Curated by KS Randhawa, Ludhiana Punjab
Updated: 6 November 2026, 12:29 AM IST
The Supreme Court has dismissed a petition seeking mandatory rotation of constituencies reserved for Scheduled Castes (SCs) and Scheduled Tribes (STs) in Parliament and State Assemblies. The three-judge bench said the request involved a policy choice for the legislature, rather than an order the judiciary could make.
Chief Justice of India Surya Kant, who led the bench, told petitioner Jagdish Singh that he was “dialling the wrong number”: if he wanted the system changed, he should approach Parliament. The case was reported by The Indian Express on November 5.
What the petitioner asked for
Singh, a voter from the Kadipur Assembly constituency in Uttar Pradesh’s Sultanpur district, challenged Section 9(1)(c) of the Delimitation Act, 2002. The provision guides the placement of reserved seats, including by locating SC-reserved constituencies, as far as practicable, in areas where the community’s share of the population is comparatively large.
According to the report, Singh said his constituency had remained reserved for about seven decades. He argued that a fixed designation limited the choices available to voters and asked the Court to require rotation, drawing a comparison with reservation arrangements in local bodies. The Allahabad High Court had declined to grant his request before he approached the Supreme Court.
Why the Court declined to intervene
The bench treated the requested change as a legislative and delimitation policy matter. Justice Joymalya Bagchi, as reported, also questioned the petitioner’s premise that voters are confined to choosing along caste or religious lines, observing that party and political ideology shape electoral choices.
The ruling does not remove SC/ST-reserved seats or alter the constitutional basis for them. Articles 330 and 332 of the Constitution provide for reserved seats in the Lok Sabha and State Legislative Assemblies, with the number of seats linked broadly to the relevant population proportions. The Delimitation Act sets out how constituencies are distributed and drawn.
What the decision means
For now, the existing framework remains in place: a constituency’s reserved status is determined through the applicable constitutional and delimitation process, and candidates contesting that seat must meet the eligibility rules for the reserved category. The Court’s dismissal means this petitioner did not obtain a judicial direction requiring those seats to rotate.
The decision leaves any broader redesign to Parliament and the lawmaking process. It should not be read as a ruling that rotation could never be considered; the bench’s reported reasoning was that this request had been taken to the wrong institution. Any future proposal would need to address how rotation would work alongside population-based delimitation, representation, constituency boundaries and the constitutional provisions governing reserved seats.
Hashtags: #IndianPolitics #SupremeCourt #ReservedSeats #ScheduledCastes #ScheduledTribes #Delimitation
