By this six to one majority ruling, a bench of Chief Justice D Y Chandrachud and Justices B R Gavai, Vikram Nath, Bela M Trivedi, Pankaj Mithal, Manoj Misra and S C Sharma overruled the 2004 judgment of a five-judge bench in EV Chinnaiah case which had said SCs were a homogeneous group and could not be sub-categorised. Justice Trivedi dissented and said the Chinnaiah judgment was constitutionally valid.
It firmly said sub-classification of the most backward among the SC community must be based on empirical data, both quantifiable and demonstrable, regarding their backwardness. The logic behind the court’s suggestion for keeping the ‘creamy layer’ out is that children of civil servants and others from among the SCs who have moved up on the socio-economic ladder and received good education are not deserving of quotas.
At present, creamy layer exclusion policy is applicable only to Other Backward Classes (OBCs).
The CJI authored a 140-page judgment for himself and Justice Misra. Justices Nath, Mithal and Sharma, through separate opinions, agreed with the opinions of the CJI and Justice Gavai. Both the CJI and Justice Gavai agreed with each other, thus making six of the seven judges concur on the constitutional permissibility of sub-classification of SCs.
It was Justice Gavai, the lone Dalit judge on the bench, who mustered the courage to hold that those among SC/ST communities who have got top positions in civil services and risen high in socio-economic strata must get excluded from the reservation scheme for scheduled castes, who were socially discriminated for centuries.
Justice Mithal took the creamy layer exclusion principle to a different level. “Reservation, if any, has to be limited only for the first generation or one generation and if any generation in the family has taken advantage of reservation and has achieved higher status, the benefit of reservation would not be logically available to the second generation,” he said. In his 281-page opinion, Justice Gavai said, “The state must evolve a policy for identifying the creamy layer even from the scheduled castes and scheduled tribes so as to exclude them from the benefit of affirmative action. In my view, only this and this alone can achieve the real equality as enshrined under the Constitution.”
