Shreya Mandal (Silberman School of Social Work at Hunter College, CUNY) has posted Between Recognition and Erasure: Scheduled Caste Jurisprudence, Religious Conversion, and the Intergenerational Afterlife of Caste on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
Two recent Supreme Court developments concerning Scheduled Caste (SC) status illuminate a deep contradiction in Indian constitutionalism. In State of Punjab v. Davinder Singh (2024), a seven-judge Bench held that states may sub-classify Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes in order to direct reservation benefits toward the “weakest of the weak,” thereby rejecting the assumption that SC communities form a homogeneous whole. In a later ruling concerning religious conversion, the Court reaffirmed that Scheduled Caste status remains confined to members of specified religions under the Constitution (Scheduled Castes) Order, 1950, and is lost upon conversion to faiths such as Christianity. Read together, these developments reveal two competing logics of state recognition: one that acknowledges internal differentiation in the lived distribution of caste injury, and another that treats caste as legally extinguishable when a claimant exits the religious frame recognized by the 1950 Order. This article argues that the tension between these rulings becomes especially visible when examined through an intergenerational trauma model. Such a model shifts attention from isolated legal status to the long transmission of humiliation, exclusion, fear, institutional mistrust, and blocked opportunity across generations. The subclassification ruling can be read as a partial acknowledgment that caste injury is unequally transmitted within protected groups. The conversion rule, by contrast, discloses a form of juridical amnesia: the law withdraws recognition even where the social afterlife of caste remains active. Together, the rulings raise a fundamental question for Indian democracy: does constitutional redress follow lived structures of inherited oppression, or only those categories the state is willing to preserve?
Recommended.