How Justice BR Gavai and Pankaj Mithal went off-topic in SC/ST subclassification judgment

Of the six separate opinions rendered in Thursday’s landmark Supreme Court judgment that permitted sub-classification for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes in reservations by state governments, two stood out for dealing with subjects out of the purview of the case.

The only questions the court was required to adjudicate dealt with the permissibility of creating sub-quotas within the reservations for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes and the competence of state legislatures to do so.

Reserving seats for specific sub-groups within the quotas earmarked for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes would help groups that are more backward and disadvantaged, the court held.

However, Justice BR Gavai also expounded on applying the creamy layer principle to reservations for the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes. This principle aims to exclude the wealthier and more advanced members within a group from the benefits of affirmative action policies.

Justice Pankaj Mithal went even further off-topic, making the tenuous claim in his judgment that the caste system never existed in “primitive India”. He questioned the efficacy of reservations as a tool to uplift marginalised groups and blamed the reservations policy for “reviv[ing] casteism”.

Scroll examines these two judgments and explains why they have been criticised by experts.

Unnecessary and unenforceable

Parts of Gavai and Mithal’s judgements had nothing to do with...

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