Sending a reminder to the Government to have “basics” in place before proceeding with the implementation of reservations in educational institutions, senior advocate Harish Salve has asked the Government to be rational, based on reasoning rather than political interference.

On Thursday, Salve was carrying ahead with arguments on behalf of anti-quota petitioners that were initiated on Wednesday.

“The exercise has to be done rationally, free from political will,” he argued before a five-judge Bench headed by Chief Justice of India K G Balakrishnan, which is hearing the constitutional validity of the Central legislation providing for 27 per cent reservation for Other Backward Classes (OBCs) in higher educational institutions. “It has to be done in a manner where justice appears to have been done,” he said.

Salve told the Government that “some homework has to be done now, 60 years after Independence”. Outlining it, he explained: “The exercise is really to spell out in the first instance indicia of backwardness. And that is the heart and soul of Article 15(4) of the Constitution,” and added that the statute only tended to create a vested interest in backwardness.

“The 27 per cent quota cannot be made without identifying for whom it is meant,” Salve said before the Bench also comprising Justices Arijit Pasayat, C K Thakker, R V Raveendran and Dalveer Bhandari, which is examining the Constitutional validity of the Central Educational Institution (Reservation in Admissions) Act, 2006.

The senior advocate submitted that while earlier, caste was the “starting point”, now it is the “destination” strongly maintaining that the Government was doing all to divide on the lines of caste. “Caste has now become the latest paradigm for reservation, completely constitutionally false.”

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