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New Delhi May 22: A long-standing demand from a section of Muslims and Christians to amalgamate them into the caste hierarchy has found support from the national commission for linguistic and religious minorities. Adding to the OBC debate, the commission headed by Justice Ranganath Mishra has called for a constitutional amendment aimed at extending the ambit of scheduled caste status to non-Hindu minority communities—essentially Muslims and Christians. In its report submitted to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Monday, the commission has suggested that the relevant section in the Constitution, which originally restricted the scheduled caste net to Hindus and later opened it to Sikhs and Buddhists, be deleted to include Muslims, Christians, Jains and Parsis in its ambit.
Contending that caste is a social concept in India and does not have any religious basis, the commission is understood to have said that appropriate action should be taken to completely delink the scheduled caste status from religion and make it fully religion-neutral like that of scheduled tribes.
The panel is understood to have said that all those groups and classes among the Muslims and Christians whose counterparts among the Hindus, Sikhs or Buddhists are included in the Central or state scheduled castes list should also be covered in the scheduled castes net.
The commission has further recommended that as the Constitution guarantees freedom of conscience and religious freedom as a fundamental right, once a person has been included in the scheduled caste list, a wilful change of religion should not affect adversely affect his or her scheduled caste status.
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