The Karnataka High Court’s Troubling Decision on the Right to Education Act

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educational institutions, Equality, Right to Education

On 31 May, a division bench of the Karnataka High Court handed down its judgment in RTE Students and Parents’ Association v State of Karnataka, upholding the constitutional validity of Rule 4 of the Karnataka Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Rules of 2012. The background is this: Section 12(1)(c) of the Right to Education Act requires private schools to admit – to the extent of 25% of the strength of their Class I batches – students belonging to “the weaker sections and disadvantaged groups in the neighbourhood.” The money spent on these children would be reimbursed to the private schools by the government. Rule 12 of the Karnataka Rules – secondary legislation under the RTE Act – stated that “provided that no unaided school falling under such clause (iv) of clause (n) of Section 2 [i.e., of the RTE Act] shall be identified for the purpose of admission of disadvantaged group or weaker section, where government school and aided schools are available within the neighbourhood.” The effect of this rule, therefore, was that the obligation under S. 12(1)(c) would not apply to private schools in cases where there existed government or aided schools in the neighbourhood. Or, in other words, children from disadvantaged sections would no longer be able to seek admission in private schools under the aegis of s. 12(1)(c) if there existed a government or aided school in their neighbourhood.

The constitutionality of Rule 4 – as flagged above – was challenge, and the High Court rejected the challenge. The case of the petitioners was primarily based on the contention that the vast quality gap between government and private schools essentially consigned socially and economically disadvantaged students to a second-class education, and deprived them of an equal opportunity to exercise their right to education under Article 21A of the Constitution. On the other hand, the State argued that the effect of the RTE had been a gradual closing down of state schools and a proliferation of private schools, apart from a heavy burden on the public exchequer spent on reimbursing private schools. As far as statutory interpretation went, the State argued that under Section 6 of the Right to Education Act, the State was under an obligation to establish – within three years – public schools in every neighbourhood. It was therefore argued that on a combined reading of Sections 6 and 12(1)(c), the 25% obligation on private schools was a “transitory” one, until such time that government schools were established in the neighbourhood. Consequently, Rule 4 – which effectively provided that when a government school was established, the requirements of S. 12(1)(c) no longer applied – was valid.

Accepting the argument, the High Court held that:

The learned Advocate General is right in his submission that the State Government or the local authorities are under the obligation to identify schools defined under Section 2(n)(iii) & (iv) only if there are no schools in the neighbourhood. The case of the petitioners is that notwithstanding the existence of Government or Government aided schools in the neighbourhood, unaided schools must also be identified to ensure that parent and the child get admission in schools of their choice. If petitioner’s contention is to be accepted, the State Government will be compelled to reimburse astronomical figures. The argument on behalf of the petitioners that children entitled for seat under the RTE Act may choose an unaided school in the neighbourhood though there exist Government and aided schools, is fallacious. (paragraph 21)

The Court then went on to explain the need for judicial restraint in the review of administrative action (!), and noted that because the Rule was neither arbitrary nor unreasonable, it could not be struck down under judicial review.

There are, however, a number of flaws with the analysis in paragraph 21. The first and most glaring is that it appears to ignore the plain wording of the statute. Section 12(1)(c) is clear that the private school shall admit 25% of its Class I batch strength from the disadvantaged sections. The obligation upon the private schools, in other words, is mandatory. What the High Court did, however, was to convert this mandatory obligation into a conditional obligation, based upon its reading of Section 6 of the RTE. Section 6, however, is a different provision entirely: it is addressed to the role of the government in carrying out its obligations under the Act, and therefore, requires the government to establish schools within three years. Nowhere in Section 6 – or anywhere else in the Act – is it indicated that the Section 12(1)(c) obligation on private schools is subject to the obligation upon the government under Section 6 remaining unfulfilled. Something as important as that, one would think, would be spelt out in the Act itself, and not merely inferred. The bridge between Sections 6 and 12, therefore, that the Court built, seems to be made entirely out of air.

This is evident from the fact that the Court seemed to view the issue only to be involving the right of children to be admitted into private schools of their choice. Once the argument was framed this way, it was able to make the common-sensical argument that the Constitution only guaranteed the right to education, and not the right to education in a private school of one’s choice. This, however, attacks a straw-man. The purpose of Section 12(1)(c) goes beyond granting a right of admission to private schools. To get a sense of the purpose, consider the Statement of Objects and Reasons appended to the RTE Bill of 2008, which is a permissible external aid to interpretation:

The proposed legislation is anchored in the belief that the values of equality, social justice and democracy and the creation of a just and humane society can be achieved only through provision of inclusive elementary education to all. Provision of free and compulsory education of satisfactory quality to children from disadvantaged and weaker sections is, therefore, not merely the responsibility of schools run or supported by the appropriate Governments, but also of schools which are not dependent on Government funds.

Not only does this make clear that Sections 6 and 12 of the RTE Act are independent provisions operating in independent spheres, but it also provides the rationale: inclusion, or integration. The rationale is further elaborated – in absolutely unambiguous terms – by the Ministry of Human Resource Development’s clarificatory memorandum on the provisions of the RTE:

The idea that schooling should act as a means of social cohesion and inclusion is not new; it has been oft repeated. Inequitable and disparate schooling reinforces existing social and economic hierarchies, and promotes in the educated sections of society an indifference towards the plight of the poor. The currently used term ‘inclusive’ education implies, as did earlier terms like ‘common’ and ‘neighbourhood’ schools, that children from different backgrounds and with varying interests and ability will achieve their highest potential if they study in a shared classroom environment. The idea of inclusive schooling is also consistent with Constitutional values and ideals, especially with the ideals of fraternity, social justice and equality of opportunity. For children of socio economically weaker backgrounds to feel at home in private schools, it is necessary that they form a substantial proportion or critical mass in the class they join. The relevant universe in which the proportion needs to be considered is the class/section. It is for this reason that the RTE Act provides for admission of 25% children from disadvantaged groups and weaker sections in class I only. This implies that these children cannot be pooled together in a separate section or afternoon shift. Any arrangement which segregates, or treats these children in a differentiated manner vis-à-vis the fee-paying children will be counter- productive.

Think of it as the anti-segregation rationale of Brown v Board of Education, only applied to class instead of race. The purpose of Section 12 was – and is – to combat, in whatever minimal way, the two-tier system of schooling that exists in India, where class enforces what is effectively a highly segregated structure, and where the the rich and the poor are “sorted” right from the moment primary schooling begins. Now, of course, a lot of people may have objections to the wisdom or the efficacy of the provision, but that is not the question here. The question here is a question of interpretation. And from that perspective, once the inclusive or integrationist purpose is clear, it also becomes clear that Section 12 – far from being a “transitory” provision, something like a poor cousin of Section 6 – is the heart and soul of the RTE itself. And that being the case, there is little doubt that Rule 4 – which effectively negates Section 12 – is ultra vires the RTE, apart from being unconstitutional.

How did this meaning of Section 12 – hiding away in plain sight – escape the Court? It is hard to say, but the Court’s repeated reference to the financial burden on the exchequer and to how the number of state schools was declining, gives us a hint of the factors that may have influenced the decision-making process. Neither of these factors, however, is relevant. The question of reimbursement is a pure question of policy, which – on the Court’s own insistence – it was in no position to get into. And whether the effect of the RTE was the decline of state schools is, as well, a deeply complex issue where questions of causation would be particularly difficult, and – again – unsuitable for judicial adjudication. And in any event, the clear meaning of Section 12 – and the constitutional goals that it is designed to fulfil – should have been enough for the Court.

The Karnataka High Court’s judgment, however, now makes it very easy for state governments to accomplish an end run around the heart of the RTE, and through copycat rules, basically once again ensure the insulation of private schools from the obligations of inclusion and integration, thus restoring economic segregation in the field of education. In this light, one hopes that the judgment will be set aside on appeal to the Supreme Court.

 

Notes from a Foreign Field: A Critique of the Kenyan High Court’s Homosexuality Judgment

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Equality, homosexuality, Kenya, non-discrimination, sexual orientation

In a judgment delivered last week (EG v Attorney-General), the High Court of Kenya upheld the criminalisation of same-sex relations under the Kenyan Constitution. At issue was the constitutionality of Sections 162 and 165 of the Kenyan Penal Code. Section 162 prohibits having “carnal knowledge of any person against the order of nature.” Section 165 criminalises acts of “gross indecency” between two male persons. In arguments that, by now, have attained a ring of familiarity, these provisions were challenged on the bases that they violated the rights to equality and non-discrimination, privacy and dignity, and health under the Kenyan Constitution, as well as being vague and over-broad.

In criticising the judgment of another country’s court, one must proceed with a degree of circumspection. Every nation’s constitutional jurisprudence is specific and unique, and the assumptions that one brings from a study of one’s own legal system may simply not hold. That said, however, on a reading of the judgment, the arguments advanced before the Kenyan High Court, and the manner in which the Court engaged with them have, by now, attained an almost universalistic cast: they have been litigated across a range of countries, and in supra-national forums, over many decades. It would, therefore, be almost remiss if one didn’t point out the ways in which the Kenyan High Court, with respect, appears to have delivered a seriously flawed judgment.

The Argument from Vagueness

It was argued before the Court that the phrases “carnal knowledge”, “against the order of nature”, and “gross indecency”, were impermissibly vague. This is, of course, a familiar argument, and readers will recall that in Kaushal, the Indian Supreme Court had dodged it entirely by recounting conflicting precedent, and then claiming that the question could be determined on a case-to-case basis. The Kenyan High Court, however, did a little better. Relying on precedent, it defined “carnal knowledge” as “sexual intercourse” (paragraph 270), “against the order of nature” as “anal sex” (paragraph 271), and “gross indecency” as contact between genital organs, or the breast and buttocks. (paragraph 273) Having defined each of these terms, the Court then held the two provisions were specific enough to pass constitutional muster.

That is fair enough in its own right, but notice that, having defined Section 162 in terms of a specific and particular sexual act, the implications of what that meant for the constitutionality of the statute could not, later, be dodged. However, when it came to the constitutional argument, this – as we shall see – was exactly what the Court did.

The Argument from Equality and Non-Discrimination

Article 27 of the Kenyan Constitution guarantees equality before law, and prohibits direct and indirect discrimination on a host of specified grounds, including race, sex, pregnancy, marital status, and so on. While interpreting the provision, the Kenyan High Court borrowed from the ECHR and South African jurisprudence, to (correctly) note that “unfair discrimination” occurs when a law “treats some people as inferior or less deserving of respect than others. It also occurs when a law or conduct perpetuates or does nothing to remedy existing disadvantages and marginalization.” (para 288) However, after stating the position of law, the Court went on to hold in paras 295 and 296 that Sections 162 and 165 did not violate the Constitution, because:

The substance of the Petitioners’ complaint is that the impugned provisions target the LGBTIQ community only. If we understood them correctly, their contestation is that the impugned provisions do not apply against heterosexuals … [O]ur reading of the challenged provisions suggests otherwise. The language of section 162 is clear. It   uses the words “Any person.” A natural and literal construction of these words leaves us with no doubt that the section does not target any particular group of persons.

Readers will recall that this is a very old and very familiar argument, which was also employed by the Supreme Court in Kaushal: the supposed distinction between “acts” and “identities”. According to this argument, anti-sodomy laws only target a specific set of sexual acts (in the present case, as defined by the Kenyan High Court, the act of anal sex), which could – in theory – be committed by heterosexuals or homosexuals. They do not target same-sex relations and, therefore, do not attract equality and non-discrimination provisions.

