TED Newsdesk, Mumbai: The Government of Maharashtra has repealed its notice, released on Friday, directing higher education institutions and universities to drop the admission processes “in case Maratha reservation has already been applied for the admission for the academic year 2020-21”. A new notice was issued on Saturday informing about the cancellation of the previous orders. The department is expecting Chief Minister’s assistance in carrying the process further, as per the circular.
Maratha reservation and the Supreme Court: how one week unfolded
The reversal capped a chaotic stretch for admissions offices across the state. On 9 September, a three-judge bench of the Supreme Court led by Justice L. Nageswara Rao stayed the application of the Socially and Educationally Backward Classes (SEBC) Act to educational institutions, carving out an exception for postgraduate medical admissions, and referred the constitutional questions to a larger bench, according to the order summary published by the Supreme Court Observer. The bench recorded a prima facie view that the quota breached the 50 per cent ceiling on reservations set in Indra Sawhney, the 1992 judgment that still governs the field, and found no extraordinary circumstances shown to justify crossing it.
The Department of Higher and Technical Education responded with its Friday circular, which made institutions that had admitted students under the Maratha reservation cancel admissions. Supreme Court directions, the department reasoned, left no room for seats allotted under a stayed law. By Saturday the government had thought better of the blanket instruction, withdrawing it and promising to seek the Chief Minister’s guidance on what should happen to candidates already holding seats.
The incident took place two days after the Supreme Court shelved the implementation of the Maratha reservation. The Department of Higher and Technical Education directed state colleges and universities to re-organize admission processes as per the SC verdict. Besides, the suggestions made by legal authority, post-SC judgment, were also presented.
“In case Maratha reservation has already been applied for admission for the academic year 2020-21, colleges or educational institutions will have to undo the process and provide admissions for the academic year 2020-21, as if the SEBC Act is not in force. There is no restraint for continuation of the admission process, but it must be without applying the provisions of SEBC Act, i.e Maratha reservation”, stated the circular sent to the Directorate of Technical Education, Directorate of Higher Education, VCs of non-agricultural state universities and others.
That distribution list reaches deep into the state’s higher education system. The non-agricultural state universities include Mumbai University and Savitribai Phule Pune University, two of the largest affiliating universities in the country, each with hundreds of attached colleges whose admission registers would have needed unpicking had the order stood.
What the SEBC Act promised, and what the courts did to it
The SEBC Act passed the state legislature on 29 November 2018, granting Marathas 16 per cent reservation in education and public employment, more than the 12 and 13 per cent the Gaikwad Commission had recommended. The Bombay High Court upheld the law on 27 June 2019 but read the quota down to 12 per cent in education and 13 per cent in jobs, holding that the commission’s data disclosed the extraordinary circumstances needed to cross the 50 per cent ceiling.
The Supreme Court admitted an appeal on 12 July 2019 and declined to stay the judgment, which allowed a full admissions cycle to run with the quota in place. With the SEBC Act operating, more than 70 per cent of seats in Maharashtra stood reserved, the Supreme Court Observer’s case record notes.
For colleges in September 2020, the practical instruction in the withdrawn circular was blunt: where seats had gone out under the Maratha reservation, colleges were to cancel the admissions. Supreme Court orders had stayed the law, and the state wanted the paperwork to match. The withdrawal did not change the legal position, only the question of who would decide how to apply it, and when.
The referral itself was made under Article 145(3) of the Constitution, which requires a bench of at least five judges for substantial questions of constitutional interpretation. Among the questions framed were whether Indra Sawhney needs re-examination by a still larger bench, and whether the 102nd Amendment, which created the National Commission for Backward Classes, took away the power of state legislatures to identify backward classes at all. The answers would matter well beyond Maharashtra, since several states had quota laws resting on the same footing.
Since then: the quota struck down, then recreated
A Constitution Bench answered the referred questions on 5 May 2021. The five judges, Justices Abdul Nazeer, L. Nageswara Rao, Hemant Gupta, Ashok Bhushan and S. Ravindra Bhat, unanimously declined to revisit the 50 per cent ceiling and struck down the Maratha quota, finding no extraordinary situation in the Gaikwad report. By a three to two majority, the bench also held that after the 102nd Constitutional Amendment the identification of socially and educationally backward classes rests with the President and Parliament, not the states. A review petition was dismissed on 28 June 2021.
The question returned to the legislature within three years. On 20 February 2024 the Maharashtra assembly took up a fresh Maharashtra State Reservation for Socially and Educationally Backward Classes Bill, giving Marathas 10 per cent reservation in government jobs and in admissions to educational institutions, including private ones, and repealing the 2018 Act, according to PRS Legislative Research. Unfilled reserved seats can be carried forward for up to five years under the new law. The week in September 2020 when the state, with the Supreme Court stay in hand, told colleges that had applied the Maratha reservation to cancel admissions now reads as an early tremor of the larger collapse, and of the rebuilding that followed.
