Janhit Abhiyan vs Union of India
Background
The Constitution (One Hundred and Third Amendment) Act, 2019, which came into force on 14 January 2019, inserted Article 15(6) and Article 16(6) into the Constitution. These provisions allow the State to reserve up to 10% of seats in education and public employment for "Economically Weaker Sections" (EWS) of citizens, over and above existing reservations, but this EWS quota was defined to cover only people outside the existing Scheduled Caste (SC), Scheduled Tribe (ST) and Other Backward Class (OBC) categories. Janhit Abhiyan and a large batch of connected petitioners challenged the amendment, arguing that reservation based purely on economic criteria (ignoring social and educational backwardness) was itself impermissible, that excluding SC/ST/OBC citizens from the EWS quota was discriminatory, and that the amendment breached the pre-existing 50% ceiling on total reservations, all allegedly destroying the Constitution's "basic structure," which even Parliament cannot amend away. The Union of India defended the amendment as a valid exercise of Parliament's constituent power to advance economic justice.
Decision Breakdown
By a 3:2 majority, the Court upheld the 103rd Amendment in full. Justices Maheshwari, Trivedi and Pardiwala each held that (a) reservation based solely on economic criteria does not, by itself, damage the Constitution's basic structure: economic backwardness is itself a legitimate ground for affirmative action under the equality code and the Directive Principles (Articles 38, 39, 46); and (b) excluding SC/ST/OBC citizens specifically from this new EWS quota is not discriminatory, because those groups already benefit from separate, pre-existing reservation schemes under Articles 15(4)/15(5)/16(4), so leaving them out of a class-specific EWS carve-out is a rational, not arbitrary, distinction. The majority also found no violation of the 50% reservation ceiling that would destroy the basic structure. Justice Bhat, dissenting (with the Chief Justice joining), agreed that using economic criteria for reservation is, in principle, constitutionally permissible, but held that carving SC/ST/OBC citizens out of the EWS benefit purely because they already receive other reservations was arbitrary and amounted to "othering" the poorest, socially disadvantaged citizens, striking at the equality code's core principles of non-discrimination and non-exclusion. On that basis, Bhat's opinion held the newly inserted Articles 15(6) and 16(6) themselves violative of the basic structure and struck them down. Because the majority (3 votes) exceeded the dissent (2 votes), the challenge failed and the amendment stands valid and in force.
Lesson Learnt
A constitutional amendment passed by Parliament through its "constituent power" is not automatically vulnerable to being struck down merely because it changes how reservation works. Courts under the basic-structure doctrine intervene only when the core, unamendable identity of the Constitution (like the essence of the equality principle) is destroyed, not whenever a specific policy choice is altered. For ordinary citizens, this judgment is the reason the 10% EWS reservation in college admissions and government jobs is presently valid law in India, and it illustrates how a single 5-judge bench can produce four different reasoned opinions while still yielding one clear operative order.