However, as old as this argument is, its basic flaws have also been pointed out multiple times. For example, as the US Supreme Court pointed out in Lawrence v Texas, when the act that is criminalised “is closely correlated with being homosexual … there can hardly be more palpable discrimination against a class than making the conduct that defines the class criminal.” Likewise, in National Coalition, the South African Constitutional Court noted that “it is not the act of sodomy that is denounced by the law, but the so called sodomite who performs it.” The point, in other words, is that by criminalising a specific set of acts, anti-sodomy laws effectively construct the homosexual identity as legally salient, and go on to persecute it – a point that has, by now, been made in reams of scholarly literature. That point cannot be understood, however, if the statute is examined only on its own terms, and in the absence of the social context within which it is embedded and operates. And indeed, the text of Article 27 of the Kenyan Constitution does require the latter approach: by prohibiting both direct and indirect discrimination, it requires a court to examine the effect of a law (an enquiry that needs to be contextual), and not merely its formal language (which is what the Court limited itself to in the above paragraph).

In fact, when faced with Section 165, even the Court’s formal analysis began to border on the illogical. Section 165, it held, used the term “any male person”, and therefore targeted male persons in general, and not male persons of any particular sexual orientation. The Court seemed to miss the second half the provision, however, which uses the term “with another male person”! Now, when a statute criminalises “acts of gross indecency” only between two male persons, we don’t even need to go into questions of indirect discrimination – on its face, the statute clearly targets gay men.

That said, the Court did go on to consider questions of selective enforcement. After noting petitioners’ affidavits that set out various instances of discrimination and violence, the Court noted that “a party pleading violation of constitutional rights is at the very least expected to give credible evidence of the said violation and that it is not enough to merely plead and particularize a  violation.” In this case, “save for the allegations made in the Petition and the affidavits, no tangible evidence was given to support the allegations.” (paragraph 299)

But this is a bewildering argument. It is in the nature of social discrimination and prejudice that it is experiential: it takes the form of discrimination in access to services, taunts in public and private, physical violence, and so on. The only “tangible evidence” that can be produced in such cases is in the nature of the testimony of those affected by it – all of which was before the Court. And this is also the reason why there exist detailed sociological studies (see here) that discuss the interface between anti-sodomy laws and social norms. It is therefore unclear what kind of evidence the Court would have found satisfactory in this case (it did not specify).

The Argument from Privacy and Dignity

After moving quickly through some other arguments such as the right to health (I have refrained from analysing the Court’s analysis of this, because it appears to require access to the pleadings), the Court came to the final argument: that the provisions violated the rights to privacy and dignity. The Court made two arguments to reject this claim. First, it held that there was no conclusive evidence to support the proposition that homosexuals were “born that way.” (paragraph 393) And secondly, it held that the question of legalising same-sex marriage had been explicitly raised during the drafting of the Kenyan Constitution, and it had been answered in the negative, with Article 45 of the Constitution specifying that “every adult has the right to marry a person of the opposite sex.” According to the Court, allowing same-sex relations would “indirectly open the door for unions among persons of the same sex”, something that would conflict with Article 45. (para 397)

Let us take both arguments in turn. On the first issue, the Court is right that there exists some scholarly debate on the issue of whether sexual orientation is “innate” or whether it is a product of biological and social factors. Where the Court is wrong, however, is on the question of whether that matters at all. As this piece puts the point: “Why should gay rights depend on being born this way?” Indeed, the question of whether sexual orientation is innate or not is irrelevant to a privacy/dignity claim, where one of the core elements is that of decisional autonomy, and, in particular, the right to make intimate choices in freedom and without State coercion. Therefore, wherever upon the innate/choice spectrum sexuality may lie, its position upon that spectrum does not change the fact that it is protected by the constitutional rights to privacy and dignity.

The second argument is even more difficult to parse. Article 45 uses the specific term “marry“, and in the absence of a claim for same-sex marriage, it is difficult to see where the conflict is. The Court attempted to get around this by observing that Section 3(1) of the Marriage Act defined “marriage” as the “voluntary union between of a man and a woman.” For the second time in the judgment, however, the Court appears to have engaged in a spot of selective reading. Section 3(1), in full, reads: “Marriage is the voluntary union of a man and a woman whether in a monogamous or polygamous union and registered in accordance with this Act.” This means that the Court’s attempts to equate “marriage” and “unions” when it says that legalising same-sex relations would “indirectly open the door for unions among persons of the same sex” is a piece of casuistry: by its very terms, a same-sex union would not amount to a marriage unless it is registered under the Marriage Act; and therefore, there is absolutely no conflict with Article 45 of the Kenyan Constitution.

It is also impossible to ignore the Court’s own shifts in meaning through the judgment: while considering the equality and non-discrimination claim, the Court held that Sections 162 an 165 only criminalised certain “acts”, and not persons. But when it came to the privacy and dignity claims, the Court switched tack, and found a seeming conflict with Article 45 of the Kenyan Constitution on the assumption that what Sections 162 and 165 did do was to outlaw same-sex relations, and not simply anal sex.

Conclusion

Article 27 of the Kenyan Constitution is a striking provision. It outlaws both direct and indirect discrimination. It provides a host of grounds: race, sex, pregnancy, marital status, health status, ethnic or social origin, colour, age, disability, religion, conscience, belief, culture, dress, language, or birth. And it uses the word “including” just after “ground”, signifying that the definition is open-ended. This makes it one of the most progressive anti-discrimination provisions in any Constitution, anywhere in the world.

It would seem the easiest and most natural of analytical feats to hold that sexual orientation falls within Article 27. The multiple grounds in connection are united by two things: they are either “personal characteristics”, or the products of personal and intimate choices. And they are united, further, by one overarching theme: they have been the historical and continuing sites of discrimination, used in order to identify and single out groups of people, and then target and attack them. On every conceivable understanding of this provision, therefore, sexual orientation clearly comes within its terms.

Why then did the judgment of the Kenyan High Court come out the way that it did? Reading it, I was in fact struck by the similarities that it had with Kaushal: both judgments are characterised by a similar unwillingness – an unwillingness not to justify or to defend discrimination, but simply to acknowledge that it even exists. This is what explains the fact that in both Koushal and in EG, ultimately, the Court dodged the hard questions by holding that the equality and non-discrimination provisions of the respective Constitutions didn’t even apply, because, after all, the only thing prohibited was a set of acts. The contextual analysis that was required to link these apparent “acts” to the stigmatisation and persecution of sexual minorities was the missing step that the Courts seemed either unwilling – or unable – to take.

But the future of Kaushal perhaps give hope that in Kenya as well, this is an error that shall soon be rectified.

The Uttarakhand High Court on Reservations and Article 16(1)

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Equality, power, reservations, substantive equality

A Full Bench of the Uttarakhand High Court has just delivered an interesting judgment on the question of reservations and Article 16(1) of the Constitution. In Dhananjay Verma v State of Uttarakhand, the issue before the High Court was a straightforward one: could the State provide reservations for a group of people who fell outside the category of backward classes of citizens who were not adequately represented in State services? In the present case, reservations had been provided for sportspersons domiciled in the state of Uttarakhand. Sportspersons, admittedly, did not fall within the scope of Article 16(4), which specifically authorises reservations in State services. Consequently, were they entitled to reservations – and if so, under which Article of the Constitution?

On the constitutional issue, Chief Justice Ranganathan – writing for the Full Bench – held that reservations under the Constitution are authorised not merely by Article 16(4), but also by 16(1) [“equality of opportunity”]. The reasoning of the Full Bench was straightforward: it had been clearly established by N.M. Thomas and Indira Sawhney that Article 16(4) was not an exception to Article 16(1), but a facet – or a restatement – of it. This meant that 16(4) did nothing more than give concrete expression to the principle already contained within 16(1) – the principle of substantive equality. For this reason, even in the absence of 16(4), reservations could be sourced from 16(1)’s guarantee of equality of opportunity, as long as they met the basic threshold of reasonable classification.

While this line of reasoning – and the conclusion – seems unexceptionable, Courts in India have been remarkably hesitant over the years in affirming this logical extension of the Thomas-Sawhney principle. In the pre-Thomas days, of course, when Article 16(4) was considered to be an exception to Article 16(1), the situation was different: as the Patna High Court held in Sukhnandan Thakur (1955), over a strong dissent by the Chief Justice, reservations for ex-freedom fighters were unconstitutional, as they did not fall within the scope of Article 16(4). Two years after Thomas, though, the Punjab & Haryana High Court, in Jagdish Rai, took note of how Thomas had radically altered constitutional jurisprudence. It upheld reservations for ex-armed forces personnel, on the basis that under Article 16(1), a “just proportion of the posts should be given to those who, because of a peculiar handicap, may not stand a chance against those not so handicapped.” 

After that, however, the development of law – until Dhananjay Verma restated it yesterday – has been almost negligible. Part of the reason for this, I would suggest, is that judges have balked at the potentially radical consequences of this doctrine. Not only does it open up the scope of reservations to any group that is faced with structural or systemic barriers, but also, as I have argued in The Transformative Constitution:

“… if the principles underlying Article 16(4) are now ‘facets’ of Article 16(1), then it must follow that—as Galanter realized immediately after the judgement in N.M. Thomas was delivered—an individual who feels that she has been substantively disadvantaged by reason of her group membership has a right to approach the Court and demand that this inequality be mitigated. Of course, this radically transforms the relationship between individual and the State, when it comes to questions of structural inequalities and substantive barriers to access. After N.M. Thomas, the State does not merely have the power to remedy these inequalities, but has a duty to identify and remedy them—a duty for which it is answerable in a court.” 

As Karan Lahiri has argued before on this blog, the concept of a “power + duty” is not foreign to Indian constitutional jurisprudence. It would, however, radically alter our understanding of Article 16, even though it is a logical consequence of Thomas/Sawhney. And interestingly, the Uttarakhand High Court’s Full Bench appeared to have balked at that conclusion as well, setting up an interesting tension within the judgment. Because after holding that reservations could be sourced to Article 16(1), the High Court nonetheless refused to issue a mandamus to the government directing it to implement the quota for sportspersons, and instead left the issue to the discretion of the government.

There are a few things to note about this. The first is that this makes the judgment internally contradictory: the Full Bench could not both have held that reservations were sourced from Article 16(1), and that the issue remained purely discretionary. This is because Article 16(1) is framed as a right (to equality of opportunity), and a right whose enforcement is at the discretion of the State is no right at all. Secondly, the Ranganathan CJ justified this view by invoking the separation of powers, and observing that a mandamus to the State to implement reservations would amount to legislation. While the High Court’s concern about the separation of powers is to be genuinely appreciated in an age where it seems to matter less and less, on this point – with respect – it got its wires crossed. As Lahiri has explained, the duty aspect of “power + duty” does not refer to a duty to carve out reservations, but a duty to collect the facts and evidence that will show whether or not reservations are required (for a particular group), upon the principles of substantive equality. The mandamus, therefore, would be limited to just that – something well within the scope of the separation of powers – and not a mandamus to legislate. And lastly, in NALSA v Union of India, the Supreme Court did order reservations for the transgender community, after it found that the community was disadvantaged along a host of parametres. Consequently, there existed precedent even for a judicial order of reservations following upon the relevant finding of substantive disadvantage and denial of equality of opportunity within the meaning of Article 16(1).

Conclusion

The Uttarakhand High Court’s judgment is a welcome and lucid restatement of the law. Its clear holding that Article 16(1) is the constitutional source of reservations – and that groups other than the 16(4) groups can be granted reservation subject to reasonable classification – has been long overdue. That said, however, the High Court stopped short: carrying through with its reasoning, it also ought to have clarified that reservations form part of the right to substantive equality, and that 16(1) imposes a duty upon the State at least to conduct the necessary data-gathering exercise that would serve as a pre-requisite towards implementing the promise of substantive equality underlying Article 16.

Perhaps that will be the task of the Supreme Court, if this judgment is appealed.

