NEW DELHI: Supreme Court Thursday expressed its reservation about directing governments to implement its Aug 2024 landmark ruling to bar those belonging to creamy layer within SC and ST categories from taking quota benefits, and also to sub-classify SC/STs to extend the benefit of reservation to the more needy among the two categories. The court said it was for legislature and executive to take a call, reports
Amit Anand Choudhary.
But govts have been reluctant to act on the prickly issue, with dominant sections among Dalits opposing the sub-categorisation ruling. Aggrieved by this, an MP resident moved SC, seeking direction to the state to implement the order in recruitments done by it.
Time now for legislature & executive to take a call: SC
Advocate Siddharth Gupta, appearing for the petitioner, told a bench of Justices B R Gavai and Augustine George Masih that all govt departments/PSUs must be directed to stop reservation benefits being extended to the creamy layer within SCs/STs.
The SC bench, however, said it had passed the order but it was now for legislature and executive to take a decision. “We have given our view that taking into consideration the experience of the past 75 years, such persons who have already availed benefits and are in a position to compete with others, should be excluded from reservation. But it is a call to be taken by executive and legislature,” the bench said. Indicating the court’s limitation, the bench said that the attorney general had a day earlier argued that the court should not interfere in policy decisions.
As the petitioner pleaded that govt would not frame policy as family members of policymakers would also be deprived of reservation due to the creamy lawyer criterion, the bench said, “Legislators are there and legislators can enact a law.”
Gavai, who was part of the seven-judge bench — and its lone Dalit judge — that passed the landmark order last Aug that permitted sub-categorisation of castes within the SC community, had asked states to devise a framework to identify and exclude creamy layer among SCs/STs from availing reservation benefits. He had said that a mechanism especially suited for SCs/STs was needed, as the OBC creamy layer principle could not be applied to them. “ The state must evolve a policy for identifying the creamy layer even from SCs and STs so as exclude them from the benefit of affirmative action. Only this and this alone can achieve the real equality enshrined under the Constitution,” he had said. The then CJI D Y Chandrachud and Justices Vikram Nath, Pankaj Mithal, Manoj Misra and S C Sharma concurred with Gavai.
“If a person from such a category, by bagging the benefit of reservation, achieved a position of a peon or maybe a sweeper, he would continue to belong to a socially, economically and educationally backward class. At the same time, people from this category, who after having availed the benefits of reservation, have reached high echelons in life cannot be considered to be socially, economically and educationally backward so as to continue availing the benefit of affirmative action. They have already reached a stage where on their own accord they should walk out of the special provisions and give way to the deserving and needy,” Gavai had said.
