Bombay High Court dismisses plea seeking Scheduled Tribe status for Dhangar community

The Bombay High Court on Friday dismissed a bunch of petitions seeking directions to the Maharashtra government to categorise Dhangar (shepherd) community as a Scheduled Tribe (ST) [Maharani Ahilyadevi Samaj Prabodhan Manch v. State of Maharashtra].The petitioners claimed that the community was listed as ‘Dhangar’ community instead of as ‘Dhangad’ community because of a typographical error and that resulted in the exclusion of the community from the ST category.The petitions also sought an inquiry into their claim that the ‘Dhangad’ tribe was non-existent in Maharashtra and there were only 'Dhangars'. They claimed that with respect to Maharashtra, the entry ‘Dhangad’ in the Presidential Order (PO) of 1950 and the subsequent amendment of 1956 was meant to apply to the ‘Dhangar’ community. However, a division bench of Justices GS Patel and Kamal Khata observed in its order that the petitioners failed to establish that the ‘Dhangad’ community did not exist in the former state of Bombay (reorganised as Maharashtra) when the PO was issued..The PO, also known as the Constitution (Scheduled Castes) Order, identified those castes which have experienced extreme social, educational and economic backwardness. These castes came to be identified as the ‘Scheduled Castes’..The Court observed that the entries in the PO can only be modified by the parliament because of the diversity of the country.“The PO is sacrosanct and it is inviolate and it cannot even be modified by subsequent notification. Its entries can be included or excluded only by an act of parliament. The rationale for this, in a country as diverse as ours, is to define obligation and duties, the law demarcates factual position,” the court observed..It added that the list was necessary for making adjustments for entitlements including reservations and constant changes in the list would create chaos for availing benefits.“If these entries are to be constantly modified, changed or chopped, it will result in chaos in the administration and no person will know whether the benefit availed today is liable to be taken away by judicial fiat tomorrow or what the consequences are likely to be,” the Court emphasized..The bench also refused to conduct the enquiry into whether Dhangad tribe was non-existent in Maharashtra before 1950. It placed reliance on a Supreme Court judgment which had ruled that for the court to intervene, it has to be shown that the Dhangad community was a zero class member community.The same was not done in the present case.The petitioners had also cited an instance wherein a family from Aurangabad had obtained ST certificate under ‘Dhangad’ in 1952. The family had subsequently filed affidavits before the High Court seeking disavowal as ‘Dhangad’..The family claimed that they were in fact ‘Dhangars’ belonging to the Nomadic Tribes and the certificates for ‘Dhangad’ had been issued under the ‘incorrect impression’ that the two groups were in fact the same but the words were typographical errors.However, the High Court did not accept this contention. “It is not possible to accept that the 1952 or 1953 documents have been tampered with. None suggested this till today. Only now after petitions were filed, were these disavowals made. It means the class 'Dhangad' in 1950 was not a zero-member class. Later disavowals are infinitely problematic,” the Court held.