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 best projected by lines of poetry quoted in Nehrus Autobiography: (Allied Publishers Pvt. Ltd. 1962 Edn. p. 439)-

Bowed by the weight of centuries he leans

Upon his hoe and gazes on the ground, The emptiness of ages on his face,

And on his back the burden of the world.

The Problem

4. The dynamics and dialectics of social justice vis-a-vis the special provisions of the Constitution calculated to accelerate the prospects of employment of the harijans and the girijans in the civil services with particular emphasis on promotions of these categories in the Indian Railways - that, in all these cases, is the cynosure of judicial scrutiny, from the angle of constitutionality in the context of the guarantee of caste-free equality to every person.

Petitioners Challenge

5. The gravamen of the constitutional accusation levelled in this bunch of quasiclass actions under Art. 32 of the Constitution and argued by a battery of counsel led by Shri Shanti Bhushan, with heat and light, passion and reason, is the heartless discrimination shown against vast numbers of members employed by the Railway Administration, through its policy directives, by bestowal of unconscionably pampering concessions, at promotion levels, on these social brackets belonging to the historically suppressed SCs & STs, heedless of over-all administrative efficiency in the Indian Railways and frustrating the promotional hopes of the larger human segments of economically down-trodden senior members. The fall-out of this benign discrimination of helping out the weakest sections has been to blow up, out of all proportion to the social realities, the backwardness syndrome so as to embrace many politically powerful castes disguised as Backward Classes. This constitutional amulet, rooted largely in caste, the petitioners lament, has been misused and applied in educational and employment fields on an escalating scale. The perverted result is that a caste-riven nation is a spectre that haunts the land, pushing back the patriotic prospect of a homogenised Indian Society of casteless equality and projecting instead the divisive alternative of a heterogenous caste map of Bharat. The fundamental failure of this sterile scheme of reservation-wise circumvention of the fundamental right to equality ideologically and pragmatically speaking, has depended the pathological condition of communalism besetting the Indian polity and split the have-nots into snarling camps - a consummation disastrously contrary to the constitutional design of abolition of socio-economic inequality through activist strategem of equalisation geared to actual attainment of integrated equality.

6. Logically, the argument leads to the formulation that each caste and community is bargaining politically for bigger bites of the educational-and-employment