Supreme Court upholds Madras High Court: conversion to Islam alone cannot confer backward-class quota

The Supreme Court has upheld a Madras High Court ruling that struck down Tamil Nadu’s Government Order Ms. No. 15, finding that conversion to Islam by itself does not entitle a person to claim backward-class reservation.

A bench of Justices Prashant Kumar Mishra and Shree Chandrashekhar delivered the decision, affirming the Madras court’s legal reasoning and rejecting the State’s challenge to the high court order. The dispute began with a petition by Sameer Ahamed, formerly named Paramasivam, who was born into a Hindu family in Tamil Nadu and converted to Islam in 2015.

After his conversion and name change, Ahamed applied for a community certificate asserting membership of the Muslim Lebbai community; the Tahsildar denied his application, and the matter ultimately reached the Madras High Court. The Madras court set aside Government Order Ms. No. 15, which had allowed converts to Islam to claim backward-class Muslim status.

The Supreme Court agreed with the Madras High Court’s analysis that a conversion from the Hindu social order to a non-Hindu social order does not permit a person to rely on pre-conversion social backwardness to claim benefits under Article 16(4) of the Constitution.

In its reasoning, the Supreme Court cited the Constitution (Scheduled Castes) Order, 1950, and pointed to Paragraph 3 of that Order, which recognises Scheduled Caste status only for persons professing Hinduism, Sikhism or Buddhism, subject to specified requirements. Government Order Ms. No. 15, the subject of the litigation, was issued on March 9, 2024.

The Supreme Court’s ruling therefore leaves in place the Madras High Court’s quashing of that notification and confirms the legal position articulated by the high court regarding conversion and entitlement to affirmative action benefits.

The case centres on how legal protections and affirmative-action categories interact with religious conversion, and the court’s judgment emphasises that pre-conversion social status alone cannot be the basis for claiming backward-class reservation after conversion.

The court’s reference to constitutional orders governing Scheduled Caste recognition framed its reasoning about the limits on extending reservation benefits based solely on an individual’s pre-conversion social condition. By affirming the Madras High Court’s decision, the Supreme Court resolved the state’s challenge to the strike-down of Government Order Ms. No.

15 and clarified that, under the reasoning adopted by the courts, conversion to Islam does not automatically confer backward-class reservation rights where the pre-conversion social order is the sole basis for the claim.