What is State of Punjab vs Davinder Singh case
A seven-judge Bench of the Supreme Court of India will deliver its judgment in State of Punjab vs Davinder Singh, on a question of law that carries with it enormous significance for the future of affirmative action and reservations under the Constitution.
Studies and data have shown that although they have been bracketed into two homogenous categories.
As Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, within the groups there are differing levels of development.
Some castes are more discriminated against than others.
The judgment in Davinder Singh will seek to answer this.
The State governments not be afforded the power to recognise intra-group variances.
And, in doing so, it might well serve to provide much needed clarity to an area of law that has long required mending.
Its implications for affirmative action policies in the country
Beyond this, at the root of the matter is the Constitution’s collective commitment to equality.
Contained in Articles 14 to 16, which can be read together as a code, is a promise of substantive equality.
This guarantee recognises that individuals, throughout India’s history, have been discriminated against based on their caste.
Therefore, our constitutional vision demands that we be mindful of group interests in striving to ensure equal treatment.
Under this model, reservations must be seen not as a measure in conflict with — and in exception to — the basic notion of equality, but, instead, as a means to furthering and entrenching that goal.
Indeed, since its judgment in State Of Kerala & Anr vs N.M. Thomas & Ors (1975), the Supreme Court has, at least in theory, appeared to acknowledge that governments not only possess
the power to make reservations — and correct historical wrongs — but also have a positive duty to ensure substantive equality.
If the Government of Punjab were to find on the basis of its studies — and it certainly has in this case.
The existing measures of reservation have not adequately reached Balmikis and Mazhabi Sikhs, then it is constitutionally obligated to ensure that these measures are corrected.
If Article 341 is seen as constituting a bar against sub-classification, then that prohibition would run athwart the Constitution’s equality code.
In any case, even on a plain reading, Article 341 does not impose such a prohibition.
It merely proscribes State governments from including or excluding castes from the President’s list of SCs.
Where States provide special measures to certain castes that are within this list, they do not act to include or exclude other castes from the list.
Those castes will continue to be entitled to the State’s general provisions of reservation.
Arguments for allowing sub-classification
In the case of the Punjab law, it decidedly does not modify the President’s list.
It merely accounts for inter se backwardness within that list by providing for a greater degree of preference to Balmikis and Mazhabi Sikhs.
This sub-classification is also in keeping with the Constitution’s time-honoured theory that reasonable classifications are permissible to ensure that equality is achieved.
Once we see the list of SCs and STs not as homogenous categories, but as comprising different castes with differing levels of development, a sub-classification will have to be
judged on its own merits.
That is, the Court will only have to examine whether Balmikis and Mazhabi Sikhs are intelligibly differentiable from other castes within the President’s list, and whether the grant of preferential treatment to them.
The extent of such grant bears a rational nexus with the law’s larger objective of ensuring fair treatment.
It is time the Supreme Court takes seriously what it recognised in N.M. Thomas, that governments have both a power to make reservations and a duty to ensure that the constitutional dream of equality is achieved.
To that end, any authority vested in the States to provide for special measures to those castes within SCs and STs who are most discriminated against must be seen as a way of making real the idea of equal opportunity.
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