The Supreme Court on Tuesday dropped further hearing on a PIl that questioned the discriminatory practice of the Army to recruit men on lines of their religion, region and caste.
“We do not want to rock the Army’s boat,” said a bench of Justices TS Thakur and C Nagappan, as it decided to abruptly close the PIl filed by one IS Yadav, a retired doctor from Rewari, Haryana. In December 2012, the court had entertained the petition by seeking response from Centre and Army on the practice of having Army regiments such as Sikh, Maratha, Jat, Rajputana, Gorkha, etc to which persons from the concerned religion, region or caste only could be recruited.
According to Yadav, the Army had violated the fundamental rights of citizens by engaging in such discriminatory classification. Although Army invited all classes of persons for recruitment, such classification denied many worthy individuals a place in the Army. The Centre cited administrative convenience and operational requirements to justify such classification.
“Certain regiments of the Army are organised on lines of classification because social, cultural and linguistic homogeneity has been observed to be a force multiplier as a battle winning factor,” the Centre said, adding, “The commonality of language and culture only further augments the smooth execution of operation.”
The bench questioned the locus of the petitioner to challenge the classification in the Indian Army that has continued for all these years. “Come on a real life situation and not on hypothetical ground,” said the court, directing that the remedy to such discrimination had to be addressed by Armed Forces Tribunal to which any aggrieved person should approach.