Editorial: Quit fooling BCs about quotas

The government of Telangana is euphoric after passing two bills last week, one raising job and education quotas for the Backward Classes (BCs), Scheduled Castes (SCs) and Scheduled Tribes (STs) and the other providing reservation for BCs in local bodies.

However, while decisive quota legislations are welcome, it is more important to ensure that they are sound enough to receive the President’s assent and stand the scrutiny of the courts. Even more important, for quotas to really work, there must be jobs to go around in the first place. In this respect, the record of most state governments and the Union government, in particular, has been woeful. In the context of shrinking government recruitment, reservation becomes a pointless gift unless extended to the private sector as well.

By passing these bills in the Telangana Assembly last week, the government of Chief Minister A Revanth Reddy is seeking to raise the quota for BCs from 29% to 42%, for SCs from 15% to 18% and STs from 6% to 10%, taking the total to 70%.

This breaches the 50% ceiling for reservations laid down by the Supreme Court, so there is a strong likelihood that this bill will be challenged in the courts. On the face of it, there is nothing to suggest that this measure will somehow elude the 50% filter applied by the courts. Similar legislation passed by Bihar, Maharashtra, Rajasthan, Haryana, Jharkhand, and Chhattisgarh has been blocked at the 50% barrier.

Revanth Reddy says, rather breezily, that the Telangana bill is legally ironclad as it is based on a caste survey conducted in November last year. The survey found that BCs constitute 56.5% of the population of Telangana. So, it shouldn’t be difficult to convince the judges that a quota of 42% is justified.

However, that may be typical overconfidence by the chief minister. Last year, the Nitish Kumar government in Bihar hiked weaker sections' reservation to 65% in equivalence with the state’s own caste survey. Yet, the Patna High Court struck it down, ruling that a social group’s share of the population is not sufficient justification for special treatment. There would have to be exceptional evidence of social backwardness for a community to be considered a fit case to breach the 50% ceiling.

The Telangana government has said it will also try to persuade Prime Minister Narendra Modi to place the new bill in the Ninth Schedule of the Constitution, a facility previously accorded only to Tamil Nadu’s quota of 69%, to put it beyond the reach of judicial scrutiny. This, too, is wishful thinking on account of the politics involved. It’s also not certain that the Supreme Court will agree that Telangana’s reservation policy is beyond its purview even if placed in the Ninth Schedule.

Increased quota laws may give crowing rights to ruling parties, but they do little for social justice if they are designed to disappear into legal quicksand, as so many such measures have. The legal frailties of state quota laws strangely do not square with the seeming consensus that exists among political parties on the reservation. The fact is that all parties, especially the Congress and the BJP, use quota promises to strike a pose. They must prove their real intent by collaborating on quotas in the private sector too.