Limit and excess: On the Patna High Court judgment and enhanced reservation
Creamy layer should be kept out, but the ceiling on quota is artificial
However, it is unfortunate that the court was so zealous about the reservation ceiling, that it rejected the State’s argument on the existence of special circumstances. Indra Sawhney did allow the quota ceiling to be exceeded in “extraordinary situations”. It suggested that the population living in remote or far-flung areas may require to be treated in a different way. The court seems to have taken that geographical remoteness is the only special situation to justify an enhanced quota and denied the benefit to Bihar. It is difficult to believe that a State which is backward in most parameters of human and social development should be denied the use of its executive and legislative power to expand its social justice programme. The court surely saw merit in the argument that there was no in-depth study before enhanced reservation was implemented. This raises the question whether the survey was indeed quite exhaustive when it gave a caste-wise break-up of the population and their economic conditions. While there may be a case for pruning the BC or EBC list based on the progress made over the last few decades, it might not be just to stymie every attempt to enhance the numerical representation of historically deprived sections on the ground that it exceeds the quota ceiling.
