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

IN PART I, we traced how Article 17’s anti-atrocity protections get stripped from persons of Dalit lineage who adopt Christianity or Islam under Article 341’s religious classification. Part II turns to the empirical evidence of post-conversion caste discrimination, traces how purity-pollution taboos persist in modern settings, and proposes decoupling anti-atrocity protection from reservation politics through a religion-neutral amendment to the 1989 Act.

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The Reality of Post-Conversion Caste Discrimination

The legal fiction that religious transition dissolves caste hierarchy is contradicted by extensive empirical evidence. In South Asia, caste is a structural system of social stratification that has infected every religious community. When persons of Dalit ancestry embraced Christianity or Islam to escape caste indignities, they imported their ancestral caste lineages into their adopted faiths, where those lineages continue to dictate social relations.

This sociological reality has been repeatedly documented by state-sponsored commissions. The High-Level Committee chaired by Justice Rajindar Sachar (2006) highlighted deep stratification within Indian Muslim society, distinguishing between Ashrafs (noble classes), Ajlafs (individuals with backward-caste ancestry), and Arzals (persons of Dalit lineage). The Arzals, associated with historically stigmatized occupations like scavenging, face a dual burden: they are treated as social outcasts by dominant Ashrafs within their faith, and remain targets of caste violence by dominant-caste Hindus in their villages. Similarly, the National Commission headed by Justice Ranganath Misra (2007) concluded that caste stigma does not cease upon conversion, holding that classifying individuals of Dalit background exercising freedom-of-conscience as Backward Classes while denying them Scheduled Caste status constitutes state-sanctioned discrimination. In November 2023, Chief Justice D.Y. Chandrachud, while delivering a lecture at the 36th LAWASIA Conference, observed that the social stigma of untouchability is an entrenched historical reality that dictates social relations long after theological alignment changes. 

This persistence of bias is confirmed in private market dynamics. A landmark correspondence study by economist Zahra Siddique (2011) published in Labour Economics demonstrated that low-caste job applicants in India’s private sector must send 20 percent more applications than high-caste applicants to receive an equivalent callback rate. This proves that lineage-based prejudice operates independently of formal state classifications. When the State denies statutory anti-atrocity protection to persons of Dalit lineage choosing “non-Indic” faiths, it subjects them to ‘double discrimination’. In rural environments, dominant-caste perpetrators target them based on ancestral lineage; yet when they seek legal recourse, the State treats them as ‘un-classed’ citizens, granting perpetrators structural impunity.