'Filling' the backlog vacancies

By Mukund Padmanabhan

It is ironic that the clamour over the proposed Constitution review has been followed by a deafening silence when the Government actually proposes to amend it. The Union Cabinet's decision to amend Article 16 to clear the backlog vacancies reserved for the Scheduled Caste/Scheduled Tribe category has not evoked even a whimper of protest from those who had argued that the Constitution was sacrosanct and that the problem lay not with the document but those who worked it. The consensus among political parties - which have traditionally used the quota system for narrow electoral ends - is total.

It goes without saying that every effort must be made to fill the backlog and that the non-availability of adequately qualified SC/ST candidates for certain Government posts is a sad but compelling illustration of the country's abject failure to uplift the socially depressed classes. The question, however, is whether the decision to create a separate class of backlog vacancies is a piece of political tokenism and whether the Constitution should be amended for the sake of it.

To begin with, it is somewhat odd that the Union Cabinet should decide to amend the Constitution shortly after it has set up a Commission to study whether it should be reviewed/amended. Wasn't is only proper that the proposal to amend Article 16 should have been referred to/examined by the Commission? By ignoring it, isn't the Government undermining the Commission's role?

The proposed amendment of Article 16 is aimed directly at neutralising the Supreme Court judgment in the landmark Indira Sawhney v. Union of India or `Mandal' case. The nine-member Bench had laid down that the number of reserved vacancies in any given year, including the number of backlog vacancies, should not exceed 50 per cent. This rule took effect only a couple of years ago.

In reality, the proposed constitutional amendment will overturn what is arguably the central principle around which the Mandal judgment revolves, namely that reservations should not exceed 50 per cent. In lay terms, the Court's argument was that since equality before the law was the governing principle and reservations an exception to this, the latter could not exceed or be greater than the former.

What will the amendment, which proposes to treat backlog vacancies as a separate class of vacancies to be filled up in succeeding years actually achieve? To begin with, Central Government jobs only constitute a small fraction of the total jobs available and though political parties may behave in a manner which suggests so, fixing quotas in this segment is hardly the answer towards ameliorating the condition of the SC/ST class.

Moreover, it is not all clear how a constitutional amendment will clear the backlog, estimated to be a few thousand. All it would do, in the near and conceivable future, is to keep the vacancies frozen as a separate class - as a kind of bank account from which you can withdraw over the years. If the present trends persist, the number of backlog vacancies will only keep increasing over the years. When special recruitment drives, of the kind held over the past few years, have failed to clear the backlog, how will a mere constitutional amendment help?

The proposal has tokenism written all over it, but this is perhaps not strange in a country where, in the dictionary of the political class, improving the lot of the depressed classes is synonymous with job reservations. Meanwhile, the Mandal judgment, which was hailed as a victory for the socially depressed classes, is coming under increasing political scrutiny from those who want to extend the scope of reservations.

It was only a couple of years ago that the Narasimha Rao Government amended Article 16 (4), to overcome the judgment's delinking of promotions and reservations. Meanwhile, there is increasing pressure to extend reservations for SCs/STs to the judiciary and certain other areas which, if it materialises, will overrule yet another Mandal prescription and will mean amending Article 335 of the Constitution.

Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Section  : Opinion
Next     : Kashmir: where do we go from here?