Reservations Was Supposed to End: History of How it Did Not

Before we start, I would like your attention towards paragraph 35 of Ashok Kumar Gupta v. State of U.P., (1997) 5 SCC 201, where three judges of the Supreme Court of India reached for a propagandist's pamphlet, titled, without irony,

Merit, My Foot (“A Reply to Anti Reservation Racists”)

and allowed it to speak at considerable length while considering what “efficiency of administration” under Article 335 actually means, the Court reproduced V.T. Rajshekar's assertions that:

“merit” is “pure and simple racism” and “a pure Aryan invention and merit is aimed at maintaining their monopoly

"merit goes with the highborn - the blue blood"

These were not passing references or stray quotations in a footnote. They appeared in the body of the judgment, in the course of reasoning on a constitutional question of whether reservation in bureaucracy leads to administrative inefficiency. The court did not pause to identify the evidentiary basis of the claims it was reproducing, distinguish empirical assertions from political rhetoric, or explain why a polemical tract should carry weight in answering a constitutional objection.

The identity of the author makes the choice still more striking. V.T. Rajshekar was not a judge, constitutional scholar or academic authority. He was a journalist turned polemical publisher and the founder editor of Dalit Voice, a publication whose broader record has been documented as promoting radical antisemitic and conspiratorial ideas. Rajshekar had also been arrested under the Terrorist and Disruptive Activities Act (TADA) and separately faced sedition proceedings in connection with inflammatory writings.

Such is the attitude of the Indian Judiciary towards anti-brahmanism.

SEVENTY FIVE YEAR EXCEPTION: How Reservation Outgrew Its Own Justification

Reservation began in 1950 as a narrow, expressly temporary exception to the Constitution's general guarantee of equality. Seventy five years later, it has become a near permanent and continually expanding feature of public employment, promotion, and education. That reality has generated persistent resentment among those outside its categories and remains one of the most contested subjects in Indian public life.

Its history is not a straight line toward a settled policy. The Constituent Assembly drew a narrow, time bound exception. The Supreme Court, called on to interpret it, first policed its boundaries tightly, then over time read it more expansively. And wherever the Court's boundaries proved inconvenient, Parliament amended the Constitution to override the judicial pronouncement, only for the Court to be asked, in turn, to rule on the amendment itself. That pattern recurs, with variations, across seven decades. To understand how we got here, though, you have to go back further than the Constitution itself, back to the intellectual scaffolding the British built around the idea of caste in the first place.

BEFORE THE CONSTITUTION: CASTE, COLONIAL POLICY, AND THE IDEA OF BACKWARDNESS

The single work that still shapes our everyday political discourse, whether we realize it or not, is James Mill's The History of British India. It's worth dwelling on because of the deep and lasting implications it had for how the world, and Britain in particular, came to see Bharat and Bharatiya. Mill wrote of Hindus as primitive, barbaric, uncivilized savages, and he did so, remarkably, without ever having set foot in the country.

To understand how a book like that came to be written, it helps to start with the man. James Mill came from a family of shoemakers in Scotland. His mother had an aristocratic background through her father, who had since lost that standing, and she wanted it regained, so she pushed James toward study rather than the family trade. He earned a master's degree in divinity, a period of his life that put him firmly in the Christian right. In 1802 he left for London to become a journalist, and it was there he met Jeremy Bentham, the utilitarian philosopher who would go on to shape him profoundly. Despite his religious upbringing, Mill drifted toward what British society of the time would call radical, what we'd now call the political left.

Bentham himself came from an aristocratic family but was deeply aggrieved by the monarchy, the clergy, and the aristocracy, and he wrote from the standpoint of the oppression and hierarchy he saw around him in Britain. His prose, though, was dense and hard to follow, and this is where Mill found his opening, rendering Bentham's ideas in simpler, more digestible terms for a wider audience. That talent impressed the editor in chief of the Encyclopaedia Britannica enough that in 1808 he invited Mill to write on British society for the encyclopedia, work Mill continued for the better part of a decade. This detail matters more than it seems, because it's the key to understanding exactly where Mill's later portrait of Bharat actually came from.

