Opinion Supreme Court’s latest report reveals why we need a caste-aware judiciary

Cut to December 2025: This paean seems to ring hollow.

From attacks on Dalits — as per the latest NCRB reports, there were 57,000 crimes against the Scheduled Castes only in 2023 — to reported dispossession of Adivasis, the picture is quite different. Caste discrimination runs deep in the judiciary as well. As per parliamentary reports, of 841 High Court judges appointed from 2018 to November 28, 2025, just 32 (3.8 per cent) are from Scheduled Castes, 17 (2 per cent) from Scheduled Tribes, 103 (12.2 per cent) from OBCs, and 46 (5.5 per cent) from minorities.

The Supreme Court’s latest ‘Report on Judicial Conceptions of Caste’, published by the Centre for Research and Planning, authored by Anurag Bhaskar of the National Law University, Delhi, alongside Farrah Ahmed of Melbourne and peers, looks into Constitution Bench verdicts and exposes a court entangled in its own prejudices.

It identifies several striking patterns where judicial reasoning has reflected casteist assumptions. These examples do not indict individual judges but reveal how deeply caste ideology is woven into institutional thinking. Five such patterns stand out.

One of the clearest manifestations of caste prejudice is the judiciary’s tendency to explain the exclusion of oppressed castes through metaphors rooted in deficiency. In T Devadasan vs Union of India (1964), Justice K Subba Rao describes affirmative action through a horse-race analogy where a “first-class race horse” competes with an “ordinary horse,” suggesting that Scheduled Caste communities require a “handicap” to even run the race. Later, in Indra Sawhney (1992), Justice B P Jeevan Reddy extends this paternalistic narrative by declaring that “crutches cannot be provided throughout one’s career”.

Such metaphors imply that oppressed castes are inherently weaker or less capable, thereby naturalising centuries of exclusion instead of recognising them as the result of structural violence. These analogies reduce caste oppression to biological limitation, despite the fact that the state’s role is to dismantle barriers, not to label citizens as permanently handicapped.

A persistent anxiety in judicial discourse is the fear that reservation will erode administrative efficiency. In Devadasan, the Court asserts that “lowering of standards” is inevitable when reservation is implemented, a claim echoed by Justice H R Khanna in N M Thomas (1976). He warns that merit and efficiency would be the “obvious casualties” of caste-based affirmative action.

These statements reflect an assumption: That Dalits and other oppressed communities dilute excellence. This framing reinforces caste hierarchy by portraying historically privileged groups as the natural bearers of merit and those from oppressed castes as threats to institutional quality. It also ignores empirical research, which shows that reservations do not reduce institutional performance and often improve it.

Derogatory terms, sanitised history

One of the most revealing indicators of casteism in judicial discourse is the use of derogatory terms. Even after the government officially directed that “Harijan” should not be used in official communication —and even though the Supreme Court itself later recognised the term as abusive — judgments continued to employ it. Justice V R Krishna Iyer, in his concurring opinion in N M Thomas (1976) cautioned that “the administration runs for good government, not to give jobs to Harijans.”

The use of such language legitimises upper-caste paternalism and erases Dalit self-identification. It also demonstrates how casteist vocabulary seeped into judicial reasoning long after the Constitution had repudiated untouchability.

Several judgments rely on a narrative that caste began as a harmless division of labour before getting distorted. Justice P B Gajendragadkar in M.R. Balaji (1963) describes the caste system as having “original functional and occupational basis,” only later burdened by notions of purity and pollution. Justice Kuldip Singh, in Indra Sawhney (1992), similarly characterises chaturvarna as originally “an occupational order”.

This discourse sanitises centuries of violence, exclusion, and ritual subordination embedded in caste from its inception. By portraying caste as benign until corrupted, the judiciary risks validating Brahmanical narratives while pushing the lived experiences of oppressed castes to the margins.

Another recurring judicial error is the portrayal of caste as a self-governing association with the power to admit or expel members. In Guntur Medical College vs Mohan Rao (1976), the Court claims: “the caste itself is the supreme judge” in deciding its membership, describing caste as merely a “social combination of persons.”

Such language obscures the violent, hereditary, and compulsory nature of caste identity. It adopts a colonial imagination of caste as an autonomous guild rather than acknowledging it as a system of graded inequality enforced by birth, endogamy, and ritual purity.

These five patterns — deficiency metaphors, merit-based suspicion, derogatory terminology, sanitised history, and voluntary-group narratives — reveal that casteism in the judiciary is not always explicit. It often survives in metaphors, assumptions, and linguistic habits. The report makes clear that even as the judiciary struck down discriminatory practices and upheld affirmative action, its language frequently carried the residue of caste prejudice.

A caste-just Constitution requires a caste-aware judiciary — one that does not reproduce the hierarchies it is mandated to abolish. Only then can the constitutional promise of equality and dignity move from text to lived reality.

If the judiciary, the final sentinel, will not exorcise caste from its reasoning, “Mother of Democracy” becomes a slogan, not a destiny. Justice cannot be symbolism. It must finally confront power.

The author is an independent journalist and author of two books