SC on reservations

The Supreme Court recently stayed the Government law on reservations for OBC's in India.

The case judgment is available here.

Here's what people are saying about it;

Bong Buzz writes ; The Supreme Court has temporarily stayed the government order of reserving seats for OBCs in higher education. However, there is nothing much to rejoice. For this is only an interim order. The court stayed the order only on the ground that there is not enough data on OBC demographics, that no data on this has been collected in the last 76 years. Now if the govt. readies a hurried report on OBCs the court will no more be able to say government has no data. Moreover the court has clarified that the benefits enjoyed by the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes can’t be withheld. So much for the Supreme Court! So much for India! Living in India, how can we expect justice? This is the land where caste-based reservation will continue and Lalu Prasads and all will continue to rip political benefits out of that. There is only one way out - leave the country!

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2paisaworth writes; If the SC's objection is that the census data on which the percentage of OBCs in the population is based on is outdated, then the OBC quota in Government jobs in the 1990s in the wake of the Mandal report also ought to have been quashed with the same argument. Karat is right because the SC's stay is over an non-issue. By questioning merely the veracity of the data, rather than the basis for reservation itself, the SC has implicitly acquiesced to the Centre's twisted logic for the implementation of quotas.

There's a strange incongruity in the rationale for celebrations in the anti-quota camp today and the SC judgment. Somehow people don't seem to get it. I've heard "anti-quota spokesmen" (where did that epithet come from?) from across the social spectrum laud the SC for recognizing that "caste-based reservations only serve to divide the country". The SC has done nothing of the sort. How long will it take for a Government hell-bent on the idea of Quota to come up with more accurate figures?

The debate ought to be on the very raison d'être of reservations, not mere technicalities like this one.

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2kbloggers also has an interesting post on it.