Days after the Supreme Court struck down the Maratha reservation, Maharashtra Chief minister Uddhav Thackeray along with few other leaders from the MVA allies is set to meet governor Bhagat Singh Koshyari today to discuss the issue.
Thackeray will be accompanied by deputy chief minister Ajit Pawar, Maratha reservation cabinet sub-committee head Ashok Chavan, home minister Dilip Walse Patil and revenue minister Balasaheb Thorat.
The delegation will meet the governor at 5 pm at Raj Bhavan.
On May 9, the committee had decided that the state government will soon write letters to the Prime Minister and President of India to draw their attention to the issue and seek their intervention for the restoration of the quota for the 32% Maratha community in the state.
The Cabinet Sub Committee took a slew of decisions whereby a committee of legal experts headed by a retired judge will study the judgement delivered by a five-member bench and submit its report in a fortnight on various legal options. Thereafter, the state government will take a decision on whether to file a review petition in the apex court.
For the uninitiated, a 5-judge Constitution Bench, headed by Justice Ashok Bhushan, recently held the Maratha reservation, more than the 50% ceiling limit fixed by a 9-judge Bench in the Indra Sawhney case, as illegal.
The court also found no ‘exceptional circumstances to justify the grant of reservation to the Marathas. “Neither the Gaikwad Commission nor the (Bombay) High Court, have highlighted an exceptional situation for exceeding the ceiling of 50% reservation,’’ the court held. (The State had provided reservation to members of the Maratha community in government jobs and higher education.)
The court further struck down the special provision made under the Maharashtra Socially and Economically Backward Class Act, 2018, as violative of the principle of equality.
The court also rejected the plea to refer to a larger Bench of nine or eleven judges for reconsidering the verdict in 1992 in the Indra Sawhney case, which had placed the 50% cap on reservations in government jobs and education. The court refused to review “the legal precedent that has, for three decades now, held the ceiling as inviolable.”
The Bench, also comprising Justices L. Nageswara Rao, S. Abdul Nazeer, Hemant Gupta and S. Ravindra Bhat, also upheld the validity of the 102nd Constitutional Amendment and ruled that the Centre alone has the powers to determine the socially & educationally backward classes (SEBCs) and the states can’t have a separate list as the power is only with the President to notify the list of SEBCs, who shall be guided by the National Commission on Backward Classes, constituted through this constitutional amendment.
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