fJudgment

KRISHNA IYER, J.:- The Root Thought

The abolition of slavery has gone on for a long time. Rome abolished slavery, America abolished it, and we did, but only the words were abolished, not the thing. (Leo N. Tolstoy)

2. This agonising gap between hortative hopes and human dupes vis-a-vis that serf-like sector of Indian society, strangely described as Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (SCs and STs, for short), and the administrative exercises to bridge this big hiatus by processes like reservations and other concessions in the field of public employment, is the broad issue that demands constitutional examination in the Indian setting of competitive equality before the law and tearful inequality in life. A fasciculus of directions of the Railway Board has been attacked as ultra vires and the court has to pronounce on it, not philosophically but pragmatically. "The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it" (Theses on Feuerbach (1888) xi.)- This was the founding fathers fighting faith and serves as perspective-setter for the judicial censor.

The Backdrop

3. The social backdrop to the forensic problem raised in this litigation is bes