The Centre on Wednesday sought review of the Supreme Court decision scrapping Jat reservation, a day after the apex court had refused to allow Jat students to take benefit of the Jat OBC quota for admission to post-graduate medical courses. The hurriedly drafted review petition was in the reckoning after Prime Minister Narendra Modi had assured Jat leaders to use all legal means to redress their grievance of losing out on the 27 per cent OBC quota benefit in admissions and Government jobs.
Finding fault with the reasoning adopted by the Court’s decision of March 17, 2015 on multiple grounds, the petition settled by Additional Solicitor General (ASG) Maninder Singh said that the two-judge bench had erred in holding that the recommendation of National Commission for Backward Classes (NCBC) was binding on the Government.
Backing its predecessor regime which passed the decision to include Jats as OBCs overruling the decision to the contrary taken by NCBC, the court held that the Centre was well within its power to extend reservation to communities which were backward. Citing the fact that Jats were already OBCs in nine States, the Centre argued that there was sufficient material to hold Jats as eligible for reservation in jobs and education.
“The Centre’s power to make available quota for a community is not dependent on NCBC’s advice,” the petition said adding, “The test laid down by the Supreme Court in the Indra Sawhney case for determination of social, educational and economic backwardness of Jats had been fully met.”
A bench of Justices Ranjan Gogoi and Rohington F Nariman had struck down the Government notification to provide OBC reservation to Jats for lack of adequate data or material to show the community’s social backwardness. The negative recommendation of the NCBC further contributed to the Court’s reasoning. It directed the Centre to move beyond “caste-based identification” of backwardness and not borrow state’s criteria to declare Jats as backward to declare them backward in the entire country.