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On March 30, the Rajasthan high court’s Jodhpur bench delivered its judgment in Ganga Kumari v. State of Rajasthan, a case about horizontal reservation for transgender persons. The petition had nothing to do with the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Amendment Bill, 2026, which Parliament had passed days earlier. Yet the judgment acquired its headline not for what it decided, but for what it said in passing. In a separately authored “epilogue” appended by Justice Arun Monga after both judges had signed off on the main judgment, the bench became the first court to comment on the Amendment Act.

That epilogue deserves closer scrutiny: not for repeating what the court said, but for asking why it said it, and whether it ought to have.

The case that was actually before the court

Ganga Kumari, a transgender woman serving in the Rajasthan Police, challenged a January 2023 state notification that placed transgender persons at serial number 92 of the Other Backward Classes (OBC) list. Her contention was straightforward. The Supreme Court’s 2014 NALSA judgment had directed states to treat transgender persons as socially and educationally backward and extend reservations. Rajasthan’s response, however, was to slot them into the OBC category. This created perverse outcomes. A transgender person born into a Scheduled Caste (SC) or Scheduled Tribe (ST) family would have to abandon their birth-category reservation to claim the OBC slot. The notification effectively extinguished pre-existing entitlements without offering anything meaningful in return.

The division bench of Justices Yogendra Kumar Purohit and Arun Monga agreed. It held the notification to be a “mere facade and an eyewash”, one that “parrots” the Supreme Court’s recognition of transgender persons as backward without translating it into concrete affirmative action. The state’s constitutional obligation, the court said, had been “conspicuously abdicated”.

On relief, the bench was cautious. It acknowledged that creating horizontal reservation is a policy question beyond the permissible scope of judicial intervention under Article 226. Instead, it directed the state to constitute a committee, headed by the Principal Secretary (Social Welfare), to study the “compounded, aggravated marginalisation” of transgender persons across all socio-economic categories and recommend a workable framework. As interim relief, it ordered a 3% additional........

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