The Supreme Court on December 16 took on board a batch of petitions, including one by the Tamil Nadu Government, challenging a Madras High Court decision to quash a State quota law which provided 10.5% special reservation to Vanniyars, a most backward community.
A three-judge Bench of Justices L. Nageswara Rao, B.R. Gavai and B.V. Nagarathna ordered that no fresh appointments to State Government services or admissions to educational institutions should be made till February 15, the next date of hearing in the case.
However, admissions and appointments already made, pursuant to a Madras High Court order of August 25, would not be disturbed. The High Court did not stay the Vanniyar quota law, following which the appointments and admissions were made in the State. But on November 1, the High Court went on to quash the quota law, leaving the appointments and admissions made vulnerable.
The Bench said the case was important and had implications on the future of a large number of students, State Government employees, etc. The court said it had to be heard expeditiously. The Bench scheduled the case for back-to-back hearings on February 15 and 16. It asked the lawyers in both sides to prepare their pleadings and organised three lawyers from either side to make convenience compilations of the records and arguments in the case to avoid delay during the hearings in February.
Tamil Nadu has argued that the High Court decision to quash the law was based on the ground that the State had no legislative competence and the special reservation was provided with caste as basis and without quantifiable data.
Justice Rao, at the beginning of the hearing, referred to the 105th Constitutional Amendment which restored the power identify socially and educationally backward classes to the States.
The Government said Tamil Nadu had been a “pioneer State with regard to grant of reservation.”
“The Most Backward Classes within the Backward Classes were identified in Tamil Nadu as early as in 1957, when they were considered equivalent to Scheduled Castes but without the factor of untouchability,” the petition has explained.
It said some of these communities were impacted by the criminal tribes' laws of the British and enlisted as Most Backward Classes.
The recommendation for 10.5% reservation to the Vanniyakula Kshatriya was made in commensuration with their population as enumerated in a survey held in 1983 by the Tamil Nadu Second Backward Classes Commission.
“The State had enacted the Act in 2021 only based on adequate authenticated data on population of the Most Backward Classes and Denotified Communities enumerated by the Tamil Nadu Second Backward Classes Commission in the year 1983,” the Government contended.
Tamil Nadu said that the caste-wise population data disclosed by the commission was the “only authenticated data available as of now before the State; and such data can be used effectively to plan for sub-classification within backward classes of citizens”.
“Totally brushing aside such an authentic survey just for the insignificant observations in the note of dissenting Members of that commission on the population enumerated on few of the communities in the order [of the High Court] cannot be sustained,” the State petition said in the Supreme Court.
It said the High Court had decided to focus on these observations rather than the “stupendous” exercise conducted for two years by the commission and the State for enumeration of the data.
