In March 2022, the Supreme Court of India declared the Act providing 10.5% internal reservations to the…

The correct choice is: “The Vanniyars do not constitute a class apart from other OBC categories and hence this goes against the equality guarantees of the Constitution of India.”

The Tamil Nadu Special Reservation Act, 2021 gave the Vanniyakula Kshatriyas 10.5% out of the 20% quota for Most Backward Classes. In Pattali Makkal Katchi v. A. Mayilerumperumal (31 March 2022) the Supreme Court upheld the Madras High Court’s decision striking it down. The Court held that the State did have legislative competence (so the competence ground and the claim that only the President can identify the most backward fail) and that internal sub-classification is not barred in itself; reservation as such is not against the basic structure. But the State had no quantifiable, contemporaneous data to justify treating the Vanniyars as a separate group from the other MBCs, so singling them out was an unreasonable classification violating Articles 14, 15 and 16.