Who was E V Chinnaiah, lead petitioner in Supreme Court’s SC sub-classification case?

In June 1997, after the MRPS organised a marathon rally from N Chandrababu Naidu’s birthplace Naravaripalle in Chittoor district to Hyderabad, Naidu, then the Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister, agreed to divide the SCs into the A, B, C, and D categories. This is when E V Chinnaiah, Venkat Rao, and Mala Mahanadu founder P Vigneshwara Rao challenged the Naidu government’s order in the Andhra Pradesh High Court. A single-judge Bench of the court struck down the order but the Naidu government passed an Ordinance and then an Act in the Assembly and the High Court upheld the legislation. In 2001, the three activists approached the Supreme Court against the law, with Chinnaiah as the lead petitioner. A five-judge Constitution Bench ruled in November 2004 that micro-classification of SCs was unconstitutional. The verdict came just when Y S Rajashekara Reddy of the Congress came to power, dislodging Naidu. In 2011, the petitioners on behalf of Punjab’s Balmikis and Mazhabi Sikhs filed a petition in the SC against the Punjab High Court’s ruling.

The case of Punjab’s Balmikis and Mazhabi Sikhs came to the Supreme Court after the Punjab and Haryana High Court in 2006 struck down 50% quota for them among the seats reserved for SCs, citing the Chinnaiah judgment. It was then that Venkat Rao, Vigneshwara Rao, and Chinnaiah were impleaded as petitioners in the case.

E V Chinnaiah’s life

Venkat Rao, Vigneshwara Rao, and Chinnaiah became active in Dalit politics in the 1980s and 1990s. They first met in the aftermath of the July 1985 massacre of Madiga Dalits in Karamchedu in Andhra Pradesh. They also visited Tsunduru in Bapatla district after Dalits from the Mala community were massacred in August 1991.

Chinnaiah was an Ambedkarite and Buddhist from Nellore who settled down in Hyderabad, working as a Class IV government employee. He retired in the 1990s and did odd jobs to earn money from book translations. “In the 1990s, we were not very organised or politically active, we were not highly educated, but we did what we felt was right,” said Venkat Raom adding that Chinnaiah spent several years translating Dr B R Ambedkar’s works The Buddha and His Dhamma and Annihilation of Caste into Telugu. In November 2005, a year after the Supreme Court judgment in the case bearing his name, Chinnaiah died. He was 68 years old at the time. A month later, Vigneshwara Rao, who was a Class I officer in the Andhra government’s Information Department, died of a heart attack while visiting Delhi to discuss the issue with political leaders, Veknat Rao said. He was 56.

Venkat Rao said since 2000 he has been a full-time Dalit activist. “I have immersed myself in the work of upliftment of Dalits and fighting against classification. I feel that it is being done for political benefit but it will not help the Dalits in any way. Classification will also lead to bad blood among the different sub-castes. I will continue to fight against it,’’ he said.