Maharashtra: Quota within quota furore

It’s an unwritten rule of Indian politics that in the final year before general and state elections, leaders of all political parties experience an acute need to do justice to the country’s scheduled castes, tribes and other backward castes and classes. With the legislative assembly election scheduled to be called within the next 14 months in Maharashtra, on June 22, the BJP/Shiv Sena government felt obliged to impose a ten-day moratorium on first-year degree college admissions across the state to clear the decks to re-introduce reservations for SC, ST and OBC students in minority-run arts, science and commerce colleges.  On October 12 last year, the Bombay high court struck down a 16-year-old Mumbai University (MU) order which obliged private colleges promoted by religious and linguistic minorities, to reserve seats for SC, ST and OBC students. The moratorium on admissions announcement was made after the college admission process had begun, and has derailed the academic calendars of 2,800 minority colleges in the state besides adversely affecting 1.5 million students who have begun the process of applying for first-year college admissions.   Minority colleges are permitted to reserve upto 50 percent seats for students drawn from the promoters’ religious or linguistic community. Until October 2017, the break-up of 100 admission seats in minority colleges typically entailed setting aside 15 seats for the management quota. Of the remaining 85 seats, 43 were reserved for students from the religious/linguistic communities of the promoters of the institute, leaving 21 seats for general merit students and 21 for OBC, ST and SC category students.  However, the October 12 Bombay high court ruling, which became operational in the new 2018-19 academic year exempted minority institutions from reservations other than for management, merit students of the promoters’ religious/linguistic community. Adjudicating a writ petition filed by St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai and the Maharashtra Association of Minority Educational Institutions which challenged the constitutional validity of a circular dated May 30, 2001 of Mumbai University, a two-judge high court bench held that “the quota within quota” mandated by the state government is “unconstitutional”. “Almost 3,000 of the 4,000 undergrad colleges in the state are minority-run institutions and if they are allowed to de-reserve the few seats they have been allotting to students from the backward classes, it will be a big setback for social justice,” says Aniket Ovhal, a member of the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), the student wing of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), BJP’s ideological mentor. Surprisingly, neither the student unions nor the Maharashtra government realised the impact of the Bombay high court’s judgement until the media highlighted the exclusion of SC, ST and OBC students when minority colleges released their first merit list on June 18. Addressing the media, the state’s education minister Vinod Tawde said the government has readied a special leave petition (SLP) against the Bombay high court order to be filed in the Supreme Court. “We will wait for the outcome of our SLP. Until then the admission process for first-year degree courses has been…