The Allahabad High Court ruled on February 10 that a person’s caste, as determined at birth, cannot be altered by marriage or religious conversion, dismissing a criminal appeal that sought to strip a Scheduled Caste woman of her legal protections on the ground that she had married outside her community.
Justice Anil Kumar-X dismissed Criminal Appeal No. 6081 of 2022, filed by Dinesh and eight others under Section 14-A(1) of the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989. The provision allows an accused to challenge a summoning order directly before the High Court. The appellants had challenged an order dated July 27, 2022, issued by the Special Judge, SC/ST Act, Aligarh, directing them to face trial for offences under Sections 323, 506, 452 and 354 of the Indian Penal Code and Section 3(1)(R) of the SC/ST Act.
The case arose from a criminal complaint filed by a woman originally from West Bengal, who belongs to the SC/ST community. She alleged that the appellants assaulted and abused her, trespassed into her home, hurled casteist slurs at her and outraged her modesty during an altercation. Three persons, including the complainant herself, sustained injuries, and their injury reports were placed on record before the trial court.
The appellants, for their part, had lodged a prior FIR on September 7, 2021, under Sections 147, 323, 308, 504 and 506 IPC at Police Station Khair, District Aligarh, against the woman and her family members, claiming that members of their own family had also been injured in the incident. Before the High Court, they argued that the woman’s complaint was a counterblast to this earlier FIR and deserved to be set aside on that ground alone.
Their more significant legal argument, however, centred on the woman’s caste status. The appellants contended that though the informant originally belonged to the SC/ST community by birth, she had forfeited that identity upon marrying a man from the Jat community. “A woman, after marrying a person of another caste, loses her original caste which she held since birth and thereafter belongs to the caste of her husband,” they argued before the court, submitting that invoking the SC/ST Act against them was therefore unsustainable and the summoning order was liable to be set aside.
The State counsel and the counsel for the informant opposed the appeal. They pointed out that both the complaint filed by the woman and the FIR lodged by the appellants related to incidents that occurred on the same date, which made the counterblast argument untenable. They submitted that the complaint clearly alleged assault, abuse, casteist slurs and injury, and that the appeal lacked merit.
The court rejected both arguments. On the cross-case contention, Justice Anil Kumar-X observed that “the existence of a cross-case does not constitute a ground to discard a complaint filed by the opposite party on a rival version,” and found no illegality in the order passed by the Special Judge, which had been issued after duly considering the statements of the informant, her witnesses and the injury reports on record.
On the question of caste, the court was unequivocal: “Though a person may change religion, his or her caste remains the same despite conversion to another religion. Hence, marriage does not change a person’s caste. Therefore, the said contention is unsustainable.”
The appeal was dismissed in its entirety. The ruling is consistent with established legal precedent holding that caste, acquired at birth, is not altered by either religious conversion or marriage.
