Bombay HC: a woman's tribal-caste certificate restored after a nearly three-decade fight to prove her identity

The Bombay High Court directed authorities to issue a Scheduled Tribe caste certificate to a woman whose claim to belong to the Thakur tribe had been challenged and re-litigated for close to thirty years, through three rounds of scrutiny-committee proceedings, two earlier remands by the High Court, a Division Bench that once dismissed her case, and finally a Supreme Court order sending it back for a fresh, individual decision. Her certificate, first issued in 1988, had been invalidated in 1997 after a caste-scrutiny committee relied almost entirely on an affinity test, a subjective assessment of a claimant's cultural traits and practices, and set aside pre-constitutional documentary evidence she had produced, including her great-grandfather's 1944 entry in the village Kotwal Register and her father's 1949 school-admission record.

A Division Bench of Justices M.S. Karnik and Sandesh D. Patil held that the Scrutiny Committee had erred by discarding high-value historical documents in favour of the affinity test, which the Supreme Court has repeatedly warned is unreliable on its own, and ordered that she be recognised as belonging to the Thakur Scheduled Tribe and issued a fresh certificate within eight weeks. The judgment closes a dispute over her identity and the reservation benefits attached to it that had run for most of her adult life.