Naidu’s 34% BC quota lasted 42 days

N. Chandrababu Naidu’s government in Andhra Pradesh sold 34% reservation for Backward Classes in local bodies as a completed promise. The Andhra Pradesh High Court has now made clear that the promise arrived before the evidence needed to support it.

The court on October 1 set aside G.O.Ms.No.105, dated August 20, and G.O.Rt.No.1065, dated August 19, to the extent that the combined vertical reservation for SCs, STs and BCs exceeded 50%. The orders covered Panchayat Raj Institutions and urban local bodies. The judgment recorded aggregate reservation of 61.08% in the rural calculation and 49.24% in the urban calculation.

The legal problem was not the idea of BC representation. The court expressly left the Andhra Pradesh government free to revisit a quota above 50% after collecting the required data. The judgment says the Unified Family Survey could not form the basis for the reservation declaration. It also records that the report of the commission headed by retired IAS officer Rajiv Ranjan Mishra had been submitted but not accepted by the government and remained under consideration.

That is a remarkably thin foundation for an order affecting local elections. The TDP government announced the quota first and left the legal homework for later, as though constitutional scrutiny were an administrative afterthought. Naidu has announced that the government will approach the Supreme Court, but no appeal number or filing has been confirmed. The court did not close the door on enhanced BC reservation; it closed the door on doing it without the evidence.

The TDP government now has two choices: complete the data exercise and return with a defensible order, or keep converting a legitimate demand into a sequence of press statements and court setbacks. So far, it has managed the second.