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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 not merely a crisis of theological belief; it is a brutally material structure of (re)production, an agrarian hierarchy and a mechanism of social control.

While it may be a theological truism that global Christianity and Islam do not possess a caste system, the inescapable sociological reality is that subcontinental Christianity and Islam are deeply structured by it.

The judiciary’s assumption that a change in faith mathematically equates to the obliteration of historical, social and economic backwardness is a legal fiction completely divorced from the empirical reality of the Indian village. The stigma of untouchability is deeply embedded in the division of labour and the ownership of resources; it does not evaporate upon contact with baptismal water.

This judicial erasure of Dalit agency finds its crude, societal parallel in the venomous rhetoric of the Hindutva right, which routinely stigmatises Dalit Christians as “rice-bag converts“. This slur is not merely a communal insult; it is a profound ideological weapon that denies the oppressed any capacity for intellectual, political or spiritual aspiration.

By reducing a historical mass exodus from the indignities of the Brahminical order to a cheap, transactional barter for grain, the dominant castes conveniently absolve themselves of the structural violence that necessitated such conversions in the first place.

The court and the communal mob, therefore, could be said to have arrived at the same destination from different paths. Both refuse to acknowledge that the Dalit converts not to sell their soul for material gain, but reclaim a human dignity that Hindu society structurally denies them.

One might ask their Lordships: Does a dominant-caste Reddy or Kamma landlord in Guntur read the Epistle to the Galatians before deciding whether or not to hurl a caste slur at a Madiga?

When a Dalit embraces a different faith, seeking a spiritual dignity denied to them by the Brahminical order, do the material realities of the village suddenly reconfigure themselves? Does the Dalit hamlet (the cheri or palle) physically relocate to the center of the village? Does the historical burden of landlessness vanish?

Of course not. A Madiga who reads the Bible remains, in the eyes of the village power structure, a Madiga who must be kept in his place. The violence inflicted upon him is not despite his religion, but precisely because his social location remains stubbornly fixed at the bottom of the caste hierarchy.

By insisting that conversion erases caste, the state effectively punishes the Dalit twice. First, the individual suffers the historical indignity of caste oppression. Second, when they seek emancipation through religious conversion, the State strips them of the only legal shield—the SC/ST (PoA) Act—designed to protect them from that oppression.

The law ends up demanding that to be protected from Hindu caste violence, one must remain a captive within the Hindu fold. This reinforces the hegemony of the very system that generates the atrocity.

The Supreme Court has dismissed the 1977 Government Order of the Andhra Pradesh state, which extended non-statutory concessions to Dalit Christians, correctly noting that a state order cannot override a Presidential mandate regarding central statutory benefits. However, what the court misses is the meaning of that 1977 order.

The Andra Pradesh government issued it precisely because it recognised the inescapable sociological truth that the Presidential Order of 1950 ignores: that a change in faith does not annihilate the social disability of caste.

The state government acknowledged the reality; but the Supreme Court prefers recourse to theology. This is a recurring paradox in our democracy. While the elected branches of government, pressured by the exigencies of mass politics and popular movements, are occasionally forced to recognise and accommodate the raw, uncomfortable truths of social inequality, the judiciary – insulated from democratic pressures – can sometimes end up being the ultimate bulwark of the status quo.

‘Logic’ and ‘statutory interpretation’ can often neutralise the hard-won gains of the marginalised.

But the court does not stop at stripping Anand of his protection under the PoA Act. It proceeds to quash the standard penal charges under the BNS (wrongful restraint, criminal intimidation and causing hurt) using its powers under Section 528 of the BNSS. The justification provided is a classic example of what one might call the “urban eye” failing to take into account the mechanics of rural terror.

The court notes that the allegations “rest solely on the statement of the appellant”, with “no independent witness attributing any specific overt act” to the dominant caste accused. Other witnesses supposedly stated that the situation was pacified and Anand was escorted away, with no mention of a mob of thirty people.

To use the lack of “independent corroboration” at the charge-sheet stage to quash an FIR in a case involving caste-based conflict is to fundamentally misunderstand how power operates in an Indian village. It exposes the fatal flaw in applying the abstract principle of ‘equality before the law’ to a society structured upon deep, inherent inequalities. To treat the powerful oppressor and the powerless victim as equals under the standard rules of evidence is to guarantee the victory of the oppressor.

Who are these “independent witnesses”? They are villagers who must continue to live, work and survive in an agrarian economy dominated by the very dominant land-owning castes accused of the assault. To expect a landless labourer or a marginalised villager to offer consistent, ocular testimony against a mob of dominant caste men in a police station is to demand a suicidal level of heroism.

The silence or the “pacified” versions of the witnesses are not necessarily proof that the crime did not happen; more often than not, they are the architectural proof of the impunity enjoyed by the dominant castes.

By treating this predictable silence as a fatal flaw in the prosecution’s case, rather than a symptom of the structural intimidation that necessitated the PoA Act in the first place, the High Court and the Supreme Court end up converting the powerlessness of the victim into a legal justification for letting the perpetrators walk free without a trial.

Chinthada Anand v. State of Andhra Pradesh may go down as a masterclass in how impeccable formal logic can end up denying substantive justice. The law here ends up functioning not as an instrument of social transformation, but as a mechanism that re-legitimises historical oppression under the guise of secular neutrality.

This judgement is in continuation of the higher judiciary’s historical trajectory.

Our constitutional courts have often displayed a structural inability – or perhaps, as some allege, a deep-seated ideological reluctance – to comprehend social justice. The parameters of what is social justice appear to be only those defined by the dominant classes.

The language of constitutional purity has often ended up denying substantive relief to the marginalised. In doing so, the judiciary frequently acts not as an agent of social transformation, but as the ultimate bulwark of the social status quo.

© The Wire