Before Mill, there was William Jones, founder of the Asiatic Society in 1784 and of the school of Orientalism, who had called Bharat the cradle of civilization. Mill set out to overturn that discourse entirely, and by the time The History of British India appeared, he had succeeded. Where Jones saw a cradle of civilization, Mill saw barbarism and savages.

The book did not go unnoticed. In 1819, two years after publication, Mill was hired by the East India Company, and by 1823 he had become the second most powerful man at its London headquarters. In his own preface, he admitted there was a scarcity of reliable information about Bharat. His stated task was simply to collate what existed, material meant to help the Company govern India. It was, in effect, a governance manual, and Britain owes thanks to this manual, and its distortions, for divisions that persist to this day. That influence only compounded once the book became required reading at Haileybury Training College, where English civil servants bound for India were trained. It was no longer just Mill's book. It had become the Company's official lens on Bharat.

And here is the crux of the matter. James Mill wrote about Brahmins in almost exactly the same terms he had already used for the English clergy. Placed side by side with his Britannica writings, the correspondence is unmistakable. Mill's caricature of the Bharatiya Brahmin wasn't built on Indian material at all. It was built on his own preexisting grievances against the English priesthood.

That same habit, projecting a British frame onto an Indian institution, is what eventually turned Varna into caste. The difference between Jati (caste) and Varna is vast. The Manusmriti, for all its objectionable provisions, itself acknowledges fluidity of status and social mobility within the Varna system, which is not the same thing as a rigid caste hierarchy. B. R. Ambedkar himself argued that the Shudras were fallen Kshatriyas, which only makes sense if you accept that Varna was fluid to begin with. Nicholas Dirks makes a related point in Castes of Mind: caste, as we understand it today, was a modern construct. Varna was achievable. It carried mobility within it. It was the British who took a dynamic system and hardened it into something rigid.

Jones, to his credit, actually tried to understand the Indian perspective on meteorology, history, geography, whatever the subject, and argued for genuine openness. I don't say this to paint Jones as a saint, but he was at least truer to the spirit of real inquiry, and that's the essential difference between the Anglicist and Orientalist positions. Administrators like Mill took their Eurocentric inferences and stamped them onto a complex, intertwined Indian society. Hindus as barbaric, a people with no sense of history, Varna flattened into caste as a mere social construct, Indian governance dismissed as having no popular participation, Indian social rules cast as uniformly regressive. That framing didn't stay in the nineteenth century. It walked straight into the room where the Constitution was being drafted.

THE CONSTITUENT ASSEMBLY'S BARGAIN

The Constituent Assembly's eventual consensus on reservation was narrower and far more contested than we tend to remember. Proposals for separate electorates and reserved seats for religious minorities were debated right alongside proposals for the Scheduled Castes. Sardar Patel, moving the abolition of separate electorates, told the Assembly plainly that the entire scheme of reservation was meant to be temporary. Nehru, seconding Patel's motion, was equally explicit. The Assembly was retaining reservation only for the Scheduled Castes, out of every group that had asked for it.

Three features of that scheme mattered for everything that followed. First, it applied to specific enumerated groups, the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, joined by a constitutionally distinct category of backward classes, defined more broadly than caste, in which caste was one relevant indicator, not the only one. Second, the provisions were enabling rather than mandatory, a discretionary power granted to the state, not an obligation imposed on it. Third, and most significant for everything that comes after, the whole scheme was understood to be temporary. The Constitution wrote in an explicit ten year sunset clause, one that has since been renewed by amendment at the end of every decade, without exception, for seventy five years.

Nehru's own misgivings are well documented. In his correspondence with chief ministers around the first Backward Classes Commission, he warned that the "minute division of our people into castes and groups" was itself a barrier to national progress, and he pressed state governments to prefer economic tests of backwardness over caste wherever the two could be separated. His own government's memorandum on the Commission's report went further, warning that officially recognizing particular castes as backward, even for the benevolent purpose of helping them, risked entrenching the very distinctions the Constitution was supposed to erode. A 1961 Home Ministry circular told state governments, wherever they had discretion, to prefer economic tests over caste. Nehru wasn't opposed to helping disadvantaged groups. He was doubtful, from the very outset, that building that help around caste identity was compatible with the Constitution's larger project of dissolving caste as a category of public life. That doubt, voiced at the founding of the policy, is worth holding onto, because almost nothing that followed honored it.

