their verdict in Chinthada Anand v. State of Andhra Pradesh where the bench ruled that “conversion to Christianity meant immediate and complete loss of Scheduled Caste status”.

No certificate.

No Prevention of Atrocities Act shield.

No reservations in education or jobs.

Clause 3 of the Constitution (Scheduled Castes) Order, 1950, they reminded the country, is “categorical and absolute.”

The judgment was not new law but a reiteration which simply slammed shut a door that Dalit Christians and Dalit Muslims (Arzals and Pasmandas) have been rattling for 76 years. Estimates place Dalit-origin Christians at around 25-30 million and Dalit Muslims in similar numbers, though precise census data remains elusive because the state refuses to count them as such (National Commission for Minorities reports; Deshpande & Bapna, 2008).

In a secular republic that guarantees equality before the law, the most powerful tool of affirmative action, the Scheduled Caste status, remains chained to three religions: Hinduism, Sikhism, and Buddhism.

To trace how we arrived here, one must return to the Constituent Assembly’s anxious drafting in the shadow of Partition of ‘47. Article 341 empowered the President to notify communities suffering untouchability as Scheduled Castes. The 1950 Order listed hundreds of castes and tribes, but Paragraph 3 added a fatal line: “no person who professes a religion different from the Hindu religion shall be deemed to be a member of a Scheduled Caste.” The logic, offered in parliamentary whispers and later judicial glosses, was pragmatic.

Untouchability was framed as a peculiar Hindu affliction; other faiths, at least in doctrine, rejected it. When Sikh leaders pressed their case, Parliament relented in 1956. When lakhs followed Dr. B. R Ambedkar into Buddhism after 1956, the 1990 amendment brought them in. Christianity and Islam, however, remained foreign imports, their converts presumably cleansed the instant they crossed the threshold of the church or mosque.

Yet this legal scaffolding crumbles against historical facts. Dalits were never inside the varna system; they were its exiles— the avarnas, panchamas, those whose touch polluted the fourfold order. Historians and Dr. Ambedkar himself described them as “broken people,” performing labour no varna would touch: scavenging, leatherwork, corpse disposal. Their oppression was existential, enforced by custom and violence long before scriptures codified it.

Citizen activist and journalist Cynthia Stephen, who has documented these realities for decades from Bangalore, captured the absurdity of this reiteration, “Dalits were never part of the varna system. They were the “outsiders”, the untouchables whose very existence challenged the purity of caste. So what religion did they originally belong to that conversion could erase it? What proof do we have they were all Hindus?”

Colonial censuses separated Dalits from “clean” Hindu castes. Many converted precisely to flee ritual degradation— molten lead in ears for learning to read, separate burial grounds, sexual violence framed as right. “A change of religion never guaranteed relief from prejudice, discrimination, or violence,” Stephen continued. “Walk any village in Karnataka or Tamil Nadu. The Dalit Christian is still called by their caste name. Their church may have a separate entrance. The state pretends conversion dissolves caste. It doesn’t. It never has”.

Organisations like Evidence, the Madurai-based Dalit rights group founded by A. Kathir, have documented hundreds of cases where faith made no difference. In a 2011 study of 336 atrocity cases across southern districts of Tamil Nadu, Evidence recorded 44 brutal murders with conviction rates at a shocking 3.9 per cent. Many victims were Paraiyar or Pallar Christians. In an incident in Melur, in 2011, Dalits hoisting a political flag were attacked not for creed but for asserting dignity. Churches were burned, pastors assaulted, Dalit Christian women gang-raped— all under the shadow of caste. As recently as March 2026, Evidence’s fact-finding in Nanguneri, Tirunelveli, revealed police refusing to invoke the Atrocities Act against attackers of a Dalit Christian because “the victim is Christian.” Kathir has intervened in over 1,800 cases since 2006, repeatedly noting that separate temples, separate water sources and social boycotts persist regardless of baptism.

The National Campaign on Dalit Human Rights’ (NCDHR) fact-finding missions and its 2026 report on five years of caste-based atrocities highlight “double marginalisation” for Dalit Christians and Muslims: caste violence from society, legal invisibility from the state. UN treaty bodies like International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD), which India has ratified, have repeatedly urged India to apply the Atrocities Act to Dalit Muslims and Christians, noting that social exclusion does not respect religious conversion. The Ranganath Misra Commission (2007) and Sachar Committee (2006) had already reached the same conclusion: indicators for these oppressed groups— poverty, literacy, landlessness, violence, all mirror or exceed those of Hindu Dalits. Yet the law renders their suffering invisible.

It is this lived reality that Dr Ruth Manorama, a member of the National Federation of Dalit Women and the Christian Dalit Liberation Movement, confronted head-on when we spoke in the verdict’s immediate aftermath.

