India's own commission found caste survives conversion. Nineteen years on, it is still right

In 2007 a commission appointed by India’s federal government gave it a plain answer to an old question. Dalits, the communities once branded “untouchable”, do not stop being Dalits when they become Christian or Muslim, it found, and the rule that strips them of Scheduled Caste status should go. The National Commission for Religious and Linguistic Minorities, chaired by Ranganath Misra, a former Chief Justice of India, recommended that paragraph 3 of the Constitution (Scheduled Castes) Order, 1950 “should be wholly deleted by appropriate action so as to completely de-link the Scheduled Caste status from religion”, its report says.

Nineteen years later no government has done it. The Supreme Court held in March 2026 that a Christian pastor born into the Madiga community, a Dalit community of Andhra Pradesh, could not invoke the law against caste violence, because conversion had ended his Scheduled Caste status, as The Dalit Project reported. The Misra report remains the state’s own most direct answer to that ruling, and its reasoning has held up better than the objections raised against it.

What did the commission find?

The government set up the commission on 29 October 2004 to suggest how to identify the “socially and economically backward” among religious and linguistic minorities and what to do for them, “including reservation in education and government employment”, its founding resolution says. Its members were Misra; Tahir Mahmood, a former chair of the National Commission for Minorities; Anil Wilson, principal of St Stephen’s College in Delhi; and Mohinder Singh, director of the National Institute of Punjab Studies. Asha Das, a former federal secretary, was its member-secretary, the report records.

In 2005 the government added a question to its brief: whether the religion bar in the 1950 Order should stay, in light of petitions then before the Supreme Court. Paragraph 3 of that Order reads: “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.” Sikhs were added in 1956 and Buddhists in 1990, the report notes.

The commission’s answer rested on three findings, set out in its chapter on the Order:

• Caste does not stop at a religion’s border. “By all available evidence we do find the caste system to be an all-pervading social phenomenon of India shared by almost all Indian communities irrespective of religious persuasions.”
• The rule contradicts itself. Almost everyone agrees that no benefit can be given on the basis of religion, yet “it is generally insisted upon that the class of Scheduled Castes must remain religion-based. This seems to be illogical and unreasonable.”
• The lists were never surveyed either. The 1936 colonial list of Scheduled Castes “was based on general impressions and not on any actual survey”, and so was the 1950 Order built on it.

It asked that Christian and Muslim groups whose Hindu, Sikh or Buddhist counterparts are on a Scheduled Caste list be moved onto it, and off the lists of Other Backward Classes (OBCs), the broader category for disadvantaged castes, where many States had placed them. Listing the same people as Scheduled Castes if they are Hindu but as OBCs if they are Christian “clearly amounts to religion-based discrimination”, it said. It added that a change of religion should never cost anyone a Scheduled Caste status they already held, its recommendations say.

It also asked for 15% of central and State government posts to be earmarked for religious minorities, 10% for Muslims and 5% for the rest, with an 8.4% minority share within the 27% quota already reserved for OBCs as a fallback, the report says. It said “at least 15 per cent seats in all non-minority educational institutions should be earmarked by law for the minorities”, Ummid reported when the report was tabled. That proposal is separate from the Scheduled Caste question, and this piece does not argue it.

Why does the religion bar matter?

Scheduled Caste status carries reserved seats in legislatures, jobs and universities, and the protection of the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, India’s 1989 law against caste violence. The Scheduled Tribes, India’s listed Indigenous peoples, have never had a religion test, a point the commission made directly.

3 religions whose Dalits can be Scheduled Castes under paragraph 3 of the 1950 Order: Hindu, and since 1956 Sikh, and since 1990 Buddhist. Christians and Muslims from the same castes are left out. Source: Misra Commission report

The bar also decides who is counted. Census 2011 counted 201.4 million members of Scheduled Castes: 94.2% Hindu, 3.0% Sikh and 2.9% Buddhist. It did not ask the question of anyone else, so no official count exists of Christians or Muslims from castes on the lists, The Dalit Project’s Data desk shows.

