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.
The drafting history reveals that the framers intentionally left ‘untouchability’ undefined and enclosed in quotation marks.
The Constitutional Paradox of Article 341
The statutory mechanism perpetuating this exclusion is Clause 3 of the Constitution (Scheduled Castes) Order, 1950, promulgated under Article 341. This clause establishes a strict religious boundary, stipulating that “no person who professes a religion different from the Hindu, the Sikh or the Buddhist religion shall be deemed to be a member of a Scheduled Caste.” Consequently, the moment an individual of Dalit background exercises freedom of conscience and embraces a “non-Indic” faith, their Scheduled Caste status is legally extinguished. This transition results in the immediate forfeiture of all statutory protections under the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989.
This statutory exclusion is sustained by a persistent legal fiction first articulated in Soosai v. Union of India (1985). In Soosai, the Supreme Court rejected the challenge of cobblers of Dalit lineage professing “non-Indic” faiths who sought Scheduled Caste status, holding that the petitioners had failed to establish that their social and economic backwardness survived conversion with the same degree of intensity. The underlying assumption of the Soosai doctrine is that because Christianity and Islam are doctrinally egalitarian, the social disabilities of untouchability instantly vanish upon conversion. This formalist approach ignores the sociological reality of South Asia, where caste operates as an inescapable system of lineage-based subjugation indifferent to theological transitions.
By maintaining this legal fiction, the State constructs a coercive constitutional paradox. It forces a Dalit citizen to make an unconstitutional choice: they must either forfeit their freedom of conscience under Article 25 to retain State-backed anti-atrocity protections, or exercise their religious freedom at the cost of their physical safety under Articles 17 and 21. Under the doctrine of unconstitutional conditions, the State cannot condition the enjoyment of one fundamental right upon the forced surrender of another. Forcing a citizen to choose between their spiritual conscience and bodily integrity is a form of state-sanctioned subordination.
The devastating impact of this paradox was realized in Chinthada Anand v. State of Andhra Pradesh (2026). The appellant, born into the Madiga community, a recognized Scheduled Caste in Andhra Pradesh, had exercised his freedom of conscience to practice Christianity and served as a pastor. He was brutally assaulted, wrongfully restrained, and subjected to caste-based slurs by dominant-caste Reddys. A formal police investigation corroborated the assault. Yet, the Supreme Court quashed criminal proceedings under the Atrocities Act, reasoning that his active service as a pastor constituted an open avowal of Christianity, which legally eclipsed his Scheduled Caste status.
The Chinthada Anand ruling exposes the deep absurdity of current jurisprudence: in the eyes of the perpetrators, the victim’s Madiga lineage remained an indelible marker of impurity prompting targeted violence; yet, in the eyes of the law, the victim was stripped of his protective shield because of his faith, transforming a violent hate crime into an uncorroborated private dispute.
The civil protections of Article 17 must be decoupled from the restrictive religious classifications of Article 341 to protect persons of Dalit ancestry professing “non-Indic” faiths from targeted violence.
Expanding Article 17 Beyond Traditional Silos
To resolve this crisis, we must return to the foundational text and legislative intent of Article 17. Unlike other fundamental rights in Part III directed primarily against State action, Article 17 declares an absolute, horizontal prohibition of ‘untouchability’ in any form. The drafting history reveals that the framers intentionally left ‘untouchability’ undefined and enclosed in quotation marks.
As K.M. Munshi explained in the Constituent Assembly on April 29, 1947, the term was “put purposely within inverted commas in order to indicate that the Union legislature when it defines “untouchability” will be able to deal with it in the sense in which it is normally understood,” rather than freezing a rigid definition in the constitutional text. Subsequently, the Drafting Committee, led by Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, explicitly rejected Naziruddin Ahmad’s Amendment No. 372, which sought to restrict untouchability strictly to ‘religion or caste’. This deliberate choice demonstrates that the framers intended to keep Article 17 open-textured and adaptable to evolving forms of social exclusion.
This open-textured reading has been advanced in contemporary constitutional litigation. In the written submissions filed on behalf of the intervenors in the Sabarimala Reference proceedings in Kantaru Rajeevaru v. Indian Young Lawyers Association, Senior Advocate Indira Jaising argued that the exclusion of menstruating women from the temple precinct constituted a form of “untouchability” prohibited under Article 17. Her submissions decoupled Article 17 from its traditional, caste-confined boundaries, extending its protective sweep to gender-based purity taboos. Her arguments demonstrated that Article 17 was designed to dismantle the entire structural architecture of “purity and pollution” taboos that relegate individuals to a lesser human status. They raised the foundational question of whether Article 17 protects all persons, showing that Scheduled Caste women face a “double deprivation” when excluded on gender grounds. She also cited the historical warnings of Professor K.T. Shah during the Constituent Assembly Debates on November 29, 1948, who cautioned that untouchability manifests in non-caste domains, including the temporary ostracization of women during menstruation. This formulation provides a vital doctrinal precedent for this decoupling theory.
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.
Furthermore, representing the intervenors Advocate Bindu A. and Ms. Kanakadurga, the written submissions filed before the Court directly challenged the ‘Sudhikaran’ (purification ceremony) performed by temple priests after their entry. The submissions argued that the purification ritual was an explicit deployment of exclusionary purity-pollution logic, directly violating civil rights and bodily autonomy under Article 21 and the absolute mandate of Article 17. By demonstrating that the constitutional prohibition targets the underlying logic of purity and pollution rather than static theological categories, these arguments establish that Article 17 is a dynamic, anti-exclusionary tool.
If the civil protections of Article 17 can be structurally decoupled from caste lists to protect individuals from gender-based exclusionary taboos, they must similarly be decoupled from the restrictive religious classifications of Article 341 to protect persons of Dalit ancestry professing “non-Indic” faiths from targeted violence.
This is Part I of the two-part series ‘Orphaned by the State’. The next part will be published tomorrow.