Reservations in Promotions and the Idea of Efficiency: B.K. Pavitra v Union of India

Tags

Equality, equality of opportunity, reservations, transformative constitution

[Editorial Note: Justice is an indivisible concept. We cannot, therefore, discuss contemporary Supreme Court judgments without also acknowledging the Court’s failure – at an institutional level – to do justice in the case involving sexual harassment allegations against the Chief Justice. This editorial caveat will remain in place for all future posts on this blog dealing with the Supreme Court, until there is a material change in circumstances.]

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This morning, a two-judge bench of the Supreme Court delivered a fascinating judgment in B.K. Pavitra v Union of India, concerning the relationship between reservations in promotions for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes [SCs/STs], and issues of seniority. The facts were as follows: in 2002, the state of Karnataka enacted a law stipulating – in effect – that consequential seniority would follow upon the promotions of SC/ST employees. To put it in simple language: if a reserved category employee (A) was promoted before a more senior colleague (B) by virtue of A belonging to the reserved category, then – in the higher level post – A would now be senior to B (when, eventually, the latter would get promoted as well).

Readers familiar with reservation will know that this issue – bitterly contested over many decades – was eventually set at rest by amendments to Article 16(4A) of the Constitution, that authorised consequential seniority in cases of reservations in promotions. In Nagaraj, while upholding the amendment in question, a Constitution Bench of the Supreme Court also held that the government was obligated to first collect data demonstrating “inadequacy” of SC/ST representation in the services, their “backwardness”, and the impact on “efficiency”, before it could enact laws in accordance with Article 16(4A). In 2017, the Supreme Court then found that the Karnataka law did not comply with Nagaraj, and was therefore unconstitutional (B.K. Pavitra – I). In response, the Karnataka government commissioned a study [“the Ratna Prabha Committee Report”], and based on the results of the study, (basically) re-enacted the earlier law.

The constitutional challenge to the law raised a host of issues. It was argued that Karnataka had impermissibly “overruled” the judgment in Pavitra – I by re-enacting the law that had been held to be unconstitutional, and doing it retroactively, to boot. It was argued that the bill had been wrongly sent for Presidential assent. It was argued that the study on the basis of which the law was passed was flawed. And it was argued that the law was unconstitutional because it failed to exclude the “creamy layer.” In this essay, I will not discuss all of the above issues: on some points, such as legislative overruling, the Court essentially synthesised and restated existing law; readers interested in the subject may read the judgment for a clear and lucid exposition of the principles. What I want to focus on, rather, are some of the novel issues that arose, as well as the novel treatment that the Court accorded to older issues.

Standards of Judicial Review

As the Chandrachud J. correctly observed at the beginning of the judgment, this was the first time in the post-Nagaraj era that the Court was explicitly asked to rule upon the State’s data-gathering exercise, which was now a constitutional pre-requisite for any law aiming to implement reservations (with consequential seniority) in promotions (paragraph 4).

The petitioners argued that the Ratna Prabha Committee Report was flawed because, inter alia, its methodology was either incorrect or insufficient (in many respects, such as measuring inadequacy against sanctioned posts instead of filled posts, that it was not cadre-based, and so on), and because the reports on efficiency were only general in nature. The Respondents contended, on the other hand, that these questions were within the “subjective satisfaction” of the State (as had been held in Indra Sawhney), and that it was the State that was in the best position to “define and measure merit.”

In response, the Court noted that, as a preliminary point, it would have to set down the parametres of judicial review in a case like this. These parametres, it held, would be based on two mutually reinforcing principles: the first was the general principle that the executive was best aware of prevailing conditions. This is nothing more than the familiar presumption of constitutionality. The second principle was more specific: in the context of reservations, questions such as adequacy of representation would be left, at the first instance, to the subjective satisfaction of the State. This was because, as Chandrachud J. noted, the State was tasked with promoting substantive equality under the Constitution through the vehicle of reservations. (paragraph 95). Applying these principles to the Ratna Prabha Committee Report, Chandrachud J. observed that the Report was based on sampling methods that were broadly accepted among social scientists. There was no evidence that extraneous or irrelevant material had been used. Beyond that assessment, it was not for the Court to hold that the Report was invalid because the best (or substantially better) methods were available, that had not been used. And on the basis of the Report, it was open to the legislature to hold that a disparity between the population percentage of SC/STs, and their representation in the services, was the basis for determining “inadequacy of representation.”

A few things follow from this discussion. The first is that the Court adopted a deferential attitude towards the State’s collection of data, and its inferences from the data it had collected. The reason for this, the Court held, that the purpose of the exercise was for the legislature to be able to effectively advance the constitutional goal of substantive equality. In other words, the Court recognised the crucial point that constitutional goals are to be advanced by all three wings of the State, and that in different contexts, the primary responsibility for that lies upon different wings. In the specific case of reservations, that responsibility has been placed upon the legislature. For this reason, in the domain of reservations, the Court would only assess the State’s subjective satisfaction on the deferential threshold of rationality and non-arbitrariness. Note, also, what follows: this principle of deference will not apply to every situation where a law is challenged, and the State invokes data collection and analysis to justify itself. In a case where – for example – the challenge is on the basis of a violation of civil rights, the Court may well elect to take on a more interventionist approach to the reliability of the data. In the specific context of reservations, though, given the constitutional text, and the clear responsibility of the State, this the Court’s approach has much to recommend it.

Interrogating Efficiency

Now, of course, it might be argued that the Court ought to have been more interventionist, because the case did indeed involve a violation of rights – the Article 16(1) equality rights of non-SC/ST candidates. This point was addressed by Chandrachud J. in the subsequent section where, relying upon the judgments in N.M. Thomas and Subba Rao J.’s dissenting opinion in Devadasan, he correctly observed that it was the principle of substantive equality – and not formal equality – that underlay the Constitution’s equality code. As Chandrachud J. observed, at paragraph 107:

There is substantial evidence that the members of the Constituent Assembly recognised that (i) Indian society suffered from deep structural inequalities; and (ii) the Constitution would serve as a transformative document to overcome them. One method of overcoming these inequalities is reservations for the SCs and STs in the legislatures and state services.

Readers may consult the following paragraphs for an account of the Constituent Assembly Debates, the the place of reservations in advancing the Constitution’s transformative character. This discussion, however, segued into what is perhaps the most fascinating part of the judgment. Recall that, according to Nagaraj, the government was also required to collect data on whether reservations in promotion would affect “efficiency” in services (as per the requirement of Article 335). And one of the bases on which the petitioners attacked the Ratna Prabha Committee Report was precisely that it had failed to do so.

In response, Chandrachud J. undertook a critique of the concept of “efficiency” itself. In paragraph 119, he observed that:

The Constitution does not define what the framers meant by the phrase efficiency of administration. Article 335 cannot be construed on the basis of a stereotypical assumption that roster point promotees drawn from the SCs and STs are not efficient or that efficiency is reduced by appointing them. This is stereotypical because it masks deep rooted social prejudice. The benchmark for the efficiency of administration is not some disembodied, abstract ideal measured by the performance of a qualified open category candidate. Efficiency of administration in the affairs of the Union or of a State must be defined in an inclusive sense, where diverse segments of society find representation as a true aspiration of governance by and for the people. If, as we hold, the Constitution mandates realisation of substantive equality in the engagement of the fundamental rights with the directive principles, inclusion together with the recognition of the plurality and diversity of the nation constitutes a valid constitutional basis for defining efficiency. Our benchmarks will define our outcomes. If this benchmark of efficiency is grounded in exclusion, it will produce a pattern of governance which is skewed against the marginalised. If this benchmark of efficiency is grounded in equal access, our outcomes will reflect the commitment of the Constitution to produce a just social order. Otherwise, our past will haunt the inability of our society to move away from being deeply unequal to one which is founded on liberty and fraternity. Hence, while interpreting Article 335, it is necessary to liberate the concept of efficiency from a one sided approach which ignores the need for and the positive effects of the inclusion of diverse segments of society on the efficiency of administration of the Union or of a State.

This needs some careful unpacking. What Chandrachud J. is effectively arguing against here is an account of “efficiency” that sees it in purely instrumental terms, and devoid of any relationship with the socio-economic context within which such accounts are inevitably embedded. It is an account that is based in a deeper idea of philosophical individualism, where there exist certain mechanisms – such as standardised tests – that measure “individual merit”, independent of an individual’s group affiliation. This is what efficiency is about, and it must be set off and “balanced” against group-based affirmative action. However, this account has been challenged throughout our history (starting with Subba Rao J.’s dissenting opinion in Devadasan), and here Chandrachud J. takes up the challenge. At the heart of this reasoning is the acknowledgment that assumptions about what people are (i.e., their “merit” or “efficiency”) cannot be separated from what has been done to them (i.e., structural and social privileges, often the product of centuries of discrimination). And ultimately, constitutional values dictate that both must be taken into account. Thus, as Chandrachud J. observed in paragraph 126:

Thus, a meritorious candidate is not merely one who is talented or successful but also one whose appointment fulfils the constitutional goals of uplifting members of the SCs and STs and ensuring a diverse and representative administration.

On these bases – and on the basis of the Report’s finding that there had been no adverse impact even on instrumental efficiency as the data showed, this ground of challenge was rejected as well.

Creamy Layer

A final point: it was argued that the law was unconstitutional because – after Jarnail Singh – it was bound to take into account the exclusion of the creamy layer among SC/STs. The Court correctly observed that the question of creamy layer did not arise at the point of promotions and consequential seniority. It is worth pointing out once more, however, that Jarnail Singh’s finding on this respect is somewhat suspect: the reason why the creamy layer doctrine is not supposed to apply to SCs/STs is because – historically – they have been oppressed by virtue of their group identity. The concept of the creamy layer makes sense if we assume that it is possible to escape one’s group identity (through prosperity or other ways of social advancement, for example). However, when oppression is defined by characteristics such as social stigma (as was well-recognised by Ambedkar and other framers of the Constitution), then the very concept of a “creamy layer” within that group does not make sense. This aspect of Jarnail Singh, it is to be hoped, will be reconsidered at some point.

Conclusion

Today’s judgment is a fascinating read, particularly because of the manner in which it moves between different levels of reasoning – from concrete issues of service jurisprudence to the abstract principles of substantive equality and the idea of merit – and how it weaves them together in one coherent vision of transformative constitutionalism. The Court’s finding on the substantive question – the constitutionality of the seniority law – is informed by its reasoning about the abstract principles that underly the Constitution’s equality code; in other words, the Court believes that the Constitution ideals make a difference, and it explains precisely how it does so. And moreover, it joins an important tradition of judicial reasoning on affirmative action that does not take concepts of “merit” and “efficiency” as self-evident, but subjects them to critical evaluation, from the perspective of the original constitutional vision, noting how they are embedded within our social realities (and inequalities). This tradition of reasoning has, so far, been underdeveloped in our constitutional history – and today’s judgment marks an important milestone in its evolution.

Guest Post: The Case against the 103rd Amendment

Tags

basic structure, caste, Equality, reservations

(This is a guest post by Malavika Prasad. A prior version appeared here.)

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The 103rd Constitutional Amendment permits the State to:

1. make special provisions (Article 15(6)),
2. make special provisions, including reservations in admissions to educational institutions, in addition to the existing reservations to the extent of 10%, and
3. make provision for reservations in appointments or posts, in addition to the existing reservations to the extent of 10% for the advancement of “any economically weaker sections of citizens other than the classes mentioned” in Articles 15(4) and (5) and Article 16(4).

In this piece, I respond to Gautam Bhatia and Anup Surendranath, and make the basic structure argument against the 10% reservation for this class of beneficiaries. I do not present any analysis on the constitutionality of other “special provisions” such as scholarships, fee waivers, etc.

