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No quota within quota, rules SC New Delhi, November 5 It was not permissible to have micro-reservation within the reservation quota provided for a particular class of people under the Presidential list, a five-judge Constitution Bench, headed by Mr Justice N Santosh Hegde ruled. Quashing the Andhra Pradesh Scheduled Castes (Rationalisation of Reservation) Act, 2000, dividing SC community in four sub-groups of ‘A, B, C D’ to give them “reservation within reservation”, the apex court said “adequate representation must be given to the members of the SC as a group and not to two or more groups of persons, or members of castes.” The Bench, comprising Mr Justice Hegde, Mr Justice S.N. Variava, Mr Justice B.P. Singh, Mr Justice H.K. Sema and Mr Justice S.B. Sinha, said the splitting of the reservation further was violative of Article 14 of the Constitution, which guaranteed the right to equality to citizen. People belonging to the SC category were most backward classes of society, but it was not permissible to further classify them into sub-groups for the purpose of reservation, the court said. The Andhra Pradesh Government, headed by the Telugu Desam leader N Chandrababu Naidu, had passed the AP SC (Rationalisation of Reservation) Act in May 2000. Its validity was upheld by the AP High Court’s full Bench when challenged in a batch of petitions. Aggrieved by the High Court order, they had filed appeals in the apex court, which referred the matter to the Constitution Bench. Setting aside the High Court verdict, the apex court said the classification of the members of different classes of people within the SC, based on their respective castes, would also be violative of “the doctrine of reasonableness”, as Article 341 provides that only Parliament was competent to exclude a part or a group of castes from the Presidential list on reservation, not the State Assembly. “The state legislatures are forbidden” from passing such a legislation and it was beyond the competence of the State Government to promulgate an ordinance on the issue,” the court said, adding that “a uniform yardstick” must be adopted for providing reservation to the under privileged classes. The AP Government had initially promulgated an ordinance for
splitting the reservation facilities to SC in December 1999 and later the State Assembly had passed the Act on
May 2, 2000.  |
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