OPINION | Judging Caste: What the Supreme Court’s report reveals

Not even well trained judicial minds can shake off impressionistic views

Caste-related issues, ranging from affirmative action to caste-based atrocities, have repeatedly come before the Supreme Court for adjudication over the past seven decades, resulting in several landmark judgments.

The breadth of this jurisprudence is striking: cases have been related to caste-based segregation and discrimination within prisons, honour killings, and other manifestations of social exclusion, offering valuable insight into how the apex court has historically interpreted and engaged with the realities of caste in Indian society.

The challenge posed by varying perspectives on caste

Given the centrality of caste to constitutional adjudication, a recently released report by the Supreme Court’s Centre for Research and Planning, which has been authored by a group of distinguished legal scholars, assumes particular significance. The document serves as an important analytical resource, mapping the court’s evolving approach to interpreting and analysing caste hierarchies and their implications.

The report emphasises that the analyses contained in it are intended solely to sensitise members of the judiciary, the legal community, policymakers, and the public to issues of caste and caste-based discrimination and to encourage reflection, dialogue, and greater awareness on how the legal system can advance the constitutional mandate of equality and dignity for all citizens.

Nevertheless, it is equally important to recognise something more fundamental. Caste, as one of the starkest social realities of India, can be perceived and analysed from markedly different perspectives even within rule-based, formal institutions. This underscores the complexity of caste as a social fact and highlights the challenges faced by constitutional adjudication in engaging with a phenomenon that is deeply embedded in a complex social structure.

Even judges of the apex court are not immune to social conditioning

The report delineates three broad aspects of caste-based matters as addressed by the apex court.

First, it examines how the Supreme Court has interpreted caste-based hierarchies. Second, it analyses the manner in which the judiciary has defined the Scheduled Castes and other marginalised communities. Third, it evaluates how the Court has conceived remedies for correcting caste-based discrimination and injustice.

In undertaking this exercise, the report also brings to the fore a more unsettling reality: India’s highest court, like all institutions, is not entirely insulated from the social and cultural constructs that have historically shaped understandings of caste—often in ways that are unscientific, deeply ingrained, and socially conditioned.

Caste is embedded in the social structure

While several judgments have underscored this reality, the report notes that caste in India is not merely a social category but a structural and hereditary institution intrinsically linked to occupation, hierarchy, and identity. Even when individuals move away from their traditional vocations or migrate to urban centres, their caste identity often persists, continuing to shape social interactions, marital relations, and community recognition.

This enduring nature of caste identity, as reflected in the Court’s jurisprudence, demonstrates how caste operates as a form of deep social conditioning rather than a transient or purely contextual classification.

However, the report also highlights how certain judgments focused on the “ benign origins of the caste system and on caste as a voluntary association”. It quotes Justice Kuldip Singh, dissenting opinion in the Indra Sawhney case, where he writes: “The Chaturvarna-system has been gradually distorted in shape and meaning and has been replaced by the prevalent caste-system in Hindu society... The caste system as projected by Manu and accepted by the Hindu society has proved to be the biggest curse for this country. The Chaturvarna-system under the Aryans was more of an occupational order projecting the division of labour. Thereafter, in the words of Professor Harold A. Gould in his book ‘The Hindu Caste System'’, the Brahmins ‘sacralized the occupational order, and occupationalised the sacred order’. Yet with the passage of time, the caste-system become the cancer-cell of the Hindu Society.”

The report makes a pertinent point in this regard when it highlights an important fact that “supposed benign origin of the caste system risk being understood as implicitly validating the (still dominant) Chaturvarna model (the four- fold division of society into Brahmins, Kshatriyas, Vaishyas, and Shudras) allegedly on a functional and occupational basis”.

Use of language that would today be deemed politically incorrect

The report also flags concerns regarding the language employed by the judiciary while referring to oppressed caste communities. It points, for instance, to the judgment in T. Devadasan v. Union of India, where the Court, while seeking to justify affirmative action, invoked an analogy of horses. The use of such metaphors—particularly the imagery of a “first-class horse” and an “ordinary horse,” and the characterisation of reservation as a “handicap” or “crutches”—is, as the report observes, viewed today as inconsistent with the constitutional imperative of dignity.

This underscores how judicial reasoning, even when well-intentioned, can reflect the social idioms of its time and invites a critical re-examination of the language through which equality and justice are articulated.

Regarding judicial discourse on remedying caste-based injustice, the report makes several notable observations. It notes that judicial reasoning has both shaped—and at times constrained—the constitutional project of addressing caste inequality. Referring to the judgment in Ashoka Kumar Thakur v. Union of India, which emphasised education as a means to eradicate caste-based hierarchies, the report argues that such an approach reflects a deeply idealistic, yet ultimately inadequate, understanding of India’s social realities.

While acknowledging that education is undeniably a vital instrument of empowerment, the report cautions against the assumption that education alone can dismantle caste-based discrimination. Such a view, it argues, disregards overwhelming evidence of the persistence of caste bias within educational institutions and public services themselves. Far from being neutral spaces of merit and social mobility, classrooms and offices often end up reproducing the very hierarchies they are constitutionally expected to dismantle.

The report further makes a significant observation, noting that “from the Thorat Committee Report on caste discrimination in universities (2007) to multiple inquiries into campus suicides of Dalit and Adivasi students, the evidence demonstrates that caste prejudice pervades educational spaces.” This acknowledgement grounds the analysis in documented institutional experience rather than abstract theorising.

Limitations and revelations

At the same time, the report is careful about its institutional positioning. As the Centre for Research and Planning functions within the Registry of the Supreme Court of India, it acknowledges the boundaries and responsibilities and consciously refrains from personalised commentary.

Yet, these constraints do not impede a rigorous and dispassionate analysis. On the contrary, the report effectively highlights persistent shortcomings in how caste has been understood and analysed as a social phenomenon—often through reductionist and overly simplistic frameworks that fail to capture the complexity of caste hierarchies, their origins, and the challenges involved in dismantling them.

In doing so, the report emerges as a valuable addition to a growing body of important institutional scholarship produced under the aegis of the Supreme Court. Together, these documents show a deeper institutional engagement with questions of dignity, equality, and structural injustice within the legal system.