A person’s surname is not always a deciding factor in determining his or her caste, Bombay High Court has held.
Interestingly, in the present case, Caste Scrutiny Committee had refuted petitioner Deepika Nandnawar’s claim that she was a ‘Halbi’ (an ST), because similar claims of people who shared her surname, had been disproved earlier of their caste identity.
But the division bench of Justices Ranjana Desai and Roshan Dalvi overturned this reasoning recently.
When they were unable to prove that these ‘other Nandanwars’ were not blood relatives of the girl, their caste has no relevance in determining her caste, the court said.
Deepika Nandanwar, currently an MBBS student of G S Seth Medical College, was given the certificate of being a ‘Halbi’ while she was in school.
In November 2005, prior to her Class XII exam, she filed an application with Scheduled Tribes Certificate Scrutiny Committee, to get her certificate validated.
The committee initiated an inquiry in February 2006 and reported her claim to be genuine. But the committee ordered another inquiry, which was conducted by another senior inspector.
His report said that in Amravati there were 29 persons, all with the surname Nandanwar, whose claims of belonging to ‘Halbi’ tribe had been dismissed by the Amravati scrutiny committee.

Not her relatives

Based on this report, in January 2007, the committee invalidated Nandanwar’s certificate. She challenged it before the High Court. Her lawyer R K Mendadkar argued that these persons sharing her surname were not her blood relatives. Both Deepika and her father, also a doctor, filed affidavits.
Moreover, there were two documents dating back to pre-independence era which backed her claim, he said.
One was a school leaving certificate of 1922 of her grandfather, another was a 1923 sale-deed in her great grandfather’s name. Both documents showed their tribe to be Halbi.
The court accepted this argument in the judgement delivered last month.
“Surname by itself is not indicative of the caste,” and these two “pre-constitution period” documents were more relevant, the court said.
The court also warned that if their claims of those the other Nandanwars not being their blood relatives was disproved, both will lose their degrees.