Bhubaneswar,November 14(Odisha.in) RSS backed All India SC and ST Reservation Protection cell national president and former Chairman of the National Commission for SC and ST Bizay Sonkar Shastri said that the recent move of the UPA Government for setting up Justice Ranganath Misra commission was purely unconstitutional and amendment in the Article 15(Clause-iv) was defamatory in nature.
The National Commission for Religious and Linguistic Minorities (NCRLM) chaired by Justice Ranganath Mishra, the former Chief Justice of India, recommended the Centre to grant equal rights as Scheduled Castes to the Christians of Scheduled Caste Origin.
“We have decided to educate Schedule Caste people to struggle for their rights and massive rally will be held here in the State Capital on Wednesday,” Shastri said.
Cell believes the Government is planning to implement the Ranganath Mishra Commission’s recommendation that SC status be completely delinked from religion, he argued.
The move has infuriated the Hindutva organisations and it is all set to take up the battle both on the ground in the hinterland, where it is pitted head to head against the Church, and also at political level, he warned.
He further cautioned the Government that any effort to implement the recommendations of the commission, which are against the Constitution, is fraught with serious consequences.
“We call upon the Government not to succumb to the pressure tactics of the Church lobby in politics and outside and to stand steadfast on the path carved out by the leaders in the last several decades by rejecting the demand for inclusion of such converts into the Scheduled Castes category,” he said.
Let the Pope first declare that there was a caste system in his religion, he said. He was critical of the “brazenness of the petitioners”, who have gone to the Supreme Court with the demand of inclusion of the Christian converts in the SC category, with the contention that Dalits remain Dalits even after converting to Christianity.
Odisha.in