The Supreme Court’s Centre for Research and Planning has released an important document — the Report on Judicial Conceptions of Caste (2025) — examining how India’s highest court has historically understood caste. While the report is institutionally framed as a self-reflective exercise, a close reading reveals something far more significant: a decades-long ideological struggle within the judiciary, between the transformative, egalitarian mandate of the Constitution and the deeply embedded worldview of the upper-caste social order.

The report, by systematically analysing Constitution Bench judgments, exposes not a consistent jurisprudential march towards justice, but a fractured and often contradictory discourse where progressive, transformative pronouncements wrestle with regressive, paternalistic, and socially conservative assumptions.

This judicial record demands a critical analysis. The law and its language are not neutral; they are terrains of ideological struggle that reflect and reinforce existing power relations. While the Indian judiciary has, at moments, articulated a powerful vision of substantive equality and recognised caste as a structure of hereditary oppression, its discourse has been persistently haunted by liberal formalism, Brahminical hermeneutics, and a bourgeois reluctance to sanction radical redistribution. This has resulted in a jurisprudence that often legitimises the very hierarchies it purports to dismantle, militating against the Constitution’s egalitarian ethos.

B R Ambedkar himself was conscious of the limitations of the Constitution and it being an inadequate weapon to annihilate caste. In his famed speech on the occasion of the adoption of the Constitution on November 25, 1949, he said: “In India there are castes. The castes are anti-national. In the first place because they bring about separation in social life. They are anti-national also because they generate jealousy and antipathy between caste and caste. But we must overcome all these difficulties if we wish to become a nation in reality. For fraternity can be a fact only when there is a nation. Without fraternity, equality and liberty will be no deeper than coats of paint.”

These limitations, according to B T Ranadive, were also because the leadership of the freedom struggle, which was in the hands of the national bourgeoisie, was not interested in going into the root of the problem and uprooting it.

The CRP report correctly identifies a fundamental tension in how the Supreme Court understands caste itself. This tension is not merely academic; it has direct consequences for the remedial action the Constitution permits.

On one hand, there exists a robust strand of jurisprudence that recognises caste as a material, exploitative structure. Justices like Chinnappa Reddy (Vasanth Kumar, 1985), Ratnavel Pandian, and B P Jeevan Reddy (Indra Sawhney, 1992) meticulously documented the caste-occupation-poverty cycle and the unbreakable bondage of social identity, emphasising caste as an economic and social system of graded inequality. This view culminates in Justice D Y Chandrachud’s powerful assertion in the Sabarimala judgment (2018) that notions of purity and pollution, the core of caste, “can have no place in a constitutional regime.” This line of thinking sees caste as a social relation of production and power that requires structural dismantling.

On the other hand, the court has repeatedly entertained and legitimised an idealist, sanitised version of caste. The discourse on benign origins, where caste is presented as a mere functional and occupational division later corrupted (as in Balaji, 1963), is not just a historical fallacy but an ideological one. It performs a critical function: it severs the link between the varna ideology, which is the theological sanction for hierarchy, and the concrete, violent practice of caste. By suggesting a fall from a pure, occupational past, it exonerates the philosophical and scriptural foundations of Brahminism (the Manusmriti, the Purusasukta) from culpability. Similarly, characterising caste as an autonomous association (Guntur Medical College, 1976), a self-governing social group, obscures the coercive, hereditary, and exclusionary nature, framing it as a matter of voluntary cultural practice rather than enforced subjugation.

This dualism has concrete effects. The reluctance to fully acknowledge caste as a pan-religious social reality (evident in judgments like Kuldip Singh’s dissent in Indra Sawhney), despite overwhelming evidence of its persistence among Muslims, Christians, and Sikhs, reveals a desire to contain caste as a Hindu problem. This not only ignores the lived experience of Dalit Muslims and Christians but also lets the state off the hook for addressing caste oppression within non-Hindu communities, betraying a constitutional mandate aimed at eradicating the practice, not just its Hindu theological justification.

The language used to describe Scheduled Castes and Tribes is a stark indicator of the court’s embedded assumptions. The CRP report highlights deeply problematic metaphors: the race horse and handicap analogy (Devadasan, 1964), the crutches that cannot be provided for life (Indra Sawhney, 1992), and the portrayal of Adivasi life as primitive and unfit for the mainstream (Chebrolu Leela Prasad, 2020). This discourse is not merely outdated; it is structurally paternalistic and deficit-oriented.

Such language accomplishes regressive goals. Framing centuries of systemic violence and exclusion as a handicap transforms a historical, social wrong into an individual deficiency. The remedy then appears as charitable benevolence (crutches) rather than reparative justice.

The horse race metaphor presupposes that the first-class race horse (the upper caste) is naturally superior. The ordinary horse (the Dalit) is inherently slower, needing a head start. This naturalises caste hierarchy and smuggles in a biological or cultural theory of inherent capability. By describing Adivasi societies as primitive and in need of uplift to contribute to national development echoes colonial and assimilationist logic. 

