The Supreme Court on Wednesday told the petitioner that the demand for mandatory rotation of seats reserved for Scheduled Castes (SCs) and Scheduled Tribes (STs) in Parliament and state assemblies was a matter for the legislature, not the judiciary.
The provision does not mandate periodic rotation of such constituencies. The court also observed that whether identifying reserved constituencies on the basis of a higher concentration of SC/ST residents perpetuates caste divisions was a question for the legislature to consider and could not by itself render the existing law unconstitutional. During the hearing, the court questioned the premise of the petitioner’s argument that concentrating reserved constituencies in areas with a larger SC/ST population entrenched caste divisions. The court also distinguished between the right to vote and any claimed right to contest elections from a particular constituency, pointing out that candidates from the general category remained free to contest from unreserved seats. The petitioner pointed out that the high court had itself acknowledged that rotation would be an ideal arrangement but had declined to issue directions, citing judicial restraint. “That proceeds on the idea that a majority community will vote on community or caste lines. They may not vote on community and caste lines. The high court cannot judicially pronounce on a democratic choice. That is for the voters to decide,” it added.
But the bench questioned the assumption that voters in constituencies with a larger SC population would necessarily vote along caste lines and that reservation in such seats was therefore unnecessary. Declining to interfere with an Allahabad High Court judgment, the bench upheld the validity of Section 9 (1)(c) of the Delimitation Act, 2002, which requires reserved constituencies to be identified in areas where the proportion of SC/ST residents is comparatively large. The court made it clear that it could not introduce a rotation requirement into the constitutional and statutory framework when neither Articles 330 and 332, which provide for reservation of seats for SCs and STs in the Lok Sabha and state legislative assemblies, nor the Delimitation Act prescribed such a mechanism.
