When a society crumbles from within, it's rarely the poor who bring it down — it's the big guns, the ones already sitting comfortably at the top, who hollow it out quietly. Reservations were built for a person still tied to hardship — a household in a genuinely backward village, a family within a genuinely disadvantaged caste. That system is being gamed in plain sight, not by those it was meant to protect, but by those who no longer need protecting. The children of powerful officers and government employees — raised and schooled for years in Srinagar, Jammu, or cities their "native" village could never match — keep a Reserved Backward Area, domicile or category certificate tucked away, ready to be produced the moment it offers the better shot at a government job, in open defiance of the government's own rules. And the record shows exactly how the game is played: through classification that never gets updated, cross-checks that never happen, and generational limits that simply don't exist.
The clearest illustration lies in a single notification. In 2005, the State Administrative Council, then headed by Governor Satya Pal Malik, approved 66 villages as Backward Areas. Reporting by the Kashmir Observer in January 2022 found that two of them, Rupora and Yarikalan, barely two kilometres from Chadoora town and seventeen from Srinagar, had since become comfortable, well-connected localities — yet government employees and gazetted officers from these villages, whose children studied in prestigious Srinagar schools, continued to draw RBA benefit and secure government jobs on that basis. The law anticipated this drift: Section 11 of the J&K State Commission for Backward Classes Act, 1997 requires the list to be revised every ten years. Two decades on, that revision has plainly not kept pace.
Even where an area's backward status is not in dispute, nothing stops one person from holding certificates that ought to be mutually exclusive, because no register checks what one Tehsildar has certified against what another already has. Tribunal and High Court records on Indian Kanoon show this in practice. Before the Central Administrative Tribunal, Jammu, an RBA-category appointment was struck down as void ab initio because the candidate did not hold the requisite certificate when required. Before the J&K High Court, an applicant sought a domicile certificate in Ramban by declaring he held none other, while already holding a valid RBA certificate from Tehsil Banihal; a separate ruling held that an EWS certificate acquired while an RBA certificate remained in force contravened the rules. None involved a forged signature — each involved genuine paper, issued by genuine officials in different jurisdictions, never checked against the other paper the same person already held.
Where fraud has been alleged directly against an official, the outcome shows how high the legal bar sits. In October 2022, the J&K and Ladakh High Court quashed an FIR against JKAS officer Indra Thakur, involving an allegedly fake RBA certificate. Justice Sanjay Dhar held that criminal misconduct requires proof of dishonest intent, and that an officer cannot be convicted merely because a Tehsildar took a possible view that the certificate applied — but the court explicitly made no finding on whether it had been validly issued. A quashed FIR closed a criminal case; it did not clear the certificate. Similar buck-passing surfaced when the J&K Services Selection Board, amid allegations that candidates from influential families had obtained fake Scheduled Tribe certificates, cancelled the selection of 71 candidates. Asked whether they had gamed the system, chairman Zubair Ahmed told The Tribune that verifying authenticity was the appointing authorities' job, not the Board's. Several candidates reportedly withdrew rather than risk scrutiny by the Crime Branch, after a complaint asked how non-ST candidates had obtained ST certificates at all.
A quieter risk lies in policy outrunning verification capacity. In 2019, J&K raised the income ceiling for EWS and backward-class eligibility from Rs 4.5 lakh to Rs 8 lakh, widening relief for modest households without a matching rise in the machinery to verify income, most of which still rests on self-declaration rather than cross-checked tax records.
Beyond outright fraud lies a question the Supreme Court has now engaged directly. In State of Punjab v. Davinder Singh (2024 INSC 562), a seven-judge Bench, by 6:1, upheld States' power to sub-classify Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes so benefits reach the most backward among them. Justice B.R. Gavai went further, holding that the "creamy layer" principle — long used to exclude the affluent among OBCs — applies to SCs and STs too, and recommended reservation be confined to first-generation beneficiaries, with periodic review to exclude households that have achieved higher status. Justice Bela Trivedi dissented, warning against fragmenting SC/ST communities through sub-categorisation.
Applied to J&K's own record, the logic is direct. A gazetted officer's household has already crossed the threshold reservation exists to help people cross. When its children — schooled in the same cities, carrying the same certificate their parent once used — claim the identical benefit again, the policy stops correcting disadvantage and starts protecting incumbency. A genuinely first-generation household is crowded out; competition-free entry, repeated across generations in one family, blunts the discipline reservation is meant to preserve for everyone else.
This argument is contested, and fairness requires the other side. Justice Trivedi's dissent, and many scholars, hold that caste-based exclusion is not erased by one generation's income or one government post — social distance from dominant castes can persist regardless of salary, which is why the income-based creamy-layer test used for OBCs has never applied to SC/ST status, a category law treats as social and historical, not purely economic. Critics of an automatic cut-off also note that visible SC/ST/OBC representation in gazetted posts is a policy goal in itself, and that Justice Gavai's observation remains obiter dicta — an opinion, not a binding direction any State has implemented.
Two distinct failures need two distinct fixes. The Backward Classes Commission's statutory duty to revise the RBA list every ten years must actually happen, using income and infrastructure data, not political convenience. Every RBA, EWS, domicile, OBC, SC and ST certificate held by a government employee should be checked against every other certificate issued to that person through one shared register, closing exactly the overlap the Ramban and Banihal cases expose. Where a certificate is found wrongly issued, both the issuing official and the beneficiary should face dismissal, recovery and prosecution — not one alone. And consistent with the Court's 2024 reasoning, the Commission could record which households have already had a member benefit from a reserved post, using that record, not assumption, to decide whether the next generation's application warrants closer review rather than automatic renewal.
Reservation was written to give a family its first foothold, not to become the foothold itself, passed down like a family heirloom while the door stays shut to the household next door that never got one. Every certificate quietly renewed within the same family, and every list left unrevised for twenty years, answers a question India has not yet asked itself plainly enough: at what point does a policy meant to correct inherited disadvantage start manufacturing an inherited entitlement instead — and who, if not the state that wrote the rule, is supposed to notice the difference?
Email:----------------- asmathkhaliqsoss.uok@gmail.com
