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Polity & Governance
Mahesh

20/01/24 06:48 AM IST

Sub-categorisation among SCs

In News
  • The apex court will soon decide if states have the power to create these sub-classifications when providing reservations or if such power is vested only with the President.
Beginning of Sub-categorisation
  • In 1975, the Punjab government issued a notification dividing its 25% SC reservation at that time into two categories.
  • In the first category, seats were reserved solely for the Balmiki and Mazhbi Sikh communities, which were and continue to be considered two of the most economically and educationally backward communities in the state. As a result, they were to be given first preference for any reservations in education and public employment.
  • The second category consisted of the rest of the SC communities, which didn’t get this preferential treatment.
  • It was one of the first instances of existing reservations being ‘sub-classified’ by a state to provide benefits to certain communities beyond what was already being offered to scheduled caste communities as a whole.
  • Article 341 of the Constitution which gives the President the power to create a list of SC communities for the purposes of reservation.
  • The five-judge bench held that this meant states did not have the power to “interfere” or “disturb” this list, including through sub-classification, and that doing so would violate Article 341.
The Supreme court ruling
  • In 2020, the constitution bench headed by Justice Arun Mishra held that the court’s 2004 decision in E V Chinnaiah required reconsideration.
  • The ruling noted that the Court and the state “cannot be a silent spectator and shut its eyes to stark realities.”
  • The ruling disagreed with the premise that Scheduled Castes are a homogeneous group and said that there are “unequals within the list of Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, and socially and educationally backward classes.”
  • In the landmark 2018 ruling in ‘Jarnail Singh v Lachhmi Narain Gupta’, the Supreme Court upheld the concept of “creamy layer” within SCs too.
  • The ‘Creamy layer’ concept puts an income ceiling on those eligible for reservations. While this concept applies to Other Backward Castes (OBC), it was applied to promotions of SCs for the first time in 2018.
  • States have argued that the sub-classification is essentially an application of the creamy layer formula, where instead of excluding the better-off castes from the Scheduled Caste list, the state is merely giving preferential treatment to the most disadvantageous castes.
  • Apart from Balmikis and Mazhabi Sikhs in Punjab and Madiga in Andhra Pradesh, Paswans in Bihar, the Jatavs in UP, and Arundhatiyars in Tamil Nadu will also be impacted by the sub-classification strategy.
Source- Indian Express

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