India: Top court rules against caste-based tasks in prisons

The Supreme Court in India ordered that caste details of prisoners be deleted from prison registries in a push to combat discrimination. 

Until now, prisons allocated inmates from oppressed communities to carry out menial jobs. The court found that promoting caste-based allocations of work in prisons goes against the country's constitution.

A bench made up of Chief Justice DY Chandrachud and Justices JB Pardiwala and Manoj Misra said legal changes to curtail the practice must be implemented within three months.

Court probe prompted by journalist

The petition to the court was filed by journalist Sukanya Shantha, who previously published an investigative report on caste-based discrimination and segregation in Indian prisons for The Wire magazine.

According to the report, prison officials would assign labor on the "purity-impurity" scale. This means the higher castes would handle only work that is considered "pure" and those lower in the caste grid being left to carry out the "impure" jobs.

In the Wednesday verdict, however, the court ruled that prisoners from oppressed communities cannot be assigned menial, degrading or inhumane work merely because of their caste identity.

"We have held that assigning cleaning and sweeping to marginalized and assigning cooking to higher caste is nothing but a violation of Article 15," the judges said. "Such indirect uses of phrases which target so-called lower castes cannot be used within our constitutional framework, even if caste is not explicitly mentioned, 'menial' etc targets the same."

Article 15 of India's Constitution prohibits discrimination based on religion, race, caste, sex or place of birth.

"All such provisions [enabling caste discrimination] are held to be unconstitutional," the judges added. "All states are directed to make changes in accordance with the judgement."

Deep roots of the caste system

India's caste system, which splits up Hindus into different societal groups according to their birth, is thought by researchers to go back some 3,000 years.

Hindus are divided up into classes — based on the principle of "varna," which literally means "color" — the Brahmins (the priestly class), the Kshatriyas (the ruling, administrative and warrior class), the Vaishyas (the class of artisans, tradesmen, farmers and merchants) and the Shudras (manual workers). There are also people who fall outside the system, including tribal people and the Dalits, previously dismissed as "untouchables."

The concept of "jati," meaning "birth," also underlies the caste system and causes its differentiation into thousands of sub-groups based on lineage or kinship.

For centuries, inter-caste marriage was forbidden, and in villages, castes mostly lived separately and did not share amenities such as wells.

Human dignity at stake

As part of Thursday's ruling, India's Supreme Court declared that caste-based discrimination of prisoners, segregation of their work, and the treatment of inmates from the "Denotified Tribes" as "habitual offenders" within prisons, was against fundamental human dignity.

Furthermore, dividing prisoners based on their caste would only reinforce animosity, according to the top court.

"Segregation would not lead to rehabilitation… Only such classification [of prisoners] that proceeds from an objective inquiry of factors such as work aptitude, accommodation needs, special medical and psychological needs of the prisoner would pass constitutional muster," Chief Justice Chandrachud said.

The judgment deemed that forcing marginalized caste inmates to carry out tasks such as cleaning latrines or sweeping, without giving them any choice, was a form of coercion.