THE FIRST COLLISION: CHAMPAKAM DORAIRAJAN AND THE FIRST AMENDMENT

The first serious test came within a year of the Constitution's commencement. In State of Madras v. Champakam Dorairajan (1951), the Supreme Court struck down a Madras government order allocating medical and engineering seats through caste wise quotas, holding that it violated Articles 15(1) and 29(2), and that fundamental rights couldn't be abridged by executive or legislative order except as the Constitution itself provided.

Rather than working within that limitation, Parliament amended the Constitution within months. The First Amendment (1951) inserted Article 15(4), expressly empowering the state to make special provision for backward classes, Scheduled Castes, and Scheduled Tribes. Nehru told Parliament that backwardness shouldn't be understood in purely caste terms, the same reservation he'd voiced in the Constituent Assembly, but the amendment he moved gave governments, for the first time, an explicit constitutional basis for caste conscious classification anyway. This set the template for everything that followed. A judicial limit, met not with legislative accommodation within that limit, but with a constitutional amendment that simply erased it.

PART ONE: THE COURTS SET BOUNDARIES, AND THE BOUNDARIES START TO MOVE

By the late 1950s, states were compiling their own backward classes lists, often using caste as the sole criterion and often sweeping in enormous shares of the population. M.R. Balaji v. State of Mysore (1963) concerned a Mysore order reserving 68 per cent of medical and engineering seats for backward classes, SCs, and STs combined, on a list built almost entirely on caste.

A Constitution bench, in a judgment by Justice Gajendragadkar, held that caste couldn't be the sole or dominant test of backwardness, both because it was analytically unsound and because it risked entrenching the very caste consciousness the Constitution's broader design was meant to dissolve. This is also where the 50 per cent ceiling was born, a rule that would govern reservation law for the next six decades. Article 15(4) is an exception to the general equality guarantee, and if the exception swallowed the rule, the guarantee itself would become "theoretical and illusory" for everyone standing outside it. The 68 per cent order was struck down.

A year later, R. Chitralekha v. State of Mysore (1964) tested the opposite scenario, a Mysore

scheme that identified backward classes purely through economic and occupational criteria, without reference to caste at all. The Court, per Justice Subba Rao, upheld it and made the classes versus castes distinction explicit. Article 15(4) speaks of "classes," not "castes," and treating the two as synonymous would extend benefits to people within a caste who didn't actually need them, at the expense of those who did. Between Balaji and Chitralekha, the constitutional text clearly supported an economic and occupational reading of backwardness that didn't require caste as its foundation at all.

Two more cases from this period tested the ceiling from different directions. In General Manager, Southern Railway v. Rangachari (1962), a divided Court (3 to 2) held that reservation under Article 16(4) extended to promotional posts, not just initial recruitment, a reading that later became the doctrinal foundation for reservation in promotion, and one that a 1981 Railway case pushed even further, upholding 66 and two thirds per cent reservation in certain promotional posts, in obvious tension with the ceiling principle. In Devadasan v. Union of India (1964), a five judge bench struck down the carry forward rule, under which unfilled reserved vacancies compounded year after year until, in the case at hand, cumulative carry forward had pushed effective reservation to nearly two thirds of available posts. The majority held that each year's recruitment had to be measured against the 50 per cent ceiling on its own terms. Justice Subba Rao dissented, arguing that Article 16(4) conferred an independent power with no implicit ceiling at all.

