Third Bombay High Court Bench to Hear the Maratha 10% Quota Challenge From October 9

The news

The Bombay High Court said on Friday that it will begin hearing on October 9 the petitions for and against the Maharashtra State Reservation for Socially and Educationally Backward Classes (SEBC) Act, 2024, which gives 10% reservation to Marathas in education and services in the State. A Bench of Justices Makarand Karnik, N.J. Jamadar and Sandeep Marne will hear the petitions. The matter reached this Bench after hearings before two earlier Benches stopped. A Bench comprising Chief Justice Devendra Upadhyay, Justice Girish Kulkarni and Justice Firdosh Pooniwalla had initially heard the petitions, but Justice Upadhyay was moved to the Delhi High Court. A Bench led by Justice Ravindra Ghuge then heard the matter from May 2025 to August 2025; with Justice Ghuge subsequently elevated as Chief Justice of the Calcutta High Court, the hearings before the second Bench ground to a halt as well. The SEBC Act was passed by the legislature on February 20, 2024 and notified by the State government led by Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis six days later. The enactment followed a report by the Maharashtra State Commission for Backward Classes led by Justice Sunil B. Shukre, which cited circumstances and situations warranting the grant of reservation to the Maratha community beyond the 50% limit on reservation. The earlier statute had given Marathas 16% reservation in State government jobs and education. An advocate moved the Bombay High Court against that Act, and the court upheld it in June 2019; it held, however, that the 16% quota could not be justified and reduced it to 12% in education and 13% in jobs under the government. This was then challenged in the Supreme Court. In May 2021, the Supreme Court struck down the SEBC Act, 2018, holding that no circumstances justified reservation for Marathas beyond the 50% ceiling set by the 1992 Indra Sawhney judgment; the court also questioned the data submitted to show the backwardness of Marathas. The State government filed a review petition, which the court rejected in April 2023. It then filed a curative petition, which remains before the Supreme Court. The Hindu carried a file photograph of Maratha Kranti Morcha members burning tyres on the Pune-Solapur highway during a rasta roko protest.

Static syllabus linkage

1. The reservation power sits in Articles 15 and 16, not in a single quota clause. Article 15(4), inserted by the First Amendment in 1951, permits the State to make special provision for the advancement of any socially and educationally backward classes of citizens, and Article 15(5), inserted by the Ninety-third Amendment, extends this to admission in educational institutions including private unaided ones. Article 16(4) separately permits reservation in appointments for any backward class of citizens not adequately represented in the services of the State. Article 16(4A) allows reservation in promotion with consequential seniority for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes only, and Article 16(4B) allows carry-forward of unfilled reserved vacancies. A State law creating a Maratha quota therefore has to be defended under Article 15(4) and Article 16(4), and the enabling nature of these provisions means no community has an enforceable right to be reserved.
2. Indra Sawhney is the case the entire dispute turns on. Indra Sawhney v. Union of India (1992) was decided by a nine-judge Bench of the Supreme Court. It upheld the 27% quota for Other Backward Classes, held that backwardness under Article 16(4) is primarily social and that caste may be the starting point of identification, excluded the creamy layer from the benefit, held that reservation in promotion is impermissible under Article 16(4), and laid down that reservation should ordinarily not exceed 50% of the available posts except in extraordinary situations arising out of the peculiar conditions of far-flung and remote areas. That single exception is the door every State quota beyond 50% has since tried to walk through, and it is the door the Supreme Court shut on the 2018 Maharashtra law.
3. The 102nd and 105th Amendments decide who may even identify a backward class. The Constitution (One Hundred and Second Amendment) Act, 2018 gave constitutional status to the National Commission for Backward Classes under Article 338B and inserted Article 342A, providing for a Central List of socially and educationally backward classes notified by the President. In the 2021 Maratha judgment the Supreme Court read these provisions as taking away the States' power to identify their own backward classes. Parliament reversed that reading through the Constitution (One Hundred and Fifth Amendment) Act, 2021, which amended Article 342A and inserted Article 366(26C) to restore the power of every State and Union Territory to prepare and maintain its own list of socially and educationally backward classes. Maharashtra's 2024 Act was enacted under that restored power.
4. A curative petition is the last door in Indian litigation. After a review petition is dismissed, the only remaining remedy is a curative petition, a jurisdiction the Supreme Court created for itself in Rupa Ashok Hurra v. Ashok Hurra (2002) to prevent abuse of process and to cure a gross miscarriage of justice. It is circulated first to the three senior-most judges and the judges who passed the impugned order, it is ordinarily decided in chambers without oral hearing, and it must be certified by a senior advocate. That Maharashtra's curative petition against the 2021 judgment is still pending is why the fresh 2024 Act and the old challenge now run on two tracks at once.