Ram Surat, a Dalit scholar and activist, described what that leaves converts facing:

“But it is heart wrenching when a Dalit converts to Christianity to gain dignity and to get away from the grip of untouchability and the caste system but finds that she or he continues to face discrimination, thus marginalizing them twice with respect to both caste and religion.” Ram Surat, Christianity Today, August 2022

What happened to the report?

The commission’s term ended on 15 May 2007, its report records. The report was tabled in the Lok Sabha, Parliament’s lower house, on 18 December 2009, Ummid reported.

In late 2022 the government said no. In an affidavit to the Supreme Court in the long-pending petitions brought by the Centre for Public Interest Litigation and others, the federal government argued that Dalits who became Christian or Muslim had left “the oppressive system of untouchability which is not prevalent at all in Christianity and Islam”, The Wire reported. At a hearing on 7 December 2022, Solicitor General Tushar Mehta, the government’s second law officer, told the court the Misra report “was written within the four walls of a room. There was no field study done”, the same report said. The government had by then appointed a new Commission of Inquiry under another former Chief Justice, K.G. Balakrishnan, LiveLaw reported.

Does the “no field study” objection hold?

Not as a reason to set the report aside. The commission visited 28 States and Union Territories between September 2005 and November 2006, its appendix lists, and wrote to State and Union Territory governments for their views on the conversion question, its contents list shows. Its own sponsored studies, nine in all, covered minorities in general rather than Dalit converts in particular, so the government’s objection has a grain in it.

But the standard the government applied is one the 1950 Order itself never met. By the commission’s account, the lists the Order protects were drawn from “general impressions”, and the castes added since were not chosen by “a scientific survey” either. The government’s own affidavit made the opposite claim about Christianity and Islam, that untouchability “is not prevalent at all” there. The state also does not collect the data that would settle the question: its Census asks the caste question of Scheduled Castes only of Hindus, Sikhs and Buddhists.

Asked to wait for the new commission, Justice Sanjay Kishan Kaul’s bench said the first question was whether it should instead “proceed on the basis of the material on record”, The Wire reported. The Balakrishnan Commission was given two years and then several extensions, the latest to 10 June 2026. In June it had finished its report and was expected to submit it “in a few days”, The Hindu reported, as carried by Catholic Connect. The Dalit Project has found no later report of its submission or findings, and an October 2026 piece in Countercurrents still cited the June report as the latest word.

What about the existing Scheduled Castes?

The strongest objection comes from Dalit organisations, not from the government. Opening the list to Christians and Muslims would add people to a quota whose size is already fixed. Ashok Bharti, of the National Confederation of Dalit and Adivasi Organisations, argued in 2023 that Dalit Christians and Muslims should get “separate reservation among the General Seats” instead, The Mooknayak reported. The commission’s member-secretary dissented, arguing that converts should stay in the OBC lists and that the 50% ceiling on reservation should hold, her note of dissent says.

That concern is about the size of the quota, not about whether Dalit Christians and Muslims face caste. Those are separate decisions, and the first can be settled only with the count the religion bar now prevents. Ali Anwar Ansari, a former member of Parliament who backs the change for communities whose names and work match those of Hindu Dalits, has argued for raising the Scheduled Caste quota if they are added, the same report said. A larger list with a quota sized to it would answer both.

The rest of the commission answered its dissenter in its own note. It found “no indication whatsoever in the Constitution” that Scheduled Castes must be confined to particular religions. That link “was created – unwarrantedly in our opinion – by executive action”, it wrote.

What to watch

• The Balakrishnan report. Its last deadline was 10 June 2026. Whether the commission has formally submitted it, whether the government publishes it, and whether it is tabled in Parliament faster than the two and a half years the Misra report waited.
• The Supreme Court petitions. The class petitions on Dalit Christians and Muslims, separate from the pastor’s case, are still pending, as The Dalit Project reported.
• Parliament. The commission said none of its recommendations needed a constitutional amendment, its report says. A law under Article 341, which lets Parliament change the Scheduled Caste lists, is enough.

The religion bar has moved twice, for Sikhs in 1956 and for Buddhists in 1990. Each time, the state accepted that Dalits who left Hinduism still needed the list. The Misra Commission asked only that the same rule apply to every Dalit. That has been on the government’s desk since 2007.