PART TWO: THE COMMISSIONS AND THEIR ARITHMETIC

Article 340 was first invoked in 1953 with the Kalelkar Commission. Nehru, writing to chief ministers about its mandate, repeated his conviction that the caste system was itself "a terrifying factor" that policy should aim to dissolve, not institutionalize. The Commission went on to classify 2,399 castes as backward, a list later criticized, including by the Mandal Commission itself, for never explaining how its own stated criteria had produced that particular number. The Mandal Commission's own report called the approach "somewhat arbitrary."

In the decades that followed, individual states compiled their own lists using wildly varying methods, and journalists later established that several state governments couldn't point to any systematic contemporary survey behind their operative lists at all. They relied instead on decades old lists, some traceable to the colonial period, periodically enlarged by state legislatures for reasons the record doesn't connect to any fresh evidence of backwardness. The number of castes officially classified as backward rose steadily across this period, from a few hundred in the 1930s and 40s, to 2,399 under Kalelkar, to several thousand by the time Mandal reported around 1980. A commission is created to identify a bounded, temporary category of disadvantage. The category, once created, never shrinks. It only grows.

The Second Backward Classes Commission, chaired by B.P. Mandal, found that OBCs made up roughly 52 per cent of India's population and recommended 27 per cent reservation on that basis, a figure that, together with the existing 22.5 per cent SC/ST quota, became the foundation of national reservation policy for the next four decades and remains so today.

The methodology behind that number deserves far more scrutiny than it usually gets, because it isn't a count. India had conducted no caste wise census since 1931. The Commission assumed every caste counted in 1931 had grown at an identical rate over the following fifty years, and from that assumption derived a 43.7 per cent OBC share among Hindus. For non Hindus, where no caste wise data existed even in 1931, the Commission made a second assumption, that the OBC proportion among non Hindus mirrored the figure it had just derived for Hindus, adding another 8.4 per cent. The two numbers summed to 52 per cent. The 27 per cent reservation figure, meanwhile, wasn't derived from that 52 per cent estimate at all. It was worked backward from the existing 22.5 per cent SC/ST quota and the Balaji ceiling, so that the combined total would stay under 50 per cent.

In short, the number that has anchored OBC reservation for four decades rests on two unverified extrapolations layered onto a fifty year old census that, by the Commission's own admission, never used a consistent definition of caste in the first place. A policy that reserves more than a quarter of public jobs and college seats nationally has never once rested on an actual, contemporary count of the population it claims to serve.

PART THREE: INDRA SAWHNEY AND THE AFTERMATH

The nine judge bench in Indra Sawhney v. Union of India (1992) remains the single most important settlement in reservation law. It upheld the 1990 Mandal implementation, endorsing caste as one relevant indicator of backwardness while formally reaffirming that caste couldn't be the sole criterion, though individual judges characterized the underlying purpose quite differently from one another. Justice Sawant, for instance, held that Article 16(4) isn't a poverty alleviation measure at all, but a mechanism to redistribute state power to groups excluded from it, a purpose he considered applicable to a group he estimated at "not less than 77 and a half per cent" of the population. That figure was one judge's own inference about constitutional purpose, not an empirical finding, but it shows just how capaciously reservation's rationale could be stretched even by judges who agreed on the outcome.

Indra Sawhney's three other holdings were these. The 50 per cent ceiling was reaffirmed and hardened, subject only to "extraordinary circumstances." The creamy layer doctrine was introduced, requiring the more advantaged members of a backward class to be excluded from OBC reservation. And reservation was limited to initial recruitment, not promotion. Of these, the promotion holding proved the shortest lived. Parliament overrode it within three

years.

Where Indra Sawhney limited reservation, Parliament simply enlarged it again. The 77th Amendment (1995) restored reservation in promotion for SCs and STs, directly reversing the judgment. The 81st Amendment (2000) revived, in modified form, the very carry forward mechanism the Court had struck down in Devadasan thirty six years earlier. The 82nd Amendment (2000) permitted relaxed qualifying standards for SC/ST candidates in promotion, while leaving Article 335's efficiency requirement formally intact right alongside it. The 85th Amendment (2001) extended "consequential seniority" to promotions secured through reservation, overriding an entire line of cases, R.K. Sabharwal and Ajit Singh among them, in which the Court had held that officers who leapfrogged colleagues through reservation shouldn't retain that advantage permanently. In every instance, the sequence repeats. The Court draws a limit, and Parliament amends the Constitution to erase it.

