Supreme Court rejects review petition challenging its decision upholding validity of 103rd Constitutional Amendment
Posted Date – Tue, 5/16/23 at 9:15pm
New Delhi: The Supreme Court rejected a petition for review challenging its decision upholding the validity of the 103rd Constitutional Amendment, providing economically weaker section (EWS) persons with a 10 percent hold on admissions and government jobs.
“The application for examination of the petition is allowed to be filed,” the order issued by the bench headed by Chief Justice of India Chandrachud and comprising Justices Dinesh Maheshwari, S. Ravindra Bhat, Bela M. Trivedi and JB Pardiwala said on May 9. Application for Review to be listed as open court dismissed. Delayed connivance. After careful reading of the Petition for Review, there are no apparent errors on the face of the record. There was no case for review under Rule XLVII Rule 1 of the Supreme Court Rules 2013. Accordingly, the Application for Review was dismissed turn down.
On November 7 last year, the five-judge bench of the Supreme Court wrote four separate judgments with different reasoning. Justices Maheshwari, Trivedi and Pardiwala upheld the 103rd Amendment in three separate decisions. However, Justice Bhat and then-Chief Justice UU Lalit overturned the 103rd Constitutional Amendment in their minority ruling, saying that the reservation to EWS based on economic criteria was the same as the constitutional reservation and was conceived to create a commitment An equal society is constitutionally unsound.
In November last year, Justice Maheshwari dismissed the petition challenging the EWS quota: “It cannot be said that the 103rd Constitutional Amendment violated the fundamental structure of the Constitution by excluding SEBCs/OBCs/SCs/STs from the scope of the EWS reservation.”
He said a reservation based solely on economic criteria does not violate any fundamental feature of the Constitution nor does it cause any damage to its fundamental structure.
“The categories covered by Article 15(4), Article 15(5) and Article 16(4) are excluded from retained benefits as economically weaker segments, having the nature of balancing non-discrimination and compensatory discrimination requirements , does not contravene the Equality Act, nor is it in any way detrimental to the fundamental structure of the Constitution,” he said.
He added that the reservation of up to 10 per cent to the economically weaker section of citizens would not lead to violation of any fundamental feature of the Constitution, nor would it cause any damage to the fundamental structure of the Constitution by violating the existing 100 percent The upper limit of fifty.
“Because, the cap itself is not immutable and in any case applies only to the reservations envisaged in Articles 15(4), 15(5) and 16(4) of the Constitution,” Justice Maheshwari said.