Reservations are meant to ensure that the ideal of “equal opportunity” is not a mirage for persons subordinated by social structures such as caste, gender, race, etc. This is why Article 16(4) is considered to be an emphatic restatement of Article 16(1)’s principle of equality of opportunity (see NM Thomas, Indira Sawhney and this paper examining the relationship between the two articles). Prior to the 103rd Amendment, in an ideal India in which quality education is available in public schools, a beneficiary of reservation under Articles 15(4) and (5) and Article 16(4) (let’s call them “protected groups”), from the parent’s generation ought to attain upward mobility of the degree and kind that enables their children or grandchildren to compete for the unreserved, open seats. So long as there is a steady stream of first generation learners from protected groups attending school each year with the benefit of reservation, the numbers of second and later generation learners from protected groups in the total pool of students (comprising reserved and unreserved seats) ought to grow. Growing numbers of later generation learners from these protected groups, in even unreserved seats, would be testimony to the success of a reservation program: the parental generation, being beneficiaries of reservation, gained a boost that enabled the later generations compete without the need for a similar boost. In other words, the benefit of reservation to earlier generation learners enables later generations of learners to work their way up, in educational institutions and the workforce, and out of the conditions of backwardness.

This logic is, of course, an oversimplification resorted to here only for the purpose of the argument. In reality, the conditions of backwardness that characterize OBCs are qualitatively different than those for SCs/STs. The key difference between the two is of social stigma: persons from SC communities, for instance, regardless of their attainments in education and employment, continue to face the stigma of untouchability by other members of society, a reality steadfastly recognised by the Supreme Court in 1992 Indira Sawhney, albeit with a recent and problematic departure in Jarnail Singh. A study of the castes and tribal groups classified as SC/ST, and the determinants for doing so is available in Chapter 5 of Marc Galanter’s Competing Inequalities.

The Rights of Later-Generation SC/ST/OBC Learners

After Articles 15(6) and 16(6), the number of second and later generation learners from protected groups who take up unreserved seats might diminish, notwithstanding the growing numbers of them who are capable of competing in the open channel. This would not have happened but for the Amendment, because the new set of beneficiaries under Articles 15(6) and 16(6) are to be “other” than those from the protected groups contemplated in Article 15(4) and (5) and 16(4). In other words, the new class of beneficiaries is defined in opposition to the old classes of beneficiaries. So when the State sets about following the Amendment’s instructions to name the new class of beneficiaries, it must first analyse what counts as “economic disadvantage” and then produce “indicators”. Then, it must test which persons qualify against these indicators of economic disadvantage. In doing so, the State must consider only persons who are not from the protected groups of SCs/STs or OBCs. Thus, to the extent of 10%, educationally well-to-do persons can be beneficiaries of reservations in educational institutions under Article 15(6). Likewise, classes of citizens who are adequately represented in the State services can be beneficiaries of reservations in the State services under Article 16(6). The Amendment thus cements the claim of persons from upper castes who are possibly educationally well-to-do and adequately represented in State services, on 10% of seats or posts.  

Furthermore, the new class of beneficiaries is left to the State to notify from time to time, “on the basis of family income and other indicators of economic disadvantage.” What might count as “indicators of economic disadvantage” is unclear. Since “indicators of economic disadvantage” are to be understood in conjunction with “family income”, presumably, the indicators of disadvantage will consider disadvantage that afflicts families, and thus members of families i.e. individuals. Thus, the Amendment will cement the claim of persons from educationally well-to-do and otherwise well-represented upper-castes, based solely on characteristics that are individual to them.

This damages the basic structure of the Constitution of India. To be clear, the argument is not that the Amendment excludes second and later generation learners of SC/ST/OBCs capable of accessing unreserved seats, from accessing 10% unreserved seats. This by itself is not a problem for the basic structure; it is thus no response to argue that the SC/ST/OBCs already have 50% reserved seats and thus cannot remedy the loss of potential access to unreserved seats. The argument is that the exclusion of these later generation learners, due to an a priori reservation of 10% seats for persons from the upper-castes, is a violation of the basic structure doctrine.

The Logic of Group Representation

This argument hinges on the premise that reservations, as a special provision are meant to achieve representation of communities so far either unrepresented or inadequately represented in the State. That reservations are meant to guarantee opportunity for representation was the premise of even the debates in the Constituent Assembly on Article 16 (Draft Article 10) for instance here, here, here, here and here.

If we can agree that reservations are meant to remedy inadequate representation, then I make two claims:

First: reservations in particular, unlike other special provisions, are only a fruitful remedy to persons subordinated by a structural barrier such as caste, race and gender. This follows from the purpose of reservations being to enhance the representation of those groups that are inadequately represented. Inadequate representation of certain groups is a consequence of members from those groups being held back, throughout their lives, from accessing opportunities on par with the rest of society, by other members of society. For instance, gatekeepers to social spaces such as schools, workplaces, shops etc. continue to practice untouchability, or create other onerous entry barriers for persons from SC/STs. Such continual treatment as “lesser” than others could also psychological harms and intergenerational trauma in persons from SC/STs. One’s birth into castes that are SC/ST then becomes the cause for further and cumulative disadvantage that is not only social and educational but also economic. Contrast this with persons from upper-castes who are setback by “economic disadvantage”. Such disadvantage is not caused by being systematically treated discriminatorily by other members of society. Even the framers of the 1st Constitutional Amendment which introduced Article 15(4) were conscious of the nature of economic disadvantage, as Galanter notes:

In spite of [Prime Minister Nehru’s] reluctance to talk about caste, it is clear that what was intended were not measures to erase all inequalities, but specifically those which were associated with traditional social structure. “[W]e want to put an end to . . . all those infinite divisions that have grown up in our social life . . . we may call them by any name you like, the caste system or religious divisions, etc. There are of course economic divisions but we realize them and we try to deal with them. . . . But in the structure that has grown up . . . with its vast number of fissures or divisions.”

Galanter also notes that Nehru was unwilling to accept any of KT Shah’s amendments that sought to remedy only “economic backwardness” of individuals, as opposed to social and educational backwardness of “classes”:

He then observed: “But if I added ‘economically’ I would at the same time not make it a kind of cumulative thing but would say that a person who is lacking in any of these things should be helped. ‘Socially’ is a much wider word including many things and certainly including economically” (id., 9830).

Since “economic disadvantage” as contemplated in the 103rd Amendment is unlike the structural disadvantage of caste, in that it varies from individual to individual and does not result from membership in a subordinated group, there is nothing to be gained from granting reservations to persons suffering economic disadvantage. This is because the barriers facing upper-caste persons with economic disadvantage are not barriers of representation. One might respond that reservations nonetheless are sought by groups that do not seek to be better represented, because they are an immediate and tangible benefit unlike other special provisions. While that may be true of the demand for reservation by upper-castes, it is not constitutional to accede to such a demand – which is the substance of my next claim.

Equality and the Basic Structure

Second, if reservations are to remedy the effects of caste-subordination by providing representation, then enhancing and cementing the representation of upper-castes damages democracy, which is a part of the basic structure of the Constitution of India.  This aphorism is oft-invoked in cases concerned with questions of what comprises a representative democracy (“free and fair elections”, “judicial review of governor’s powers”) and how a representative democracy can be realized (mechanisms like “one-person-one-vote”, or “secret ballot”). For instance, Justices Khanna and Mathew held, in Indira Gandhi v. Raj Narain, that the constitutional amendment immunizing the election of the Prime Minister and Speaker from judicial challenge damages the principle of “free and fair elections”, a central principle of democracy. RC Poudyal v. Union held that a marginal distortion of the “one-person-one-vote” principle does not damage representative democracy. Kuldip Nayyar held that doing away with the requirement of domicile in the State of candidacy and secret ballot in Rajya Sabha elections would not damage representative democracy. It is the what – the concept in Bhatia’s and originally Dworkin’s words – and not the how – the “conception” – that courts recognise as part of the basic structure. In all these cases, Courts appear to repeatedly uphold elements of the structure and form of democratic government as part of the basic structure.

The form and structure of democratic government cannot be an end in itself, unless all citizens are a priori free and equal to each other. Indian society however possesses deep-seated inequality perpetuated by structures such as caste, and is thus fundamentally undemocratic. Democratic government was chosen as the means to achieve substantive democracy. Dr. Ambedkar reckoned with this reality as he defended the choice to place the working of the administrative services in the Constitution:

While everybody recognizes the necessity of the diffusion of Constitutional morality for the peaceful working of a democratic Constitution, there are two things interconnected with it which are not, unfortunately, generally recognized. One is that the form of administration has a close connection with the form of the Constitution. The form of the administration must be appropriate to and in the same sense as the form of the Constitution. The other is that it is perfectly possible to pervert the Constitution, without changing its form by merely changing the form of the administration and to make it inconsistent and opposed to the spirit of the Constitution. It follows that it is only where people are saturated with Constitutional morality such as the one described by Grote the historian that one can take the risk of omitting from the Constitution details of administration and leaving it for the Legislature to prescribe them. The question is, can we presume such a diffusion of Constitutional morality? Constitutional morality is not a natural sentiment. It has to be cultivated. We must realize that our people have yet to learn it. Democracy in India is only a top-dressing on an Indian soil, which is essentially undemocratic.

 

If elements of the structure of democratic government (such as “free and fair elections”) are part of the basic structure of the Constitution, then the ends sought to be realized through the means of democratic government must also be part of the basic structure. In other words, the why of democracy must be equally central to the basic structure of the Indian Constitution as the how and the what of democracy.

The why of our democracy, as Ambedkar stated, is to realize equality of all persons, despite our deep social stratifications. For substantive democracy, remedying subordination by virtue of caste-membership is indispensable. The 10% reservation for upper-castes undoes this remedy, by cementing the representation of upper-caste persons based on individual criteria such as economic disadvantage. In other words, the 103rd Amendment cements the power of already well-represented groups to the detriment of protected groups. This is a fundamentally undemocratic outcome, taking us back to the status quo in 1950 which we sought to consciously progress from in promulgating the Constitution of India. Thus, the 10% reservation consciously damages substantive democracy which is a core aspect and basic feature of the Constitution of India.

Conclusion

In lieu of a conclusion, it bears mentioning that for my argument, it is irrelevant whether the 10% quota is provided over and above the 50% reservation, or within the 50% reservation such that SC/ST/OBCs are entitled only to 40%. Likewise, nothing turns on breaching the 50% rule either – which can easily be breached by a constitutional amendment so long as special provisions are seen as an emphatic restatement of the principle of equal opportunity. Instead, my argument is merely that cementing the representation of persons from upper-castes damages substantive democracy – upper castes being adequately represented in all social spaces, educational institutions, and in the services of the State. The remedy for upper-caste individuals set back by economic disadvantage lies elsewhere, but not in reservations.

Is the 103rd Amendment Unconstitutional?

Tags

basic structure, Equality, reservations

Yesterday, the President assented to the Constitution (One Hundred and Third Amendment) Act, which introduces reservations based on economic criteria, into the Constitution. The swift passage of this amendment through both houses of Parliament (from start to finish, it took 48 hours) has raised serious questions about democratic accountability. The Amendment itself has been castigated (repeatedly) as an election gimmick, and contrary to the very purpose of providing reservations. However, this is now history: the Amendment is here, awaiting only to be notified by the Government. And so, to the only relevant legal question that remains: is the 103rd Amendment unconstitutional?

