Which community was categorized as Scheduled Caste (SC) by a 2015 Bihar government notification which was quashed in July 2024 by the Supreme Court, ruling that states cannot make changes to the SC li

Question

Which community was categorized as Scheduled Caste (SC) by a 2015 Bihar government notification which was quashed in July 2024 by the Supreme Court, ruling that states cannot make changes to the SC list published under Article 341 of the Constitution ?

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — A, Tanti-Tantwa. The Bihar government's resolution of 1 July 2015 directed that the Tanti-Tantwa community, until then classed among the state's Extremely Backward Classes, be treated as merged into the existing Scheduled Caste entry 'Pan/Sawasi/Panr', which in practice moved the community from the EBC quota to the SC quota in state jobs and admissions. On 15 July 2024, in Dr. Bhim Rao Ambedkar Vichar Manch Bihar v. State of Bihar, the Supreme Court set that resolution aside. Its reasoning is a straight reading of Article 341: the President alone specifies, by public notification, the castes deemed to be Scheduled Castes in relation to a State, and once such a notification is issued only Parliament may vary it by law. A State government has no role in the process beyond being consulted before the original notification, and it certainly cannot achieve an addition indirectly by declaring one community to be the same as another already on the list. The Court described what Bihar had done as a manipulation of the list rather than an interpretation of it. It also dealt with the consequences: persons appointed to Scheduled Caste posts on the strength of the 2015 resolution were not to be thrown out but to be adjusted against the Extremely Backward Class category to which they properly belonged, and the state was directed not to issue Scheduled Caste certificates to Tanti-Tantwa applicants. This was the single most-reported Bihar constitutional-law story of 2024, which is why it appears in the paper five months later.

Why the other options are wrong — (b) A caste name that appears in Scheduled Caste lists in northern India, and therefore a convincing decoy in a question whose whole surface is unfamiliar caste names. It was not the subject of the 2015 Bihar resolution and not before the Supreme Court in July 2024.  (c) Another genuine caste name from the backward-class and Scheduled Caste lists of Indian states, offered here purely for plausibility. No 2015 Bihar notification reclassified it and no 2024 judgment concerned it.  (d) The most cunning of the three, because it echoes 'Pan/Sawasi/Panr' — the Scheduled Caste entry into which Bihar tried to merge Tanti-Tantwa. A candidate who half-remembers the case remembers that a 'Pan'-sounding entry was involved, and picks the community that was the destination rather than the one that was moved.

Concept: Article 341(1) empowers the President, by public notification and after consultation with the Governor in the case of a State, to specify the castes, races or tribes that shall be deemed to be Scheduled Castes in relation to that State. Article 341(2) then locks the list: Parliament may by law include or exclude a caste, but the notification issued under clause (1) 'shall not be varied by any subsequent notification'. Article 342 does the same for Scheduled Tribes. The design is deliberate — the list carries reservations in legislatures, services and education, so a single national authority controls entry and exit and no state government can enlarge its own quota pool by executive order. The Supreme Court has enforced this repeatedly, most influentially in State of Maharashtra v. Milind (2001), which held that no authority may add to, subtract from or read entries into the Presidential list, and that courts cannot conduct an enquiry into whether one community is 'really' the same as a listed one.

State PCS 2024 Q96 — Polity & Governance PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2024 Q96 — Polity & Governance PYQ with Answer