Mizoram’s Education Minister Vanlalthlana
| Photo Credit: Mizoram Legislative Assembly official website
The fate of the Scheduled Tribes (ST) quota sub-classification in Mizoram plunged into uncertainty within days of the Supreme Court of India in a ruling permitted States to sub-categorise Scheduled Castes (SCs) and STs.
Months before the judgment, the Mizoram government had placed the sub-classification of the State’s ST quota in higher education on hold, and started working on amending the reservation rule that separated Mizo tribes from non-Mizo tribes.
Mizoram’s Education Minister Vanlalthlana said the government’s work on the sub-classification of STs would now have to be re-strategised after considering the Supreme Court’s ruling and its implications, adding that this would most likely delay amendments to reservation rules that have been in the works from at least March this year. “It is a sensitive issue and we will have to balance the interests of all communities,” he said.
In the meantime, there will be no categorisation within the ST quota, the government has said in an affidavit before the Gauhati High Court. State government sources told The Hindu that an internal meeting is scheduled this week on the Supreme Court’s ruling so that a path for the future could be charted out.
The sub-categorisation within STs in Mizoram was brought in through the Mizoram (Selection of Candidates for Higher Technical Courses) Rules, 2016 and has been mired in legal challenges ever since. The Rules provided for reserving 99% seats for STs in admissions to courses in Medical Sciences, all branches of Engineering and Technology, Animal Husbandry and Veterinary Sciences, Agricultural Sciences, Forestry, and Fishery.
But within this 99%, children of Zo-ethnic people had 95% and children of non-Zo-ethnic people had 4% reservation.
The State government had said the seats allotted to it for Higher and Technical Studies by the Centre were insufficient to meet the technical manpower requirement of the State. Hence, it said these Rules were being brought to “have fair selection of promising candidates only for those limited seats offered to the State of Mizoram on merit by means of certain aptitude test”.
This was challenged in the Gauhati High Court, which struck the sub-classification down, citing the 2004 judgment in the E.V. Chinnaiah case. The Supreme Court upheld the High Court’s decision.
However, the Mizoram government, in 2021, brought amendments to the 2016 Rules, further categorising within the ST quota for higher education. These amendments created a 4% Open Category for STs of Mizoram; 93% quota for children of Zo-ethnic Mizo people; and 1% quota for children of non-Zo-ethnic people.
These amendments were also challenged in the High Court. But this time, the Gauhati High Court refused to entertain the challenge citing at the time the fact that the E.V. Chinnaiah judgement had been referred to a larger Bench.
When the petitioners, a students’ union of the Chakma tribe, went to the Supreme Court, the top court had in 2023 ruled this could not have been reason enough to dismiss the challenge. It had then reconstituted the matter to the High Court, which was hearing the case even as a seven-judge Bench of the Supreme Court was deciding whether to overturn the 2004 E.V. Chinnaiah judgment.
But months before that happened, the newly formed Mizoram government led by the Zoram People’s Movement had filed an affidavit before the Gauhati High Court in May, saying it had already drafted amendments to the ST quota sub-classification rule, and would do away with the sub-classification in the meantime, till the amendments are passed and notified.
Sources said that the Supreme Court’s ruling on sub-classification came just as the draft amendments to the reservation rules were pending with the State’s Law Department. “The amendments were being brought because of remarks made by various courts over the last two years. The objective was to ensure as much fairness to the Chakma community as well. But now, the ruling’s implications will have to be studied,” a source said.
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