Summary
The Court set aside the invalidation of the appellant's Scheduled Tribe (Koli Mahadev) claim, holding that a pre-Independence 1943 school entry for his grandfather, which the Court itself examined and found free of interpolation, deserved greater probative value than the Scrutiny Committee and High Court gave it, and that failing the affinity test cannot by itself defeat a tribe claim.
Issues
- Whether the Scrutiny Committee and the High Court were justified in disbelieving the 1943 school admission and leaving extract of the appellant's grandfather recording his caste as Koli Mahadev.
- Whether the appellant's inability to depose to the customs and traditions of the Koli Mahadev tribe (failing the affinity test) was a sufficient ground to invalidate his caste claim.
- Whether the absence of any previously validated caste certificate in the family justified rejection of the claim.
Held
- Following Anand v. Committee for Scrutiny and Verification of Tribe Claims, greater reliance may be placed on pre-Independence documents in assessing a caste claim because they carry a higher probative value than post-Independence documents, and the affinity test must be applied cautiously; it may corroborate documentary evidence but cannot be the sole criterion for rejecting a claim. (¶¶ 7, 8)
- Though the handwriting expert's report on interpolation was inconclusive, the Court examined the 1943 entry with a magnifying glass and found the words Koli Mahadev written in the same ink and hand, leaving no scope for interpolation; the later school records of the appellant's father and uncle were consistent with it. Disbelieving the pre-Independence document on presumptions and assumptions was unsustainable. (¶¶ 9, 10, 12)
- That the appellant and his father were the first in the family to seek validation, so that no validated document existed, was not a valid reason for rejecting the claim. (¶ 11)
- With migration, modernisation and the entry of tribal populations into mainstream society, a claimant's inability to recollect the anthropological and ethnological traits, deity, rituals, customs or ceremonies of the tribe cannot by itself be a ground to deny the claim; as reiterated by the three-Judge Bench in Maharashtra Adiwasi Thakur Jamat Swarakshan Samiti, the affinity test is not a litmus test and is not an essential part of the determination in every case. (¶¶ 13, 14, 15)
Result
Appeal allowed; High Court judgment dated 23 July 2024 quashed and set aside; appellant held to belong to the Koli Mahadev Tribe; Scrutiny Committee directed to issue a Caste Validity Certificate within six weeks.