Reservations about reservations

SC reiterates the basic principle of affirmative action

The Supreme Court’s judgment quashing a Maharashtra law that provided reservations in public jobs and educational institutions to the Maratha community marks an important step in the enduring controversy over the ambit of affirmative action in India. In 2018, the state government had passed the Maharashtra State Reservation for Socially and Educationally Backward Classes (SEBC) Act, extending reservations to the Maratha community in public education and employment, which would take aggregate quotas over the 50 per cent mark. This law was enacted following the conclusions of a commission, which found that the Maratha community was socially and educationally backward and had inadequate representation in public employment. It recommended reserving 12 and 13 per cent, respectively, in education and public employment.

The SEBC Act was challenged in the Bombay High Court, which upheld it, but reduced the amount of reservation recommended by the Gaikwad commission. Wednesday’s judgment by a five-judge Constitution Bench struck down both the findings of the commission and set aside the Bombay High Court judgment validating the state’s SEBC Act. The essence of the ruling by the Supreme Court Bench was that there were no “exceptional circumstances” or “extraordinary situation” in Maharashtra that required the state government to break the 50 per cent ceiling limit to reserve quotas for the Maratha community. It held that a separate reservation for the Maratha community violated Article 14 (the right to equality) and Article 15 (prohibition of discrimination on grounds of religion, race, caste, sex or place of birth) of the Constitution.

There are two important signals from this judgment. The first is that it reiterates the basic principle of affirmative action, which is to offer equal opportunities for historically socially backward communities and rejects reservations for communities that do not fall within this ambit. The Maratha community, for instance, cannot be said to fall within the definition of a backward caste. It is a politically dominant and reasonably powerful community that accounts for a little over a third of the state’s population. The bulk of the state’s chief ministers, in fact, have come from this community. This judgment, therefore, could provide legal ballast to deter the kind of political movements that created a demand for similar quotas for powerful local castes such as the Patidars in Gujarat and Jats in Haryana.

The second important signal is that it has reiterated the 50 per cent ceiling on reservations prescribed by its 1992 judgment (known as the Indra Sawhney case), and has declined to refer this latter judgment to a larger Bench. This has implications for at least 10 states, including Tamil Nadu, that offer reservations well in excess of the 50 per cent quota. Although the judgment upheld the validity of the 102nd Amendment, which introduced the National Commission for Backward Classes, the judges differed on whether the state legislatures had the authority to provide benefits to socially and educationally backward communities in their own jurisdictions. The specific point of contention was over Article 342A, which empowers the president to specify such communities in a state; judges differed over whether this article strips states of their discretionary powers to include backward communities in their lists. This could become a febrile issue in the years ahead as jobs in the Indian economy are likely to remain scarce for some time to come.