Supreme Court Refuses to Order Rotation of SC/ST Reserved Assembly and Lok Sabha Seats, Says It Is for Parliament
A bench led by CJI Surya Kant upheld an Allahabad High Court ruling that Section 9(1)(c) of the Delimitation Act is valid and that rotating reserved seats is a policy matter for Parliament.
The Supreme Court on Wednesday declined to direct that seats reserved for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes in state assemblies and the Lok Sabha be rotated from one constituency to another, holding that such a change can only come from Parliament.
A bench of Chief Justice of India Surya Kant, Justice Joymalya Bagchi and Justice V Mohana refused to interfere with a judgment of the Allahabad High Court, which had upheld the validity of Section 9(1)(c) of the Delimitation Act, 2002.
The challenge
Section 9(1)(c) requires that constituencies reserved for SCs and STs be located, as far as possible, in areas where their share of the population is comparatively large. The petitioner, Jagdish Singh, a voter in the 191-Kadipur assembly constituency in Uttar Pradesh’s Sultanpur district, said his seat had been reserved for Scheduled Castes for close to seven decades.
He argued that permanent reservation without rotation violated Articles 14, 15 and 19 of the Constitution, restricted voters to choosing among SC candidates only, and benefited a handful of families rather than the community as a whole. He asked for a rotation system like the one that applies to panchayats and municipalities under Articles 243D and 243T.
What the bench said
The court drew a distinction between the right to vote and a claimed right to contest from a particular constituency, noting that general-category candidates remain free to contest unreserved seats. Justice Bagchi remarked that in a multi-party democracy voters are expected to choose on the basis of party and ideology rather than caste or religion, and said a court cannot assume that a majority community will vote along caste lines. Whether concentrating reserved seats in particular areas deepens caste divisions, he said, is for the legislature to weigh, and does not by itself make the law unconstitutional.
CJI Surya Kant told the petitioner he was “dialling the wrong number”, since the demand belonged before Parliament. The bench said it could not add a rotation requirement that does not exist in Articles 330 and 332 or in the Delimitation Act, but left the petitioner free to approach elected representatives and build a consensus for a change in the law.
The High Court’s view
A bench of Justices Alok Mathur and Amitabh Kumar Rai of the Allahabad High Court had held that Articles 330 and 332 only fix the number of reserved seats in proportion to population, leaving Parliament to decide how they are identified under Article 327. While it accepted that rotation might ideally be followed, it said courts could not order it.
— Legal Desk
Featured image: Photo: Election Commission of India, GODL-India, via Wikimedia Commons.
Sources
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