The Basic Structure

 

It is trite – but nonetheless important – to recall that, as the Constitution stands amended, the only constitutional challenge that remains is a basic structure challenge. It is also worthwhile to remember – in order to set the context – of how high a threshold that is. Contrary to the beliefs of basic structure critics, who see the doctrine as some kind of Damocles Sword that errant judges are always threatening to drop upon the neck of democracy, the Supreme Court has almost never used basic structure to invalidate constitutional amendments. The high-profile striking down of the NJAC notwithstanding, in the forty-five years since Kesavananda Bharati, the doctrine has been used on an average of once in a decade. And in the seventy-four constitutional amendments after Kesavananda, only five have been struck down on substantive basic structure grounds (a strike rate of around 7%).

It’s also interesting to note (by way of example) what the Supreme Court has allowed to stand in the teeth of a basic structure challenge: in Nagaraj, a whole-scale restructuring of Article 16 that would effectively breach the 50% Rule (more on that in a moment), and in Poudyal, a departure from the principle of one-person-one-vote (more on that shortly, as well). Even when the Court has invoked basic structure, it has elected to use the scalpel rather than the bludgeon: in Raj Narain and in Minerva Mills – two of the starkest cases of constitutional abuse in our history, both by Indira Gandhi – the Court only snipped away a clause (granting immunity to Indira Gandhi from electoral malpractice) and a phrase (effectively getting rid of the fundamental rights chapter altogether) respectively, while upholding the rest of the (abusive) Amendments under challenge.

This is the case because the Court – conscious of the legitimacy issues with striking down a constitutional amendment – has been very careful about the language that it uses. Kesavananda Bharati didn’t say “modify”, “tinker”, or “change” – it said that a constitutional amendment cannot “damage or destroy” the basic structure. Nagaraj refined this by introducing the “width and identity” tests, making it clear that a basic structure challenge would have to demonstrate that the constitutional amendment makes the Constitution virtually unrecognisable.

The Amendment 

Within this context, let us briefly examine the 103rd Amendment. The Amendment introduces Articles 15(6) and 16(6) into the Constitution. 15(6) allows for reservations for “economically weaker sections of citizens” other than the classes mentioned in Articles 15(4) and 15(5) (i.e. effectively, other than the SCs/STs/OBCs). Article 16(6) does the same for public employment. The quantum of reservation is fixed at 10% over and above the existing reservation for SCs/STs/OBCs. An Explanation states that “economic weakness” shall be decided on the basis of “family income” and other “indicators of economic disadvantage.”

I want to focus on three features that (in my view) can form the basis for a potentially credible basic structure challenge. The first is the “50% question.” The second is (what seems to be) the use of family income as the primary determinant of economic disadvantage. The third is potential arbitrariness.

The Challenge 

A. The 50% Rule

It has become almost an article of faith that reservations cannot cross the threshold of 50%. The roots of this stipulation lie in M.R. Balaji v State of Mysore, where the Supreme Court held that because Article 16(4) (reservations) was framed as an exception to Article 16(1) (equality of opportunity), anything more than 50% would imply that the exception was swallowing up the rule. In Indra Sawhney v Union of India, this judicial rule was affirmed once again, and a governmental notification providing for 10% reservations on the basis of economic disadvantage was struck down. However, neither Balaji nor Sawhney were concerned with the basic structure: they were considering a law and subordinate legislation, respectively.

So, is the 50% rule a part of the basic structure? In Nagaraj, the Court suggested that it is, when it noted that:

” … the ceiling-limit of 50%, the concept of creamy layer and the compelling reasons, namely, backwardness, inadequacy of representation and overall administrative efficiency are all constitutional requirements without which the structure of equality of opportunity in Article 16 would collapse.”

But is there any support for this observation? The only indication that the 50% limit is so crucial that it is to be deemed as inherent in the very “structure of equality of opportunity” is found in a speech by Dr. B.R. Ambedkar during the Constituent Assembly Debates in November 1948. Ambedkar observed that the purpose of Article 16 was to balance two competing principles – (formal) equality of opportunity, and compensation for inadequate representation in public employment. This balance was wrought by structuring Article 16 as it was (through 16(1) and 16(4)), and one example that Ambedkar specifically took to indicate what might upset this balance was a potential situation in which the quantum of reservation reached 70%.

There is, therefore, strong evidence to suggest that the 50% rule is baked into the scheme of Article 16, as its drafters intended (and as the Supreme Court later affirmed). However, it does not follow from that that an amendment to Article 16 that changes this scheme would be a basic structure violation. This is for two reasons. The first is that the basic structure is not reducible to a particular, concrete articulation of values, internal to a specific constitutional provision. It is open to Parliament – acting in its constituent capacity – to depart from the constitutional settlement that the framers encoded into Article 16. Parliament is entitled to believe that the social justice facet of 16 deserves greater importance than formal equality of opportunity, and to act upon that belief. Secondly – and more importantly – the “balancing” view of Article 16 is not even the only reasonable interpretation available. In N.M. Thomas, for example, a majority of four judges out of seven held that Article 16(4) is not an exception to 16(1), but a facet of it; in other words, 16(4) merely expresses, in explicit terms, a commitment to equality in terms of social justice that is already present in Article 16(1). Under this view, it is obvious that the 50% rule has no foundation, as that was predicated on 16(4) being an exception to 16(1).

I have defended this interpretation elsewhere, but here, I am not concerned with whether it is right or wrong. The point is that it is a legitimate interpretation of Article 16, that has been affirmed by a seven-judge bench of the Court, and which has never – technically – been overruled. Consequently, it is certainly open to Parliament to take that view, and amend Article 16 to reflect that.

Lastly – and keeping everything else aside – I am not even sure that on its terms, the 103rd Amendment commits Parliament to increasing the quantum of reservation above 50%. The Amendment only provides reservation to the extent of 10%; however, existing Articles 15(4), 15(5), and 16(4) do not stipulate that existing reservations must necessarily be at 50% – that has been achieved through legislation. Consequently, how can a basic structure challenge to the Amendment even raise the 50% argument? That argument – if it has to be raised at all – must come in when Parliament enacts a law to give effect to the Amendment.

B. Individuals and Groups

There is, I think, a more persuasive basic structure argument against the Amendment. There is one feature that distinguishes the Amendment from the rest of the scheme of Articles 15 and 16: by using the “family income” as the primary determinant of economic disadvantage, the Amendment advances a philosophy of reservation that focuses on remedying individual disadvantage (by taking the family as the unit for determining who is disadvantaged). At a very fundamental level, this departs from the kind of equality that the Equality Code (Articles 14, 15, and 16) envisages. The scheme of Articles 14, 15 and 16 is one that acknowledges the historical fact that in India, group membership has been the primary basis of institutional and structural disadvantage. One’s access to opportunity and chances of social and economic mobility have been mediated by one’s group identity – and primary, that identity has been structured around caste. The logic of reservation in India – and this dates back to pre-Independence times – has, consequently, always been that while the right to equality is an individual right, the only method of achieving substantive equality at an individual level is to take into account the disadvantages and barriers that exist on account of groups (and specifically, caste groups).

As a variant of this argument, Madhav Khosla has argued that the reason why the 103rd Amendment must fail the basic structure test is because it essentially contains internally contradictory provisions: the logic of 15(4), (5) and 16(4) (group-determined, social and educational backwardness) is at war with the logic of the new Articles 15(6) and 16(6).

While I agree that the 103rd Amendment makes a logical mess of the scheme of Equality Code, when it comes to a basic structure challenge, however, I find myself running up against the same difficulty that was faced in assessing the 50% challenge. And that is that the argument accords to the basic structure a level of specificity that it does not have, and one that the Court has consistently refused to give it. It is true that economic reservation goes against the grain of how social justice and equality have always been conceptualised in India, at least in constitutional terms. It is true that it sets up a contradiction (in terms of legal logic) between the SC/ST/OBC reservation provisions, and economic reservation. However, once again – the basic structure does not bind Parliament to any particular conception of equality and social justice. The basic structure does not require that Parliament follow the same logic, even within the same constitutional provision. The basic structure does not mandate clean, coherent, and logical drafting. All it requires is that a basic feature – in this case, “equality” – not be “damaged or destroyed.” And for me, it is difficult to see how economic reservation “damages or destroys” the concept of equality, because as long as there exists a reasonable understanding of equality that can accommodate economic reservation – and surely there does – it will be immune from a basic structure challenge.

The distinction between the level of the “concept” (which is the level at which the basic structure operates) and the level of the “conception” (which is the level at which the Amendment operates) is made clear if we consider the case of R.C. Poudyal: in R.C. Poudyal, which dealt with the accession of Sikkim to the Indian Union, one of the challenges involved a departure from the one-person-one-vote principle when it came to elections within Sikkim. It was argued that this violated the basic structure, because it went against democracy. The Court upheld it, however, noting that there were many different forms of democracy that were consistent with the concept of democracy. Similarly, there are many visions of equality – many concrete manifestations – that remain consistent with the concept of equality. A basic structure challenge can succeed only if equality itself is abrogated – for example, if Article 14 is repealed altogether, or if a Bill of Attainder is passed (which was the issue in Raj Narain).

Arbitrariness 

One last possible attack is on the grounds of arbitrariness – that is, the family income criteria has no relation with the goal of reservation. In other words – as many people have pointed out – reservation is not the remedy to the problem of poverty (reservation is about compensating for social and institutional barriers to representation). This makes mandating reservation on economic disadvantage arbitrary.

This raises a fascinating constitutional question, which is yet to be resolved: are there specific articles that are so important and crucial, that they themselves constitute basic features? In particular, are Articles 14, 19, and 21, standing alone, part of the basic structure, so that a constitutional amendment can be challenged, like an ordinary law, on the basis that it violates one of these articles?

The Supreme Court has hinted before that this might be the case; however, I am unpersuaded. It is one thing to say that if Parliament was to repeal Article 14, or 19, or 21 – taking away equality, freedom, and liberty altogether – then a basic structure challenge would lie. It is quite another to say that specific tests under 14, 19, and 21 should apply, mutatis mutandis, to a constitutional amendment.

Conclusion

There are powerful legal and constitutional arguments against economic reservation. However, what the above discussion has shown is that they operate at the level of the law: they would succeed were it the case that legislation was being tested against the basic structure.  However, it is far more difficult in the case of a constitutional amendment. Ironically, this is because of the precise reason that has given so much fodder to basic structure critics – the Court’s refusal to define it in concrete and specific terms. As long as economic reservation is defensible on a ground that is recognisable in terms of equality, the fact that it departs from how equality and social justice is presently understood in the Constitution, is no ground for striking it down. And that minimal threshold, in my view, is met by the 103rd Amendment. It is likely to survive a basic structure challenge.

 

Navtej Johar v Union of India: Rethinking Rajbala, and the Way Forward

Tags

discrimination, disparate impact, elections, Equality, panchayati raj

(This is the concluding post in our series of essays examining the Supreme Court’s judgment in Navtej Johar v Union of India. An earlier version of this piece appeared in Scroll.)

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As the dust settles over Navtej Johar v Union of India, attention must turn to the future. When, last year, the Supreme Court delivered the famous privacy judgment, it was immediately clear that it was both important in its own right, but also, equally important in the possibilities that it opened up for future expansion of civil rights. Navtej Johar – as I mentioned in my initial essay – was itself made possible by the privacy judgment. And Navtej Johar – in turn – now opens up a series of possibilities. Here are three of them:

A. “Manifest arbitrariness” as a ground for striking down laws

As readers of the blog are aware, we have previously discussed the long judicial tussle between the “classification” and the “arbitrariness” tests under Article 14 of the Constitution. To cut the long story short, the traditional rational classification standard under Article 14 has always been deferential towards the State, and incapable of addressing complex inequalities. Arbitrariness was introduced to mitigate the shortcomings of the classification standard, but has itself ended up being rather … arbitrary. Notwithstanding that, there has always been controversy over whether the arbitrariness standard is limited to invalidating executive action (which would, essentially, reduce it to a glorified Wednesbury principle), or whether it can be applied to invalidate statutes as well.

