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It is an undeniable aspect of the Indian political economy that the ruling classes, when conceding a democratic demand, often engineer a breakdown of institutional mechanisms to hollow it out from within. The history of affirmative action in this country is a case in point. It is not merely a history of constitutional amendments and landmark judicial pronouncements but also a history of stealthy bureaucratic sabotage. The dominant castes, having lost the overt political battle over the implementation of the Mandal Commission recommendations in the 1990s, retreated into the labyrinthine corridors of the secretariat, utilising the opaque instruments of ‘Office Memorandums’ and ‘clarificatory letters’ to take back what was conceded in principle.

The recent judgment of the Supreme Court, delivered on March 11, 2026, by a bench comprising Justices Pamidighantam Sri Narasimha and R. Mahadevan (Union of India v. Rohith Nathan and Others), is remarkable in this regard. In dismissing a batch of appeals filed by the Union government, the court has not merely provided relief to several legitimately qualified candidates belonging to the Other Backward Classes (OBCs) who were unlawfully denied entry into the civil services; it has, perhaps inadvertently, illuminated the deeply entrenched caste-class biases of the Department of Personnel and Training (DoPT).

To understand the nature of the bias enacted by the DoPT for nearly two decades, one must revisit the foundational logic of the ‘creamy layer’ doctrine. When the Supreme Court in Indra Sawhney (1992) mandated the exclusion of socially advanced sections from the OBC quota, it explicitly recognised that backwardness is primarily a social condition, not a purely economic one. Consequently, the Prasad Committee, and the subsequent 1993 Office Memorandum (OM) issued by the government, structured the exclusion criteria around ‘status’ rather than mere income.

The logic was sound, if one accepts the premise of the creamy layer. If an OBC individual reaches a position of recognised social status – for example, by becoming a direct recruit Class I (Group A) officer in the........

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