Orphaned by the State: Why Civil Protection under Article 17 must be decoupled from the Politics of Reservation - Part I

ON JANUARY 7, 2025, in the village of Chhindwada, situated in the southern Bastar district of Chhattisgarh, Pastor Subhash Baghel passed away after a prolonged illness. His family, native residents belonging to the historically marginalized Mahra caste, had practised the Christian faith for three decades. His ancestors lay buried in a designated section of the village graveyard (marghat). Yet, upon his death, a local Gram Sabha, captured by majoritarian sentiments, barred his burial. Rather than protecting the family’s fundamental right to bodily dignity in death, the local police aligned with the opposing factions, turning the State machinery into an active barrier against the grieving family. 

For twenty agonizing days, Ramesh Baghel, the pastor’s son, was forced to keep his father’s body in a cold hospital mortuary in Jagdalpur while petitioning the courts. The Chhattisgarh High Court dismissed his plea, relying on a certificate from the village council asserting that a burial in the ancestral ground would ignite communal disharmony. Ultimately, the Supreme Court of India delivered a split verdict on January 27, 2025, resulting in a police-supervised midnight burial in the village of Karkapal, twenty-five kilometers away from their home. Ramesh Baghel’s subsequent lament, stating that humanity rather than his family had lost, exposes a profound constitutional tragedy.

This harrowing episode exemplifies what Justice N.H. Sinha conceptualized as “civil death,” defined as the systemic reduction of a human being to a legal non-entity and a social outcast, stripped of social ties and denied basic dignity under the guise of majoritarian custom. In the Indian constitutional scheme, civil death occurs when the State conditions a citizen’s physical safety, social dignity, and bodily integrity on their adherence to a prescribed religious identity. The core of this constitutional pathology lies in a profound institutional conflation: the State has systematically tethered the protective and anti-atrocity civil shields of Article 17 to the distributive, resource-allocative quota framework of Article 341. By using the Constitution (Scheduled Castes) Order, 1950 as a singular gatekeeper for both criminal protection and affirmative action, the State effectively holds the basic civil rights of persons of Dalit ancestry professing “non-Indic” faiths hostage to majoritarian politics and reservation arithmetic.