Everyone’s Right, So Everyone’s Wrong — Reservation Structures in Local Body Polls (some thoughts and questions)

The Supreme Court’s latest hearing on the Maharashtra local body reservations returns us to a question that we keep revisiting without ever really solving. We are told that the 50 percent ceiling from Indra Sawhney remains the law of the land. We are also told that democratic inclusion, especially at the grassroots, cannot wait indefinitely. But what happens when communities that constitute a decisive majority in a constituency are asked to squeeze themselves into a minority share of seats in the name of discipline. Can we then, really call it democracy if the largest group in a district sees itself absent from decision-making in its own local council?

The Court insists that elections must go on and insists that commitments to the constitutional limit must remain intact. This sounds perfectly reasonable in theory. Fair too. But when 57 bodies already breach the ceiling and the State admits that some tribal belts have near-complete dominance of Scheduled Tribes what does this perfectly reasonable theory achieve in practice. Do we tell a 99 percent tribal village that it can have at best half the seats and trust that equality is somehow achieved by denying a majority its own majority?

The State promises data. The Court asks for data. But what does data even mean in the absence of a caste census in nearly a century. How do we calculate proportionality without knowing the proportion. How long do we keep pretending that reservation is a precise scientific exercise when it is actually an act of approximation held together by hope and litigation. And if the Union now says it will conduct a caste census are we prepared for what happens when those numbers arrive. For if OBCs turn out to be 60 or 70 percent of a district do we save the ceiling by abandoning their representation or save their representation by abandoning the ceiling. 

Or, of course, do we send the question to yet another larger Bench and wait another decade.

Perhaps the bigger question the Court hints at is this — Who is democracy for? Are we preserving a schema that ensures no single group dominates public bodies. Or are we preserving a schema that ensures that historically dominant groups never feel the discomfort of seeing institutions fully reflect the social reality around them. When Kant CJ. says that people are not getting representation is he only referring to OBCs; or is it that is he referring to non reserved categories too? And who (by the way) is deciding which missing representation matters most?