In a landmark decision, Supreme Court permitted states to sub-categorise castes within the scheduled castes (SC) based on socio-economic backwardness and degree of under-representation in govt jobs to ensure that the larger pie of 15% SC quota goes to backwards among them. It also asked govts to devise suitable criteria to bar the ‘creamy layer’ among SCs and STs from availing reservation.
By a 6:1 majority ruling, a bench of Chief Justice D Y Chandrachud and Justices B R Gavai, Vikram Nath, Bela M Trivedi, Pankaj Mithal, Manoj Misra and S C Sharma overruled the 2004 judgment of a five-judge bench in EV Chinnaiah case which had said SCs were a homogeneous group and could not be sub-categorised. Justice Trivedi dissented and said the Chinnaiah judgment was constitutionally valid.
To minimise politics and executive play over extension of the ‘quota within quota’ concept to scheduled castes, the court clarified that sub- classification of castes within SCs cannot be based on govt’s whims or political considerations.
The top court firmly said sub-classification of the most backward among the SC community must be based on empirical data, both quantifiable and demonstrable, regarding their backwardness. The logic behind the court’s suggestion for keeping the ‘creamy layer’ out is that children of civil servants and others from among the SCs who have moved up the socio-economic ladder and received good education are not deserving of quotas.
At present, creamy layer exclusion policy is applicable only to other backward classes (OBCs).
The CJI authored a 140-page judgment for himself and Justice Misra. Justices Nath, Mithal and Sharma, through separate opinions, agreed with the opinions of the CJI and Justice Gavai. Both the CJI and Justice Gavai agreed with each other, thus making six of the seven judges concur on the constitutional permissibility of sub-classification of SCs.
It was Justice Gavai, the lone Dalit judge on the bench, who mustered the courage to hold that those among SC/ST communities who have got top positions in civil services and risen high in socio-economic strata must get excluded from the reservation scheme for scheduled castes, who were socially discriminated for centuries.