Why UPSC loves this

1. Reservation is the most reliably examined single topic across GS1 and GS2. The syllabus carries social empowerment, communalism, regionalism and secularism in GS1, and mechanisms, laws, institutions and bodies constituted for the protection and betterment of vulnerable sections in GS2. The Maratha case sits on both, because it is simultaneously a question about a dominant landholding community's claim to backwardness and a question about the constitutional machinery that decides such claims.
2. The examiner prefers the doctrine to the agitation. Questions on this theme have historically asked about the rationale and limits of the 50% rule, about creamy layer, about the basis on which backwardness is determined, and about whether economic criteria alone can found a reservation. A candidate who writes only about Maratha protests and quota politics is answering a newspaper question; the one who writes about the extraordinary-circumstances exception, the quality of the empirical data and the identification power under Article 342A is answering the paper.
3. Judicial delay by transfer is itself an examinable point on the judiciary. Two Benches dissolved because judges were transferred or elevated, and the case restarts a third time. That is a clean, dated illustration for any answer on pendency, on the master-of-the-roster power of the Chief Justice, or on the case for permanent subject-wise Benches for constitutional matters, and it is far more persuasive than a general complaint about arrears.

Analysis

1. The State did not answer the 2021 judgment, it lowered the number. The Supreme Court in 2021 did not merely say the quota was too large; it said no extraordinary circumstances justified crossing the ceiling at all, and it questioned the data offered to establish Maratha backwardness. A law that reduces the figure from 16% to 10% answers the first objection arithmetically and the second not at all, unless the Shukre Commission's fresh evidence is materially better than the Gaikwad Commission's was. The entire case on October 9 will therefore turn on the quality of one report, not on the size of one percentage. This is the point most answers miss, because the percentage is what the headlines carry.
2. The 50% ceiling has already been breached once, and everybody in the courtroom knows it. The 103rd Amendment's 10% reservation for economically weaker sections takes total reservation past 50% in most States, and the Supreme Court upheld it in Janhit Abhiyan v. Union of India (2022) on the reasoning that the ceiling applies to the Article 15(4) and 16(4) quotas and that the EWS quota stands on a separate constitutional footing. Maharashtra can therefore argue that the ceiling is no longer an absolute basic-structure limit but a rule of ordinary construction. The counter is that Janhit Abhiyan carefully did not disturb the ceiling for backward-class reservation, and that a distinction drawn to save one quota cannot be borrowed to save another. That argument is genuinely open, and an honest answer says so.
3. A dominant landholding community claiming backwardness is a harder case, not an impossible one. Marathas are politically dominant in Maharashtra, have held the Chief Ministership repeatedly and control much of the cooperative sugar and rural credit economy, which is why the courts have repeatedly asked for evidence rather than assertion. But political dominance of a community's elite is not the same as the social and educational position of its median household, and agrarian distress can produce real backwardness within a numerically large caste. The legal test is empirical, and the honest position is that the claim fails or succeeds on data that neither the protests nor the counter-protests have ever produced in public.
4. Re-legislating after a striking-down is a recognisable pattern of competitive federal politics. Maharashtra is not alone: Tamil Nadu's 69% reservation survives only in the Ninth Schedule, and several States have enacted quotas that were struck down and re-enacted. The incentive structure is plain, because a legislature that passes an unconstitutional law absorbs no political cost and transfers the blame for the outcome to the judiciary, while the community's mobilisation is answered without any resource being spent. The result is a cycle in which each round buys several years of litigation and one election. Naming that incentive is a sharper criticism than calling the law unconstitutional.
5. Three Benches in two years is a structural failure, not bad luck. The first Bench dissolved when the Chief Justice was transferred to Delhi, the second when its presiding judge was elevated to head the Calcutta High Court. Both events are routine features of the collegium system, and neither is anybody's fault. What is a failure is that a constitutional challenge of this magnitude has no mechanism to survive the movement of a single judge, so the hearing restarts from the beginning each time. A designated constitutional Bench with staggered membership, or a rule that part-heard constitutional matters continue before the remaining judges, would cost nothing and would have saved two years here.
6. The real distributive question is never litigated. Reservation allocates a share of government jobs and college seats, and the number of both has been shrinking relative to the size of each cohort for two decades. Every quota dispute is therefore a contest over a shrinking prize, which is exactly why it grows more bitter as the prize shrinks. Courts cannot say this, because the question before them is constitutional validity and not economic sense, but a policy answer that stops at the 50% rule has not reached the hard part.

Administrator's brainstorm