areas tend to have the least pressure to maintain caste classes and Protestant churches are aid to be best represented in this background. After conversion, people in India lose any privileges they had in their former caste, while those in lower castes often gain more opportunities. Although a significant number of Indian Christians are unofficially reported to be Dalit Christians, the Sachar Committee on Muslim Affairs reported that only 9% of Indian Christians have Scheduled Caste status, with a further 32.8% having Scheduled Tribe status, and 24.8% belonging to other disadvantaged groups. In the 1990s there were protests against those Christian organizations that still practiced some form of the caste system and for discrimination in leadership positions; Dalits saw those practices as contrary to Jesus's egalitarianism. Dalit Christians have frequently criticized the Church for not just tolerating but hiding the discriminatory practices among Dalit Christians. Leonard Fernando, G. Gispert-Sauch writes that: "Today, no Indian Christian think would approve or speak of tolerating the caste reality. There are many, however, who live in it." Dalits that have become Christians in south India have transformed their position as just spectators in Hindu religious practice to that of leaders and representatives of the Christian religion; they have also become influential promoters of Dalit political aspirations. Reservation Reservation is available to Dalits who follow Hinduism, Buddhism, and Sikhism, but Dalit Christians and Muslims are not protected as castes under Indian Reservation policy. The Indian constitution in 1950 abolished untouchability, converting those castes to scheduled castes and tribes: in doing so it also provided a system of affirmative action (called the Reservation Policy) whereby 22.5 percent of all government and semi-government jobs including seats in Parliament and state legislatures were reserved for those in those castes; the law also set aside space for admission to schools and colleges. In 1980 the constitutional policy was extended to cover the rest of the 3,743 backward castes in the country. But Christians who claim to belong to no caste are not included in the quotas, meaning those Dalits who convert to Christianity are no longer part of the affirmative action program run by the government. Dalit Christians have now appealed to the government to extend the benefits of reservation policy to Dalit Christians to improve their employment opportunities. In 2008, a study commissioned by the National Commission for Minorities suggested extension of reservation to Dalit Muslims and Dalit