In the Triple Talaq judgment last year, at least two judges out of five held that “manifest arbitrariness” could, indeed, be applied by courts to invalidate statutes. It was unclear whether the “swing opinion” – that of Joseph J. – endorsed this principle. Subsequent judgments (delivered by two judges) appeared to believe that it did. However, the controversy has now been set to rest. In Navtej Johar – as Abhinav Chandrachud points out in his guest post – all five judges partially strike down S. 377 on grounds of manifest arbitrariness.

What does this mean for civil rights? There is one immediate implication. Three years ago, in Rajbala v State of Haryana (which I have analysed here), the Supreme Court upheld the State of Haryana’s amendments to the Panchayati Raj Act, which had imposed educational, debt and property-based restrictions upon the right to contest Panchayat elections. The judgment expressly held that the “arbitrariness standard” could not – and would not – be applied to test the law under Article 14. As Mihir Naniwadekar pointed out at the time, there was a strong argument that the Rajbala bench was bound to apply the arbitrariness standard, under existing precedent. Two judges out of five believed so in Triple Talaq, when they expressly stated that Rajbala stood overruled on this point. And that view has not been vindicated by the verdict of all five judges in Navtej Johar. Rajbala, therefore, requires reconsideration.

(N.B. I should add that, as previously discussed on this blog, I do not think the arbitrariness standard – as it stands, and without further development – is constitutionally defensible. However, it is what it is.)

B. Discrimination as a contextual enquiry

Justice Chandrachud’s concurring judgment in Navtej Johar argues at great length that the question of whether a law or a rule has a discriminatory effect must be answered by taking into account the background social context in which the law operates. In 2013, in its judgment upholding Section 377, the Supreme Court in Koushal v Naz Foundation had held that in criminalizing “carnal intercourse against the order of nature”, the section only penalized “acts”, and not persons; consequently, the question of discrimination did not arise. In a detailed repudiation of this facile argument, Justice Chandrachud examines how, when Section 377 interacts with the existing social and moral proscriptions, its effect is to confine the LGBT+ community to the proverbial closet, causing great harm to their individuality, personhood, and dignity. Whatever the form of the law, therefore, its effect – when placed within the social context – is discriminatory.

This focus on effect and context has the potential to significantly advance discrimination jurisprudence in India. As an example, take once again the judgment in Rajbala v State of Haryana. While upholding educational disqualifications in that case, the Court noted that it was only education that allowed people to distinguish between right and wrong. What the Court didn’t take into account, however, was that despite our legal and constitutional framework, access to education continues to be skewed along caste, gender, and economic lines, for a multiplicity of reasons (ranging from stereotypes about women’s role in the family, to simple economic stress that does not permit the luxury of sending children to school). This has been pointed out repeatedly, and is well-documented. For example:

A glimpse at Haryana’s background tells us how deeply it is entrenched in patriarchy. It has one of the most skewed sex ratios in India — 877 overall and 837 in the 0-6 year age group. Male literacy rate is 85 pc, against 66 pc for females, a significant gap.

 

Therefore, while the law in Rajbala appeared to be about incentivizing education (a laudable goal), its effect was to further marginalize from the political process those who were already most marginalised. If Chandrachud J.’s reasoning in Navtej Johar is followed, this background context cannot be ignored.

The Supreme Court has an immediate opportunity to correct its error in Rajbala: the State of Rajasthan passed a very similar law at around the same time, which is yet to be adjudicated upon by the Court.

It is, after all, never out of season to dream.

 C. Analogous grounds

In her concurring opinion, Justice Indu Malhotra argues that discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation violates Article 15(1) of the Constitution. Article 15(1) prohibits discrimination on grounds of sex, race, religion, caste, and place of birth. Justice Malhotra takes the view, however, that Article 15(1) covers not only these five stipulated grounds, but also “analogous” grounds: that is, characteristics that bear a family resemblance to sex, race, religion etc. What is common to the “grounds” under 15(1) – Justice Malhotra argues – is that they are either immutable (i.e., impossible or extremely difficult to change), and/or deeply linked to personal autonomy. Sexual orientation, thus, is an “analogous ground”, and therefore protected under Article 15(1).

Malhotra J.’s interpretation is difficult to sustain on the text of Article 15(1), which makes it clear that it refers to a “closed list of grounds” – i.e., the Court cannot add to the five grounds stipulated therein. However, if Justice Malhotra’s view is accepted in future judgments, it does open up Article 15(1) to a range of discrimination claims: for example, age, disability, political belief, and economic status are just a few of the possible “grounds” that can be invoked as analogous, and therefore, protected by a non-discrimination guarantee. Here, once again, the Court must tread carefully, and develop the law in an incremental and rigorous fashion.

Conclusion

For a long time now, the Indian Supreme Court’s thinking on issues of equality and non-discrimination has been static. This is contrary to other jurisdictions such as Canada and South Africa, where judges have deepened their understanding of these questions, over time. Navtej Johar’s judgment provides us with a gateway to updating our own understanding of Articles 14 and 15(1) of the Constitution, to match with ever more sophisticated accounts of what constitutes inequality and discrimination. However, it is only the foundation stone: the future development of the law is now in the hands of the courts.

Round-Up: The Delhi High Court’s Experiments with the Constitution

Tags

article 14, autonomy, contracts, Decisional Autonomy, delhi high court, dignity, disparate impact, Equal Pay for Equal Work, Equality, labour law, non-discrimination, Regularisation

(This is the second part of three blog posts that round-up some recent judicial pronouncements. For work-related reasons, I did not have the time to write about them when they were delivered. – Ed.)

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Benches of the Delhi High Court have issued a series of interesting rulings in the first half of 2018. A summary follows.

Article 14 and Genetic Discrimination

In United India Insurance Company v Jai Parkash Tayal, a single-judge bench of the Delhi High Court invalidated a clause of an insurance contract that excluded “genetic disorders” from the scope of insurance. The judgment proceeded on multiple grounds, and makes for fascinating reading. In particular, Justice Pratibha Singh invalidated the clause on the grounds of Article 14 (equality before law), 21 (right to health), and the impermissibility of changing an insurance contract to the detriment of the insured. The Article 21 issue is not one I will discuss here: as readers of this blog will know, the reading in of broad socio-economic rights into Article 21, and their exceedingly uneven application on a case-to-case basis, is not something I am very comfortable with. This case, like so many others, tells us that there is a right to health, and then uses it to achieve a specific outcome, but somewhere along the way, the precise spelling out of the scope, contours and limits of this right, and the nature of the obligations it places upon the State, is lost by the wayside.

What I find much more interesting, however, is the manner in which the Court used Article 14. In paragraph D1, Justice Singh observed:

Article 14 of the Constitution of India prohibits discrimination of any kind. This would include discrimination based on genetic heritage of an individual.

There is, however, something odd about this framing. Article 14 is the equality clause. The non-discrimination clause is Article 15(1), which prohibits the State from discriminating on grounds of race, religion, caste, sex, and place of origin. Moreover, Article 15(1) is a closed list – unlike certain other Constitutions, no additional, analogous grounds can be brought within its ambit. Article 14, on the other hand, is a general equality clause that has been interpreted by the Courts to exclude irrational classification or arbitrary State action, on a case-to-case basis. Unlike Article 15(1), Article 14 does not – a priori – rule out specific grounds upon which differentiation may be based. The distinction between Articles 14 and 15(1) was expressed by Patanjali Sastri CJ in a classic exposition, in Kathi Raning Rawat v The State of Saurashtra (1952)

As we can see, Justice Singh’s observation that Article 14 prohibits discrimination on the basis of genetic heritage appears to conflate Sastri CJI’s distinction between Articles 14 and 15(1).

In the latter part of the judgment, however, Justice Singh modulates the claim. In the context of insurance contracts, she concedes that there may be a class of narrowly defined cases (to be articulated by the policy-makers) where certain kinds of genetic diseases can be excluded by the insurer. Her specific problem is with the width of this exclusion clause (covering all “genetic disorders”) which – as she states in the operative part of the judgment – violates Article 14. Consequently, Justice Singh’s argument is not that “discrimination” on the basis of genetic characteristics will automatically violate Article 14, but rather, it will presumptively violate Article 14, unless strong reasons can be shown that justify the violation. In other words, differentiation based on genetic differences will be subjected to stricter judicial scrutiny than other classifications.

Is there any constitutional warrant for this reading of Articles 14 and 15? I have recently argued that there is, in a defence of the Delhi High Court’s Naz Foundation judgment (SSRN version here). Briefly, the argument is as follows: an analysis of the Constituent Assembly Debates shows that the framers did not intent Articles 14 and 15 to operate as separate silos. Rather, Article 14 was the general expression of the concrete commitment towards non-discrimination under Article 15(1). The framers took the five most publicly salient grounds at the time – race, religion, caste, sex, place of origin – and prohibited all discrimination involving those grounds. However, the framers also realised that forms and sites of discrimination evolve, and what is not salient today can become salient tomorrow (classic examples: sexual orientation, disability, and age, which are all present in some more recent Constitutional documents). For this reason, the framers included Article 14, whose more open-ended language would allow future Courts to develop new grounds of discrimination, and subject them to stricter scrutiny (something akin to a proportionality standard). Unfortunately, however, this possibility has never seriously been explored by the Courts, who have been caught between the classification and the arbitrariness standards under Article 14. Naz Foundation represented the first serious articulation of this vision of Articles 14 and 15(1). United India Insurance Company is another small, incremental step towards it.

Uncertainties over Horizontality

The Delhi High Court was very clear that Articles 14 and 21 applied to all insurance contracts, whether entered into by a State insurer or a private insurance company. This, however, is a problematic conclusion. Articles 14 and 21 very categorically apply to State action. “State”, under Article 12, is limited to government and entities under the “functional, financial, and administrative” control of government. Without some additional reasoning, a private insurance company cannot be brought within the ambit of the fundamental rights chapter.

The Court’s response was to argue that insurance contracts are unequal (like contracts of adhesion, although the Court did not use the term), and place the insurance applicant at a disadvantage. That is correct – and many jurisdictions recognise that such contracts are of a special kind, that cannot be interpreted in a normal way (see the recent decision of the UK Employment Tribunal involving Uber’s contracts with its drivers). However, the remedies for that are provided within contract law: interpret ambiguous terms in favour of the weaker party, and if the unconscionability is clear, void the contract on grounds of public policy. The Court could even have said – as it came close to doing – that such contracts had a public element, and therefore could be subjected to public law norms (which include norms of non-discrimination). There is no warrant, however, for making Part III of the Constitution directly applicable to private insurance contracts, and to the extent the Court did so, I submit that it erred.

The same issue arose in another Delhi High Court decision that made the news recently, Sanghamitra Acharya v State (NCT) of Delhi. Sanghamitra Acharya involved the commitment of an adult woman into a mental hospital at the instance of her parents. Justice Muralidhar, writing for the division bench, held that the woman’s rights to liberty, autonomy and dignity had been violated (especially in view of the Puttaswamy judgment), that the parents, police, and the hospital were in breach of their legal obligations, and ordered compensation. This is, of course, impeccable; in the course of the judgment, however, the Court expressly held that Articles 19 and 21 (along with Articles 15(2), 17, and 23) were horizontally applicable between private parties.

