Supreme Court sets aside law on Maratha reservation

NEW DELHI: Reservation breaching the 50% limit will create a society based on “caste rule”, held the Supreme Court on Wednesday as it quashed a 2018 Maharashtra law providing quotas for Marathas in jobs and education while also refusing to consider scrapping the 50% ceiling.

The top court also dealt a severe blow to the authority of state governments in identifying backward classes by ruling that after the 2018 amendment in the Constitution, only the central government could notify socially and educationally backward classes (SEBCs).

The interpretation of the 102nd constitutional amendment -- which related to giving constitutional status to the National Commission of Backward Classes -- may impinge on the power of states to provide reservation benefits after separately identifying backward classes, especially at a time when several dominant communities – such as Jats, Patels and Gujjars – are demanding separate quotas.

The judgment on a clutch of petitions was delivered by a fivejudge bench — comprising justices Ashok Bhushan, L Nageswara Rao, S Abdul Nazeer, Hemant Gupta and S Ravindra Bhat — which scrapped the validity of the Maratha quota law that breached the 50% limit.

While all five judges were unanimous in declaring Maratha quota law “unsustainable” and in affirming that the 50%

The Supreme Court quashed a Maharashtra law for the reservation to Marathas in jobs and educational institutions and declined to review the 50% ceiling on quota

SC said the quota breached the 50% ceiling on reservation, and that the state govt failed to show any extraordinary reason why Marathas were socially and economically backward.

ceiling on total reservation was inviolable, the ruling on depriving states of the power to identify SEBCs came by a majority of 3-2. Justices Bhushan and Nazeer said that states could still have their own list of SEBCs -- a view overruled by the majority.

Underlining that the 50% upper limit as fixed by a ninejudge bench in the Indra Sawhney case (famously known as the Mandal Commission case) in 1992 follows principles of reasonability and equality, the bench unanimously said that “to change the 50% limit is to have a society which is not founded on equality but based on caste rule”.