“What you have given in the name of caste, you are now taking away in the name of religion.” Dr. Manorama expressed. “Dalits have faced systemic violence and exclusion for centuries. So the Constitution provides benefits—education, reservations, opportunities—to help them rise.” Conversion, she stressed, was survival.

Dalit identity, she stressed, is not monolithic. “I am a Dalit Christian. My mother converted… Generations before us may have converted, not randomly, but to escape caste oppression.”

In India’s 600,000 villages, every Dalit colony endures untouchability. “Even today, atrocities don’t stop just because someone converts. They don’t say, ‘You are Christian, so we won’t touch you.’ No. They say, ‘You are a Dalit.’”

Ambedkar’s framework of reform, rehabilitation, justice demands education, opportunities, and political representation. “In Parliament, reservations exist but Dalit Christians and Muslims are still excluded. Out of roughly 240 million Dalits in India, about 25–30 million are Christians. Why are they denied recognition?”

Dr. Manorama recollects her anecdotes from fact finding missions from Gujarat and Karnataka where Dalit Christians were killed and their bodies were thrown into canals.

She dismissed fears of mass conversions— an idea that the right wing has always used to their advantage to mislead Hindus. “Christianity is about service, not conversion.” Political games target minority institutions. Yet the Constitution guarantees equality (Article 14), non-discrimination (Article 15), and religious freedom (Article 25) and we are still fighting for these basic rights”.

Dr. Manorama also acknowledged internal casteism within the church as well. “70–80 per cent of Indian Christians come from Dalit backgrounds. Yet leadership and benefits are not equally distributed. There is division. Those already receiving benefits may not support extending them.” Yet the struggle, she insisted, endures. “Dalit Christian movements have been fighting since 1950. Cases are still pending… We are not disheartened. This is a long struggle.”

AG Kennedy, convener of the Karnataka Dalit Christian Federation, placed the verdict in a deeper historical context when we spoke. AG Kennedy, convener of the Karnataka Dalit Christian Federation, placed the Supreme Court’s March 2026 verdict in historical context. He noted that several princely states, including Mysore, had their own reservation systems before 1950 that extended to Dalit Christian communities in places like Mangalore. Kennedy sharply criticised the Constitution (Scheduled Castes) Order, 1950, calling it “highly anti-democratic and anti-constitutional” because it was issued by the President without parliamentary debate, under the influence of right-wing leaders and religious groups.

More than denying rights, he argued, the Order strikes at religious freedom; it effectively imposes a religion on Scheduled Castes and penalises those who convert, despite India’s claim to be a secular republic

Kennedy rejected the notion that conversion is dramatic or forced. “It is simply a personal choice—like changing clothes.” He cited his own family’s freedom struggle credentials— his father, a mining labourer turned unionist awarded the Tamra Patra, and noted that people of all faiths contributed to independence. The state’s evasions, referring the matter to the Justice Balakrishnan Commission, which he called biased, only deepen cynicism. Yet he remains hopeful.

The history of Dalit Christians and Dalit Muslims in India is not a footnote but a counter-narrative to the state’s tidy religious taxonomy. It exposes the Brahmanical order’s ancient machinery of exclusion and the left’s unfinished project of radical equality. To understand it, one must confront the scriptural bedrock of caste hatred that right-wing ideologues still sanitise as “cultural” or “varna-based merit.”

In the 19th and early 20th centuries, as colonial modernity cracked open feudal enclosures, Dalit mass conversions erupted as acts of collective resistance— protests against a social order that treated human beings as walking pollutants. In Travancore, Pulaya slaves, chained to land, denied clothes above the waist, their women subject to upper-caste sexual predation, flocked to Anglican missions in the 1850s–1890s. Missionaries like those of the Church Missionary Society offered not just baptism but schools, hospitals, and campaigns against slavery, framing Christianity as a path to dignity the caste system denied. By the 1880s, entire Pulaya hamlets had converted en masse, viewing the faith as escape from hereditary bondage. In Andhra Pradesh’s Rayalaseema, Madiga and Mala leather-workers poured into Protestant folds after 1849, drawn by missionaries who shared meals, taught literacy, and challenged temple bans. These were not coerced “foreign” impositions but survival strategies: education denied for centuries (molten lead in ears for daring to learn), healthcare absent, dignity crushed under the Manusmriti’s boot. Missionaries provided what the varna order withheld: food without humiliation, books without pollution taboos. Conversion rates stayed low among upper castes precisely because they had no such desperation; for Dalits, it was resistance, a thumb in the eye of the oppressor.

The Manusmriti’s ghost haunts the Presidential Order, a 1950 artefact of majoritarian anxiety that right-wing forces now defend as eternal truth. Conversions were never about “anti-national” foreign plots but about rejecting a system that poured lead in ears and fed leftovers to humans.

The state may redraw religious lines, but the broken thread of caste pulls tighter still.

This article was originally published on https://countercurrents.org/2026/04/a-dalit-was-beaten-the-court-said-he-no-longer-was-one/