Justice P.B. Sawant[1]
417. The trinity of the goals of the Constitution, viz., socialism, secularism and democracy cannot be realised unless all sections of the society participate in the State power equally, irrespective of their caste, community, race, religion and sex and all discriminations in the sharing of the State power made on those grounds are eliminated by positive measures.
418. Under Article 16(4), the reservation in the State employment is to be provided for a “class of people” which must be “backward” and “in the opinion of the State” is “not adequately represented” in the services of the State. Under Article 46, the State is required to “promote with special care” the “educational and economic interests” of the “weaker sections” of the people and “in particular”, of the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, and “to protect” them from “social injustice” and “all forms of exploitation”. Since in the present case, we are not concerned with the reservations in favour of the SCs/STs, it is not necessary to refer to Article 335 except to point out that, it is in terms provided there that the claims of SCs/STs in the services are to be taken into consideration, consistently with the maintenance of efficiency of administration. It must, therefore, mean that the claims of other backward class of citizens and weaker sections must also be considered consistently with the maintenance of the efficiency. For, whomsoever, therefore, reservation is made, the efficiency of administration is not to be sacrificed, whatever the efficiency may mean. That is the mandate of the Constitution itself.
[1] This article is an excerpt from the judgment of Indira Sawhney v Union of India 1993 (1) SCT 448