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The recent judgment in Chinthada Anand v. State of Andhra Pradesh (March 24, 2026), meticulously follows the letter of the law.

The court has ruled that only Dalit Hindus, Sikhs and Buddhists will be able to avail of protections accorded by the Constitution to Scheduled Castes, or SCs. Effectively, when you convert to Christianity or Islam, you are meant to have lost the baggage that being born Dalit gives you.

But could this judgement have demonstrated once again how secular legalism can end up enforcing a profoundly majoritarian social order?

The appellant, Chinthada Anand, was born into the Madiga community – a Scheduled Caste that forms the base of the agrarian labour pyramid in Andhra Pradesh – in Kothapalem village in Guntur district.

For a decade, he had been practicing as a Christian pastor. In January 2021, he alleged that he was wrongfully restrained, assaulted and abused with casteist slurs by a group of individuals belonging to the dominant (Reddy) community. He sought the protection of the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989, alongside the Indian Penal Code.

The Supreme Court, upholding the decision of the Andhra Pradesh High Court, has quashed the criminal proceedings. The reasoning is rooted in Clause 3 of the Constitution (Scheduled Castes) Order, 1950, which explicitly states that no person who professes a religion different from Hinduism, Sikhism or Buddhism shall be deemed to be a member of a Scheduled Caste.

Since Anand is a practicing Christian pastor, the court concluded, his caste status “stood eclipsed in the eyes of law”. Consequently, he cannot be the victim of a caste atrocity under the statute.

The law assumes – and the Supreme Court dutifully reiterates, quoting older judgments like C.M. Arumugam – that when a Dalit converts to Christianity, the “social and economic disabilities arising because of Hindu religion cease”.

To bolster this, the court even briefly transforms itself into a theological seminary, citing the Epistle to the Galatians from the New Testament (“There is neither Jew nor Gentile… for you are all one in Christ Jesus”) to assert that Christianity does not recognise caste.

This reflects a fundamentally elite, Brahminical worldview that reifies caste as a mere religious or theological construct, conveniently erasing its material foundations. Caste in India is........

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