Contrast this with the powerful, dignity-affirming language found in opinions like Justice Chinappa Reddy’s (Vasanth Kumar), which declared that the demands of the oppressed are “matters of right and not of philanthropy… they ask for parity, and not charity.” Or Justice Chandrachud’s (Sabarimala) unflinching catalogue of atrocities that expose caste as a system of essential humanity denied. This latter discourse aligns with the Constitution’s transformative spirit, recognising oppressed castes not as objects of pity but as subjects of history and bearers of inviolable rights.

The most pernicious manifestation of this defective characterisation is in the discourse on efficiency and merit. Early judgments openly worried that reservations would cause lowering of standards (Devadasan) or grind the wheels of government to a halt (N.M. Thomas, 1976). This constructs efficiency as a neutral, technocratic value inherently threatened by the inclusion of Dalits and Adivasis.  Later judgments like Indra Sawhney and M. Nagaraj (2006) began to acknowledge that merit is socially constructed and context-dependent. The earlier discourse, however, reveals a deep-seated caste prejudice; the conflation of upper-caste privilege with merit, and the framing of social justice as its antithesis. It is telling that the recent judgment upholding reservations for the Economically Weaker Sections (excluding SC/ST/OBC) engaged in no such anxious hand-wringing about efficiency, exposing the caste-based nature of the original anxiety.

The judiciary’s discourse on remedies reveals the ultimate limit of its transformative ambition. Here, the conflict between a radical constitutional mandate and a liberal-conservative judicial instinct is most acute.

A persistent and dangerous strain in judicial thought, from Balaji (1963) to Ashoka Kumar Thakur (2008), argues that backwardness is ultimately and primarily due to poverty. This is a classic liberal move to substitute class for caste, reducing a distinct, socially sanctioned hierarchy of graded inequality to an economic gradient. As the CRP report correctly underscores with empirical evidence, this is sociologically bankrupt. Caste determines access to capital, credit, networks, and markets, as studies on Dalit entrepreneurs and rural economies show. Wealth does not erase caste stigma; a rich Dalit is still a Dalit. While practices of untouchability and segregation continue, lynching of Dalit grooms for riding horses are reported at regular intervals, as also other forms of atrocities.

Justices like Raveendran (Ashoka Kumar Thakur) express the anxiety that caste-based reservations perpetuate caste and create a fractured society. This view is profoundly ahistorical. Caste is not perpetuated by its recognition for remedial purposes; it is perpetuated by its daily practice in marriages, neighborhoods, workplaces, and social interactions, and by the state’s failure to radically redistribute land, wealth, and educational resources. To argue that ceasing to name caste in policy will lead to its disappearance is a form of legal idealism. 

The belief that education alone can eradicate caste (Ashoka Kumar Thakur) ignores how educational institutions themselves are sites of brutal caste discrimination and exclusion. This is perhaps one of the most naïve assumptions documented in the report. From Rohith Vemula to Payal Tadvi, from the IITs to medical colleges, the evidence is overwhelming: modern education does not erase caste; it often intensifies the hostility faced by Dalit students.

Similarly, the call for Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) to address exclusion (Jaishri Patil, 2021), while well-intentioned, outsources a constitutional obligation to the vagaries of capitalist philanthropy. It frames inclusion as a matter of corporate sensitivity rather than a legally enforceable right to non-discrimination in the private sector, a right the judiciary has been reluctant to read into Article 15 or 16. These approaches favour voluntary, depoliticised solutions over mandatory, redistributive justice.

The CRP report is a landmark document for its candid, internal scrutiny. Its ultimate value, however, lies not in its careful, institutional language but in the ammunition it provides for a more fundamental critique. The report reveals a judiciary that is, at best, a contradictory ally in the struggle against caste.

The judicial discourse, even at its most progressive, operates within a liberal constitutional framework that seeks to manage inequality rather than abolish the structures that produce it. Its tools, reservations, anti-discrimination laws, are necessary but insufficient. They provide entry into a system but do not transform the system’s foundational logic.

The rise of authoritarian Hindutva politics, which seeks to homogenise a Hindu nation by papering over caste oppression with majoritarian symbolism, finds tacit support in judicial discourses that minimise caste, romanticise its origins, or treat it as a divisive identity to be transcended. A judiciary that fails to consistently and fiercely name caste as a brutalising system of power emboldens forces that seek to silence Dalit assertion.

True annihilation of caste demands a radical political programme of land redistribution, social control of productive resources and the dismantling of Brahminical cultural hegemony. The CPI(M) Programme identifies the fight for abolition of the caste system as an important component of the democratic revolution, interlinking it with the struggle against class exploitation. Way back in 1979, E M. S Namboodiripad wrote, “One has to realise that the building of India on modern democratic and secular lines requires an uncompromising struggle against the caste-based Hindu society and its culture. There is no question of secular democracy, not to speak of socialism, unless the very citadel of India’s ‘age-old’ civilization and culture, the division of society into a hierarchy of castes – is broken. In other words, the struggle for radical democracy and socialism cannot be separated from the struggle against caste society.”