Social Inclusion in Local Government: The Promise and the Limits

In one line

The 73rd and 74th Amendments reserved seats and chairperson offices in every local body for the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes in proportion to their population, and merely permitted reservation for backward classes, which the Supreme Court has since confined by a triple test, so that inclusion in local government is guaranteed for two groups, conditional for a third, and in every case delivers a seat rather than authority.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: articles 243D(1) and 243T(1) make reservation for the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes mandatory in every panchayat and municipality in proportion to their population in the area, with one third of those seats for their women under clause (2) and chairperson offices reserved under clause (4), the reservation ceasing under clause (5) with the period fixed by article 334; articles 243D(6) and 243T(6) merely enable a State to reserve seats and chairperson offices for backward classes, and in K. Krishna Murthy v. Union of India the Supreme Court upheld those enabling clauses while holding that political backwardness is distinct from social and educational backwardness, that identification must be by a dedicated commission conducting a rigorous empirical inquiry, and that the aggregate of vertical reservation must not exceed fifty per cent except to safeguard Scheduled Tribes in Scheduled Areas, a triple test applied in Vikas Kishanrao Gawali v. State of Maharashtra to read down a uniform statewide quota; and the limitations are proxy exercise of reserved offices, rotation, the untouchability and dominance that the reservation of a seat cannot reach, and the weakness of the office itself.

The promise: what Part IX guarantees

The Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes

Articles 243D(1) and 243T(1): seats shall be reserved for the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes in every panchayat and every municipality, and the number shall bear, as nearly as may be, the same proportion to the total number of seats to be filled by direct election as their population in the area bears to the total population; the seats may be allotted by rotation.

Proportional, not a fixed quota, and everywhere. In a village where a quarter of the population is Scheduled Caste, a quarter of the seats are reserved. This is what makes the guarantee real in the places where it is most needed: it is largest exactly where the excluded population is largest.

Clause (2): not less than one third of those reserved seats for women of those communities, which is chapter 930's intersection.

Clause (4): the offices of chairperson are reserved in the same proportion at each level, allotted by rotation between panchayats. In K. Krishna Murthy the Court upheld this, holding that chairperson posts cannot be equated with solitary posts in the context of public employment, which is the answer to the argument that reserving a single office in a body is reserving a single post.