Supreme Court: converts cannot claim reservation solely on pre-conversion caste status

The Supreme Court has ruled that a person from a Scheduled Caste or Backward Class who converts to Islam or Christianity cannot claim reservation benefits based only on the social status they held before conversion.

A bench of Justices Prashant Kumar Mishra and Shree Chandrashekhar dismissed an appeal by the Tamil Nadu government on Thursday and upheld a Madras High Court judgment that had quashed a state government order issued in March 2024.

The government order

The 2024 order had allowed people who converted to Islam from backward or Scheduled Caste backgrounds to obtain community certificates under one of seven notified Backward Class Muslim groups, making them eligible for the 3.5 per cent reservation set aside for those groups. The state had issued it on the recommendation of the Tamil Nadu Backward Classes Commission and argued in court that changing religion does not erase social disadvantage.

The Madras High Court struck the order down, and the state then approached the Supreme Court.

What the court said

The bench held that reservation attaches to a class identified under the Constitution, not to an individual as a portable entitlement. Backwardness arising from the Hindu social order cannot automatically be carried into another religion, it said, according to reports by The News Minute and NewsGram.

The judges noted that, under the Constitution (Scheduled Castes) Order of 1950, Scheduled Caste status is limited to people who profess Hinduism, Sikhism or Buddhism. They also found that the state order had not shown any common link explaining why people from different backgrounds would join the same seven groups on conversion, and described it as creating an artificial route between categories.

The court said a local religious body may certify that a conversion took place, but cannot conclusively decide a person's statutory backward class status. On reconversion to Hinduism, it said entitlement must be decided case by case by the competent authority and is not restored automatically.

Why it matters

The ruling clarifies how states can extend backward class benefits to people who change religion, an issue with implications for certificates, admissions and government jobs. It does not affect the reservation available to communities that are themselves notified as backward within a religion; it addresses only claims based on a person's caste before conversion.