It is true that Articles 19 and 21 are not categorically framed as injunctions against the State. Article 19 stipulates that “All citizens shall have the right… to freedom of speech and expression…” and Article 21 states that “no person shall be deprived of his life or personal liberty except according to procedure established by law.” Therefore, there is no express textual bar against reading Articles 19 and 21 horizontally. However, the reference to State restrictions under Articles 19(2) to 19(6), and the specific reference to “procedure established by law” under Article 21, strongly indicates that these Articles are meant to apply vertically, between State and individual. This is buttressed by the fact that where the framers did intend the horizontal application of fundamental rights, they were clear and unambiguous about it (Articles 15(2), 17, 23, 24). And lastly, this is how the Courts have almost uniformly understood and interpreted them (there are some exceptions, such as the Aruna Shanbaug judgment). It is, of course, open to the Delhi High Court to hold that this jurisprudence is misguided; however, such a radical change in the interpretation of Articles 19 and 21, it needed to provide strong reasons for that holding, and also to elaborate its own theory justifying the horizontal reading of Articles 19 and 21. With respect, the Court did not do that.

Legal Interpretation in the Shadow of the Constitution

What the Court did do very well, in my opinion, was bring the Constitution to bear upon the interpretation of the Mental Health Act, which was the relevant legislation at issue. The Court was examining whether the “involuntary admission” into a mental hospital was consistent with the scheme of the Act. Under Section 19, a person could be involuntarily admitted into a mental hospital by their relative or friend, if the medical officer in-charge was “satisfied” that it was in the interests of the patient. The Court held that although Section 19 was a “stand-alone” provision, the rights under Article 21 required that the word “satisfaction” be read as “objective satisfaction”; that is, the medical officer would have to follow the legal definition of “unsoundness of mind” (which is narrow and circumscribed) before allowing involuntary admission. On facts, it was found that the medical professional had not even attempted to apply any objective standards in his determination.

The form of interpretation that the Court engaged in here is one that Indian Courts have attempted in the past, but only sporadically: borrowed from German law, it is called “the radiating effect” put broadly, holds that a Constitution is not merely a set of rights, but an objective “order of values”, and these values “radiate” through the legal system. In concrete terms, a Court is to interpret laws – including private law – in a manner that advances and promotes the constitutional order of values. By interpreting “satisfaction” (an ambiguous word) to refer to “objective satisfaction”, and to justify that reading by specifically pegging it to constitutional rights, the Sanghamitra Acharya is an important judgment in the context of the theory of the radiating effect.

Traces of this are visible in two other judgments the Delhi High Court delivered, on the subject of labour law. In Indu Munshi v Union of India, a division bench of the Delhi High Court ordered the regularisation of a batch of Kashmiri Pandit schoolteachers. The schoolteachers had been forced to flee from the Valley in 1993, and had come to Delhi. They had been given contractual jobs as schoolteachers in 1994 – and then kept on contract for the next twenty-four years. The issue of regularisation is a fraught one, and any Court that wishes to order regularisation has to content with the challenge of the Supreme Court’s Constitution Bench judgment in Uma Devi’s Case, which invoked the constitutional right to equality of opportunity to hold that contractual employees who had been appointed by the “back door” could not later be regularised “at the cost of” other employees. Uma Devi’s ratio has, however, been subsequently whittled down (the High Court discussed some of these judgments), and here Justice Bhat, writing on behalf of a Division Bench, held that, on facts, there was no “back door appointment.” One of the crucial features that weighed with Justice Bhat was the fact that the Kashmiri Pandits had arrived as refugees, and were compelled to accept whatever offer of employment was open to them, without any genuine choice or bargaining power. When combined with the fact that the process of appointments was competitive, and that the teachers had worked against regular (unfilled) vacancies for twenty-two years, as well as a number of other technical factors, Justice Bhat held that, notwithstanding Uma Devi, the case for regularisation was unanswerable. The Court also held that the contractual teachers deserved remuneration that was equal to the sanctioned remuneration for regular schoolteachers. It adopted a broad version of the “equal pay for equal work” doctrine (which focused on the nature of work) rather than a narrow version (which made technical factors such as cadres and sources of appointment – which could easily be undermined – determinative), and again, framed the issue as a right against exploitation:

Turning to the issue of equal salary and remuneration, the Govt of NCT of Delhi had argued that the teachers could not question their emoluments, because they had accepted their contractual status and functioned in that capacity for over a decade and a half. The teachers’ argument is that they had practically no choice; the alternative to accepting the job with reduced emoluments was starvation or no employment. Such a Hobson’s choice is not meaningful. This court agrees with the contention and holds that there cannot be any estoppel in such situations, barring claims to parity. Long ago, in Sanjit Roy v State of Rajasthan, AIR 1983 SC 328, the Supreme Court characterized as forced labour the acceptance, under compulsion of circumstances, by a person without employment, remuneration that was lower than the minimum wage and stated “that it may therefore be legitimately presumed that when a person provides labour or service to another against receipt of remuneration which is less than the minimum wage, he is acting under the force of some compulsion which drives him to work though he is paid less than what he is entitled under the law to receive.”

And:

In the facts of the present cases too, the court is of the opinion that the mere nomenclature of “contract teachers” is an artificial one given to the teachers who approached this court through the writ petitions that have led to these appeals; they were appointed against regular vacancies, their services are unbroken and have not been continued on account of any stay or court directed interim order; their appointments were pursuant to a constitutionally recognized and acceptable procedure of advertisement and calling names from employment exchange; they each held and hold the requisite qualifications, including B.Ed; all of them were interviewed before their appointment. For these reasons, having regard to their unbroken employment for over two decades, in line with the decision in Umadevi (supra) as understood in Pratap Kishore Panda (supra), Malati Dass (supra) and Sheo Narain Nagar (supra), the said Kashmiri migrant teachers are entitled to be treated as regular appointees. They shall also be entitled to provident fund benefit, gratuity and pension upon attaining the age of superannuation. If any of the petitioners or any other Kashmiri migrant teacher has already attained superannuation or has died in the interregnum the Govt of NCT of Delhi shall calculate their entitlement and release them to such retired employees, and in the case of death, release such amounts to the legal representatives of such deceased employees.

Of course, the Constitution was not directly involved in this case, in the sense that there was no legal provision under challenge. However, it is obvious that the Constitution – and especially, its egalitarian and anti-exploitative ethos – permeated each of the choices the judges had to make. Uma Devi had invoked the doctrine of equality of opportunity to set up “regular” and “back door” appointees in conflict with each other, competing for the same scarce public good (jobs). The Delhi High Court rejected this race-to-the-bottom vision of equality and, instead, focused upon an understanding of equality that was sensitive to exploitation and disparities in bargaining power, to hold that Uma Devi was inapplicable to the present case, and furthermore, the the constitutional principle of equal pay for equal work would also apply.

The Constitution was more directly at play in M/s Metrro Waste Handling v Delhi Jal Board, a brief judgment concerning manual scavenging, and bookending its holding by quotes from Dr. B.R. Ambedkar. The Delhi Jal Board issued a tender for mechanised sewer cleaning, where it did two things: first, it stipulated that only one machine would be issued per bidder; and second, it stipulated that preference would be given to the families of deceased manual scavengers and ex-manual scavengers. The first condition – it argued – was to encourage small entrepreneurs and the underprivileged class to apply. The justification for the second is obvious. The Petitioner challenged the first condition as being arbitrary, and the second as imposing a “100 percent reservation”, which was unconstitutional.

The Court rejected both arguments. On the first, it found that the DJB had set up an elaborate system of loans and other forms of aid to genuinely enable underprivileged sections to effectively bid for the tender; the argument from arbitrariness, therefore, was dismissed. From a constitutional point of view, however, the second issue is more interesting. The Court rejected the argument that the DJB’s order of preference was establishing 100 percent reservation. This was not – it observed – a system of “quotas”:

What is in issue, however, in this case is the attempt of the state, uniquely to ensure that the livelihood and lives of sewage workers performing manual scavenging tasks are meaningfully uplifted. The system of preference is not reservation, in any sense of the term. The court recollects what was held in Government of Andhra Pradesh v Vijaykumar1995 (4) SCC 520 that the wording of Art. 15(3) enables “special provisions” is wider than Article 16(4) which enables a special provision by way of reservations. Article 15(3) is wider and includes “positive action programmes in addition to reservations”.

However, if what was involved was not reservation, then the provisions of Articles 16(4) (since it specifically mentions reservation). Nor could 15(3)’s “special provisions” be invoked, since they are limited to women and children. The only alternative, therefore – as the Court noted – was that preferential treatment of underprivileged classes was itself consistent with the guarantee of equality of opportunity under Article 16(1). Or, in other words – as the concurring opinions of Justices Mathew and Krishna Iyer had famously held in NM Thomas, but which were not subsequently developed in detail – the constitutional vision of equality is a substantive vision, which factors in structural and systemic discrimination, and views the overcoming of structural barriers as part of the very meaning of equality. As Justice Bhat – again, writing for a division bench – held:

Seen from the context of the decisions quoted previously, the NIT conditions are not meant to exclude the “general” class of citizens. They afford an opportunity to an utterly marginalized section a “step up” (or to use the expression in Nagaraj (supra), “catch up”) with the other citizens. The object of such preference is plainly to enable the meaningful participation of the most marginalized section, i.e. workers involved in manual scavenging, and scheduled caste/scheduled tribe communities (who are so chosen, having regard to what the Constitution framers stated as “a backward section of the Hindu community who were handicapped by the practice of untouchability”). The state, i.e., DJB, in our opinion, had a compelling interest in promoting the welfare of these class of citizens, while conceiving and implementing this system of preferences, in the impugned NIT.

Indirect Discrimination

This provides an ideal segue into the last case: Madhu v Northern Railway. Madhu involved the interpretation of certain Indian Railways rules. The dispute centred around a railway employee taking his wife and daughter “off” his list of “dependents” entitled to free medical treatment, on the ground that he had “disowned” them. The Railways argued that for a person’s dependents to avail of treatment, he had to make a “declaration” that they were part of his family; in this case, since the employee had refused to do so, the Railways was justified in denying them medical treatment. The Division Bench, speaking through Justice Bhat – yet again! – rejected this argument, arguing that not only was such an interpretation textually untenable, but also that accepting it would perpetuate indirect discrimination:

The Northern Railways contends that the Appellants are not denied the medical card because they are women, but rather because their husband and father had not made the requisite declaration. However, this explanation is not enough. It is not sufficient to say that the reasoning of Northern Railways did not intentionally discriminate against the Appellants because they were women. Law does not operate in a vacuum and the reasoning and consequent decision of Northern Railways must be examined in the social context that it operates and the effects that it creates in the real world. Even a facially neutral decision can have disproportionate impact on a constitutionally protected class.

The reason that the drafters of the Constitution included Article 15 and 16 was because women (inter alia) have been subjected to historic discrimination that makes a classification which disproportionately affects them as a class constitutionally untenable. The Northern Railways decision to not grant the Appellants medical cards clearly has such a disproportionate effect. By leaving an essential benefit such as medical services subject to a declaration by the railway officer/servant, the dependents are subject to the whims and fancies of such employee. The large majority of dependents are likely to be women and children, and by insisting that the railway officer/servant makes a declaration, the Railway authorities place these women and children at risk of being denied medical services.

It is irrelevant that the Railways did not deny them the medical card because the Appellants were women, or that it is potentially possible that a male dependent may also be denied benefits under decision made by the Railways. The ultimate effect of its decision has a disparate impact on women by perpetuating the historic denial of agency that women have faced in India, and deny them benefits as dependents.

The concept of indirect discrimination – discussed in some detail on this blog previously – has been incorporated into the jurisprudence of many other constitutional courts (the High Court cited some of them). Indian Courts have taken tentative steps towards it, but Madhu represents perhaps the first full-blooded articulation and defence of indirect discrimination as a form of discrimination prohibited by the Constitution. It will, hopefully, be the first of many instances.
 