M. Nagaraj (2006) upheld these amendments but attached conditions. Before extending reservation in promotion, the state had to produce quantifiable data on the class's backwardness, its inadequate representation, and the absence of harm to administrative efficiency. Many states simply ignored this requirement for over a decade rather than comply with it, generating a fresh wave of litigation. Jarnail Singh (2018) then relaxed even this. SCs and STs no longer needed to demonstrate backwardness at all, since their inclusion in the Presidential lists was now treated as a standing presumption of it, one more instance of a data requirement being imposed, then quietly narrowed rather than enforced.

PART FOUR: RESERVATION AND EDUCATION

A parallel dispute unfolded over private unaided educational institutions. In P.A. Inamdar (2005), a seven judge bench held that the state couldn't compel private unaided institutions to reserve seats by government quota, reasoning that doing so would amount to nationalizing private education without due process. Parliament's response was, again, constitutional amendment. The 93rd Amendment (2005) inserted Article 15(5), extending reservation to private institutions, aided or unaided, with an exception carved out for minority institutions.

The resulting 27 per cent OBC quota in central higher education was challenged in Ashoka Kumar Thakur (2008). The five judge bench upheld it, but the separate opinions are worth sitting with. Justice Raveendran warned that caste based reservation had created incentives to seek inclusion in backward class lists rather than to grow out of backwardness, and that reservation should function as a "temporary crutch," not an open ended entitlement. Justices Pasayat and Thakker went further still. Caste should only ever have been a provisional marker, the state's real focus should have been poverty, and, pointedly, no group had ever "graduated" out of the OBC list, a pattern they said "raises doubt about the real concern to remove inequality."

PART FIVE: WHO ACTUALLY BENEFITS

The creamy layer doctrine is usually described as a refinement of reservation policy. I think it's better understood as an admission. Several judges in Indra Sawhney were explicit that, absent a deliberate exclusion of a backward class's more advantaged members, reservation intended for the class as a whole would be captured, repeatedly and across generations, by whoever within that class was already best positioned to claim it, while the genuinely disadvantaged saw little improvement. The doctrine exists because the Court recognized that categorical, group based reservation doesn't reliably reach the people it's meant to reach. It reaches whoever within the category is positioned to claim it first, unless a separate mechanism is built specifically to stop that from happening.

That mechanism, moreover, is only half built. The creamy layer exclusion applies, as settled law, to OBC reservation alone. Despite comparable capture concerns being documented within SC and ST categories too, it has never been extended to them. Consider the shape this takes in practice: a family that has held a reserved government post for two generations still qualifies, while a first generation applicant from the same broad category may not have had the same access at all.

PART SIX: TWO DISTINCTIONS WORTH KEEPING CLEAR

Reservation and affirmative assistance are often treated as interchangeable in public debate, but the Constitution's own text keeps them distinct. Reservation is a guaranteed share of seats or posts set aside by category, largely independent of individualized need once eligibility for the category is established. Affirmative assistance, things like scholarships, coaching, fee waivers, early childhood and school level interventions, is calibrated, in principle, to individual circumstance rather than fixed category share. Put simply, reservation guarantees a seat regardless of family income. A scholarship targets a poor student regardless of caste. Those are not the same instrument, and the Constitution never treated them as such, even though decades of policy debate frequently have.

Article 46, among the Directive Principles, calls on the state to promote the interests of weaker sections without specifying reservation as the primary instrument for doing so.

A second distinction concerns how backwardness has actually been identified over time. The Constitution's original architecture, as read in Balaji and Chitralekha, treated economic and occupational disadvantage as closely bound up with social backwardness, with caste as one available indicator among several, not the dominant one. Over the following decades, both the Mandal Commission's methodology and the administrative practice that followed it moved caste to the centre. Caste based lists became, in practice, the operative mechanism through which backwardness is identified and reservation administered, even as courts continued to hold, as formal doctrine, that caste alone could never be sufficient.

