SC says Jats not OBCs, quota politics takes hit

NEW DEAL Caste can’t be sole criterion for determining backwardness, says court

NEW DELHI: In a landmark verdict, the Supreme Court on Tuesday told the government to look beyond caste and evolve new methods to identify social groups as backward for the purpose of reservation in jobs and education.

Striking down the previous UPA government’s decision to include the politically influential Jat community in the central Other Backward Classes (OBCs) list, a bench of justices Ranjan Gogoi and Rohinton F Nariman said though caste may be a prominent and distinguishing factor for easy determination of backwardness, it cannot be the sole criterion.

“New practices, methods and yardsticks have to be continuously evolved, moving away from castecentricdefinitionof backwardness,” the bench said, citing the court’s historic verdict last year giving legal recognition to transgenders. It said the government must identify such new emerging groups as socially and educationally backward classes based on ground realities.

The ruling forces the government SUPREME COURT to crunch data and not lean on historical injustice to decide who gets benefits; it also takes away a trump card that political parties in power have played over the years to win votes.

The court scrapped the March 2014 notification that included Jats from nine states — Bihar, Gujarat, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Delhi, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand — in the central OBC list, saying the decision was based on “outdated data” and amounted to “retrograde governance”.

The SC judgment came on a batch of petitions challenging the Centre’s decision on the grounds that it ignored the advice of the National Commission for Backward Classes (NCBC) against including Jats and that it was politically motivated as it came a day before Lok Sabha polls were announced. The NDA had defended its predecessor’s decision.

Uttar Pradesh Rashtriya Lok Dal president Munna Singh Chauhan blamed the Narendra Modi government for not pursuing the case properly in court.

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