Notes from a Foreign Field: The South African Constitutional Court’s Decision on Gender Equality and Customary Marriages

Tags

constitutional court of south africa, customary law, Equality, Gender Discrimination

(This guest post, on a recent judgment of the Constitutional Court of South Africa, is authored by Tim Fish Hodgson. Tim works on socio-economic rights, is based in Johannesburg and is a former law clerk of Justice Zakeria Yacoob. He is cricket nerd, a law jock and identifies as a heretic. He tweets from @TimFish42. He writes in his personal capacity.)

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On 30 November 2017, the Constitutional Court of South Africa handed down an important judgment in Ramuhovhi, which consolidates and expands its body jurisprudence on gender equality in customary marriages and in terms of the recognition of customary marriages.

Ms Munyadziwa Netshituka, a black woman from South Africa’s poor, largely rural, Limpopo province was married to Mr Musenwa Joseph Netshituka. Ms Netshituka was not, however, the only Ms Netshituka to whom Musenwa was married. During his lifetime he concluded both civil and customary marriages with Munyadizwa and customary marriages with three other women: Tshinakaho, Masindi and Diana. Polygamous marriages are permitted in terms of Venda custom.

Musenwa died in 2008 and a dispute arose about how his property should be divided. In Venda customary law, ownership and control of marital property is reserved solely for husbands. However, Mr Netshituka’s will clearly indicated that he believed that he and Munyadizwa were married in community of property and had a “joint estate”. Indeed Munyadizwa was the registered as half-owner of valuable immovable property upon which the Why Not Shopping Centre is located.

When litigation was initiated, Munyadizwa was Mr Netshituka’s only remaining spouse at customary law (Tshinakaho, Masindi and Diana were all deceased). Upon Mr Netshituka’s death two of his sons (those of Tshinakaho and Masindi respectively) sought to challenge Munyadizwa’s right to ownership of this property in particular, and (as indicated above) they based their claim on Vedna customary law. And, if they had succeeded in proving the application of Venda customary law, this argument would have prevailed, potentially leaving Munyadizwa in a treacherous financial position.

Customary law in South Africa’s constitutional democracy

However, in South Africa’s constitutional dispensation customary law cannot be read in isolation. Venda customary marriages, like all other customary marriages, are also protected in terms of the Recognition of Customary Marriages Act (The Act). This includes both monogamous and polygamous relationships.

The Act was passed by Parliament in 1998 to give effect to the South African Constitution, which specifically contemplates protection of “marriages concluded under any tradition, or a system of religious, personal or family law”. This Act is therefore of considerable importance. According to the Constitutional Court, it:

“represents a belated but welcome and ambitious legislative effort to remedy the historical humiliation and exclusion meted out to spouses in marriages which were entered into in accordance with the law and culture of the indigenous African people of this country.”

Moreover, as with all other laws, traditions and practices in South Africa, the provisions of the Act must comply with the Bill of Right’s powerful protection of equality. The “achievement of equality” is a founding value of the Constitution, which also entrenches the right to “equal protection and benefit” of the law. It explicitly outlaws discrimination based on both “gender” and “sex”. Furthermore, when customary law is inconsistent with the Constitution, courts are required to “develop” it to ensure that it “promote[s] the spirit, purport and objects of the Bill of Rights”.

Women in Munyadziwa’s position have frequently needed to call on these constitutional provisions to ensure their own protection in terms of customary law. Without them, the Act itself is insufficient. It treats different marriages differently with serious consequences for women. Section 7(1) of the Act regulates such consequences of marriages concluded before the Act’s commencement (“old marriages”) while section 7(2) of Act governs those concluded after the Act’s commencement (“new marriages”).

 The basic and disastrous difference is that while “new marriages” are treated as marriages in community of property (where all property is shared equally between the spouses), the proprietary consequences of “old marriages” remain regulated by customary law. To return to the facts of this case, Mr Netshituka’s sons were therefore relying on the fact that the present case featured an “old marriage”, and therefore, Venda customary law (and not the “community of property” regime under Section 7(1)) would apply.

 The Constitutional Court and customary marriages

 The Constitution Court can (and should) be criticised from a feminist perspective. It has failed to identify, disregarded or ignored gender-specific arguments presented to it by women more often than it should have. It has also handed down some startlingly regressive judgments. Its infamous judgment(s) in Jordan, for example, unanimously refused to strike down legislation criminalising sex work saying: “dignity of prostitutes is diminished not by [the law] but by their engaging in commercial sex work”.

Nevertheless, overall, it has through its jurisprudence committed itself to the protection of formal and substantive equality for women. It has also, at times, been alert to systemic sexism in the form of patriarchy. It has described gendered patterns of behavior and gender-stereotypes as “a relic and a feature of the patriarchy which the Constitution so vehemently condemns”. Its broad position on gender equality has been no different in cases on African customary law.

In 2008, in Gumede, the Constitutional Court had already declared section 7(1) to be unconstitutional to the extent that it applied to monogamous “old marriages”. In coming to this conclusion, it reasoned that this provision is “self-evidently discriminatory” on the ground of gender. It was emphatic that the continued application of the provision in the context of Ms Gumede, an isiZulu women living in the KwaZulu-Natal province, negatively “affected wives in customary marriages” because they “are considered incapable or unfit to hold or manage property”. Women, the Court continued, are “expressly excluded from meaningful economic activity in the face of an active redefinition of gender roles in relation to income and property”.

The task in front of the court in Ramuhovhi, then, was simply to decide whether its reasoning in Ms Gumede’s case on monogamous “old marriage” could be extended to Munyadziwa’s case on polygamous old marriages. Quoting heavily from Gumede the Court confirmed that section 7(1) of the Act “perpetuate[s] inequality between husbands and wives” in old marriages. More specifically, it found that the provision clearly had the effect of violating Munyadziwa’s right to dignity and her right not to be discriminated against based on her gender and marital status. As a result, the challenge to Munyadizwa’s right to own, inherit and control marital property thus failed.

In its judgment, the Court also considered whether s 7(1) could be saved by s 7(4) of the Act. Section 7(4) permits couples to “jointly” approach a court to change the matrimonial property system applicable to “their marriage or marriages”. The Court’s response speaks to a strong understanding of unequal power relations between men and women in South African society. Describing s 7(4) as “cold comfort, if not pie-in-sky” for most women the court reasoned:

“The fact of not owning or having control over marital property renders wives in pre-Act polygamous marriages particularly vulnerable and at the mercy of husbands. They cannot be in an equal-bargaining footing for purposes of reaching agreement to make an approach to court in terms of section 7(4). In fact, some may even be cowed not to raise the issue at all.”

To cap off this reasoning the court added that it “it does not require rocket science” to know that most women “may not even be aware of the existence of the provisions of section 7(4)”. This observation is undoubtedly correct. A mere 46% of South Africans have ever heard of the existence of either the Constitution or the Bill of Rights, while a depressing 10% of people had ever read the Constitution or had it read to them. If people do not know their fundamental constitutional rights it takes legal fiction of science-fiction like proportions to imagine these same people will know complicated, hidden provisions of laws on the statute books.

Customary law and colonialism

 It is worth noting that the Constitutional Court has been particularly careful to respect customary law and to acknowledge the genesis of its patriarchal problems in its judgments. These problems have their origins both in patriarchal African cultures and their “formalisation and fossilisation” but Dutch and British colonial powers and the apartheid government. Therefore, though the court does not deny that patriarchy “has always been a feature of indigenous society” in Bhe it observed that:

“At a time when the patriarchal features of Roman-Dutch law were progressively being removed by legislation, customary law was robbed of its inherent capacity to evolve in keeping with the changing life of the people it served, particularly of women. Thus customary law as administered failed to respond creatively to new kinds of economic activity by women, different forms of property and household arrangements for women and men, and changing values concerning gender roles in society. The outcome has been formalisation and fossilisation of a system which by its nature should function in an active and dynamic manner.”

The result was the development “a particularly crude and gendered form of inequality, which left women and children singularly marginalised and vulnerable” in African customary law which was “recorded and enforced by those who neither practised it nor were bound by it”. These people were white settler colonialists.

The Constitutional Court’s approach to these cases has therefore been to prefer to acknowledge the organic development of “living customary law” – which is developing in a diverse and dynamic manner constantly – instead of repeating the colonial approach of strictly imposing rules from the judges’ lofty positions.

The Court’s understanding of patriarchal power imbalances, combined with its recognition that “those who were bound by customary law had no power to adapt it”, has made it very receptive to women who have approached the court in search protection. It is also critical in dispelling the myth that black African cultures and customs are any more or less patriarchal then the rest of South African society. Patriarchy, the Court rightly observes, “has worldwide prevalence”.

Constitutional promises and constitutional realities

However, as is often the case, paper-based legal protection provides paper-thin protection to women in reality. As retired Justice Zakeria Yacoob has said, contrary to the popular belief of human rights lawyers and bourgeois elites in particular, “our Constitution did NOT create the society it envisaged”. In truth, no Constitution can. Such is the pernicious and ubiquitous impact of patriarchy amongst all customs, cultures and races in South Africa.

And so, almost 20 years after the formal recognition of customary marriages in terms of the Act, women such as Munyadziwa Netshituka bravely continue to approach South African courts clutching onto “the right to equal protection and benefit of the law”. They do so simply to access the rightful benefits of their marriages and life’s work. Sadly, they often also seek protection from both their marriages, families, communities and the law itself.

But translating the constitutional promise of gender equality into a constitutional reality cannot be the business of courts alone. A monumental societal shift is needed. Women like Ms Gumede, Ms Netshituka, Ms Bhe and Ms Shilubana all around South Africa are pushing for this change on daily basis. Too many men refuse to budge, accepting instead the continued spoils of patriarchy. For as long as we men – whether white Jewish men, black Venda men, or Indian Muslim men – continue to endorse and support patriarchy, women will have to continue to fight back using any means they have at their disposal.

To paraphrase the Constitutional Court’s rhetorical question in its judgment in Ramuhovhi, on of the key questions remains: “how many [men] would readily give up their position of dominance?” If the number does not increase dramatically, exponentially and urgently, for all the constitutional protection provided to women (and all the beautiful prose in the Constitutional Court’s judgments), they will continue experience the society in envisioned in the Constitution as elusive: more fiction than fact.

The Leprosy PIL: A Chance to Rethink Equality under Law

Tags

article 14, article 15(1), Equality, non-discrimination

Today, the Supreme Court issued notice on a petition filed by the Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy challenging provisions from as many as 119 statutes, which discriminate against people with leprosy. The petition follows the 256th Law Commission Report, which highlighted the discriminatory legal landscape against persons with leprosy, and called for its elimination.

The petition challenges these statutes (that range from election disqualifications to employment discrimination) on the expected grounds of Articles 14, 19 and 21 of the Constitution. I suggest, however, that this case provides, in addition, an opportunity to the Supreme Court to reconsider and evolve its jurisprudence of equality, which has been rather sterile in recent years (and decades). This opportunity exists because leprosy, insofar as it has been a historic site for group-based discrimination, is similar to the prohibited characteristics under Article 15(1) (race, caste, sex etc.), but of course, does not fall within any of them. Consequently, while the equality-based challenge to these discriminatory statutes will have to be made under Article 14, the Court can advance a theory of discrimination that dispenses with the classic intelligible differentia/rational nexus test under Article 14, and applies a higher threshold of scrutiny in circumstances where the ground of discrimination is similar to, but does not fall within, the listed grounds under Article 15(1).

Note that this is not unprecedented. The Delhi High Court did exactly this when it read down Section 377 of the IPC in 2009. The Supreme Court overturned that judgment in 2013, without undertaking any analysis of the High Court’s 14-15 synthesis.

I have written an article that defends this view, and considers its extension to exactly the kinds of laws under challenge in the present petition – i.e., those that discriminate against people with leprosy. The article can be accessed here.