THE CASE FOR RESERVATION REFORM

The Reservation Hatao Andolan has evolved into a more constructive movement with better messaging, the reservation reform movement. Even so, the messaging around it remains flawed across the board. Its proponents often focus on the wrong targets, things like the UGC regulations, which were themselves a draconian move by the Ministry of Education under Dharmendra Pradhan (who has since been relieved of that position), or the SC/ST Act, which has nothing to do with reservation at all. I have my own problems with both of these things, but conflating them with the reservation debate only drives the conversation away from the real discourse on reservation.

The Rohini Committee report has still not been released by the Modi government. The one demand that unites reform advocates is for a white paper on reservation, which is itself somewhat unnecessary, since the Rohini Committee report already exists, even though it has not been made public. One could argue it has been quite a while since that committee submitted its findings.

My own demand is simple: meritocracy. We must review the reservation system. The political class will never willingly take part in such a review, at least not those currently in power, because doing so would cost them their political stake. Political representatives answer to their electorate, and it is always a mistake when the state pursues equality of outcome rather than equality of opportunity. This pursuit is as corrosive to a nation as the virus of communism, which disseminates a nation to the ground.

I believe reservation should be partially removed. To understand why, consider its original justification. Reservation was meant to rest on one sole criterion, historical discrimination against Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, a criterion itself rooted in social classification. But then there are the OBCs. Why were OBCs ever brought into the reservation framework at all, if the sole criterion for reservation is historical disadvantage? How do OBC castes fit under that logic? V. P. Singh has done this country a disservice. At the

same time, the slinging of slurs on all sides of this debate carries its own civilizational cost.

THE STATISTICS BEHIND THE OBC DEBATE

The recently submitted OBC Commission report to Chief Minister Bhajanlal in Rajasthan is instructive here. Reservation for OBCs stands at 52 per cent, even though OBCs constitute only around 43 per cent of the population in reality. According to that report, seven castes have monopolized 90 per cent of OBC reserved seats. In Bihar, Yadavs constitute roughly 15 per cent of the population but hold about 25 per cent of government jobs. Kurmis, another caste, make up 2.75 per cent of the population but hold around 5 per cent of government jobs.

THE EWS BACKDOOR

Replacing caste based reservation with EWS (Economically Weaker Section) reservation carries a serious disadvantage. Several studies and reports suggest that a major share of EWS beneficiaries will be Muslims. EWS risks becoming a backdoor route to religious reservation, itself an absurdity. Instead, the government should be pushing toward an economic progression such as an eight to ten trillion dollar economy, which would reduce the attractiveness of government jobs relative to the private sector.

Punjab illustrates this dynamic well. It has one of the highest Dalit populations in the country (33 per cent), yet there is comparatively little political discourse burning around caste and Dalits there. This owes largely to the agro based economy built by the Green Revolution, not to any rapid industrialization or targeted economic policy. Across India, people take up private sector jobs while continuing to prepare for government exams on the side. Reservation cannot simply be un reserved by fiat, but the system itself must be allowed to become obsolete over time. Above all, it is critical that reservation be kept out of the private sector altogether.

CONCLUSION: WHAT THE HISTORY ACTUALLY ESTABLISHES

Two things are firmly established.

First, reservation was conceived, in the Constituent Assembly's own debates and in the text as drafted, as a narrow, temporary, enabling exception to a general guarantee of equality. Not an entitlement, not a permanent structural feature, and not, in its original conception, a

primarily caste based mechanism.

Second, the sequence of amendments and case law, each one answering the last, shows that reservation's scope has expanded almost continuously since. Courts impose a limit. Parliament amends the Constitution to override or dilute it. And the courts are then asked to rule on the amendment itself. This is not an occasional pattern. It is the dominant mechanism by which reservation has grown for seventy five years, across the board, it is equally well established, from the Supreme Court's own reasoning in Indra Sawhney, that unless a reserved category's more advantaged members are deliberately excluded, reservation's benefits are not automatically distributed to its most disadvantaged members.