Maratha quota case update: hearing paused till June, here’s what has happened so far (2024)

The High Court has said that any applications for admission to educational institutions, or government jobs based on benefits provided by the impugned Act will be subject to the outcome of the case.

Why is reservation for the Maratha community politically important in Maharashtra?

The Marathas are almost a third of the state’s population. The demand for reservation for Marathas is old, and is a prominent issue in the Lok Sabha election.

Two earlier laws giving quota to Marathas failed in court, and it is critical for the state government to ensure the 2024 legislation passes judicial scrutiny.

On February 20 this year, the Assembly unanimously passed the Bill giving 10% quota to Marathas. A challenge was filed in the HC on March 1, four days after the law was notified.

In 2018, the HC had upheld a similar law, even though it said at the time that the 16% quota proposed in the law was not “justifiable”. The High Court’s decision was challenged in the Supreme Court. In May 2021, a Constitution Bench struck down the 2018 Maharashtra SEBC Act.

On what basis has the government brought the SEBC Act, 2024?

The government brought the Bill after a report by the Maharashtra State Backward Class Commission (MSBCC) led by Justice Sunil Shukre (retired) identified the Marathas as a socially and educationally backward community.

The Justice Shukre Commission found an “alarming” increase — from 0.32% to 13.7% in the six years since 2018 — in the rate of girl child marriages among Marathas. The panel found that representation of Marathas in government services had declined from 14.63% in 2018, as found by previous MSBCC headed by Justice M G Gaikwad (retired), to just 9% in 2024, and that the community was “completely out of the mainstream”.

The Supreme Court had found the Gaikwad Commission’s report — based on a survey of 43,629 families from two villages in each of the 355 talukas where Marathas are more than 50% of the population — insufficient to establish the “extraordinary circ*mstances” that could constitute grounds for reservation beyond the 50% ceiling set by the court in ‘Indra Sawhney and Ors vs Union of India’ (1992), better known as the Mandal case verdict.

The Shukre Commission surveyed as many as 1,58,20,264 families across the state on a “massive scale”, and found that Marathas constituted 28% of the population of Maharashtra.

On January 26, three weeks before the Assembly passed the SEBC Bill, 2024, the state government issued a draft notification to enable certain eligible categories of Marathas to avail Kunbi certificates for reservation under the OBC category, leaving the remaining Marathas to be covered under the new (10%) quota.

This was a formula devised in view of the protest fast by the Maratha activist Manoj Jarange-Patil. However, Jarange-Patil was not pacified, and the “backdoor” Kunbi route for Marathas to enter the OBC category was widely criticised.

What has happened during the ongoing High Court hearing so far?

The petitioners who have challenged the SEBC Act, 2024, have argued that the law is unconstitutional as it breaches the 50% ‘Indra Sawhney’ ceiling, which is possible only if Parliament passes a Bill amending the Constitution. The petitioners have also challenged the appointment of Justice Shukre as MSBCC chairperson.

On March 8, a division Bench of the HC comprising Justices G S Kulkarni and Firdosh P Pooniwalla passed an interim order directing that if any applications are received for the National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test (NEET) (Undergraduate) 2024, or in case of any other advertisem*nts taking benefit of the impugned Act, the same shall be subject to further orders to be passed in the ongoing proceedings in the SEBC Act case.

Thereafter, the matters challenging the Maratha quota law were clubbed together and placed before a division Bench led by Chief Justice Devendra Kumar Upadhyaya, which granted similar interim reliefs.

On April 2, Chief Justice Upadhyaya, “considering the nature of the challenge”, constituted the present Bench of three judges, including himself and Justices Kulkarni and Pooniwalla to hear all proceedings on the issue of interim stay. The larger Bench began hearings on April 10.

The court wanted to know how the SEBC Act, 2024 differed from the 2018 law that was struck down by the SC. The court asked if the 2024 law was just a “revalidation” of the 2018 Act without rectifying the flaws in its constitutionality that the SC had pointed out.

Senior advocate Gopal Sankarnarayanan for the petitioner responded that there was nothing new in the 2024 law, despite the state’s claim that the MSBCC led by Justice Shukre had based the report on a bigger survey.

On April 15, senior advocate Arvind Datar argued that the state government was not competent to formulate the impugned law as Parliament was required to first overtake the SC’s verdict by amending the Constitution to allow reservation in excess of 50%. The 2024 Act is an impermissible breach of constitutional propriety, he said.

Maharashtra had 52% reservation earlier which, with the 10% quota for the Economically Weaker Section (EWS) and the 10% Maratha quota, increases to 72%, the petitioners pointed out.

Senior advocate Pradeep Sancheti and advocate Gunratan Sadavarte argued that the Shukre panel’s report contained “inherent flaws”, and should not have been relied upon.