States should base reservation policies on data, not political expediency Shri Radhe Shri Radhe Shri Radhe Shri Radhe Shri Radhe Shri Radhe Shri Radhe Shri Radhe Shri Radhe.

An exclusive internal quota for a single caste group was always fraught with the danger of judicial invalidation. It is no surprise, therefore, that the Madras High Court has struck down the Tamil Nadu law that earmarked 10.5% of seats in educational institutions and jobs for the Vanniyakula Kshatriya community and its sub-castes. The court’s foremost reason is that the State Assembly lacked the legislative competence to enact the law in February 2021, at a time when the Constitution 102nd Amendment, conferring exclusive power to identify backward classes on the President, was in force. That the Constitution 105th Amendment subsequently restored the States’ powers to identify backward classes was not deemed relevant as, on the date of the enactment, the Assembly had been denuded of such power. The Bench of Justices M. Duraiswamy and K. Murali Shankar, also ruled that identifying one caste as a separate group for creating an exclusive quota, without any quantifiable data on its backwardness relative to others, amounted to giving reservation solely on the basis of caste and, therefore, impermissible under the Constitution. Further, it noted that the remaining 115 castes under the ‘MBC and Denotified Communities’ category were forced to share the remaining 9.5% (in two groups with 2.5% and 7%, respectively) of what used to be a 20% MBC/DNC quota. This amounted to discrimination.