The Maharashtra government’s formal cancellation of the 5 percent reservation for socially and educationally backward Muslims has reopened a constitutional and political question that has lingered unresolved since 2014. The decision of the Social Justice Department in February 2026 to withdraw all resolutions and circulars linked to the earlier policy has now been challenged before the Bombay High Court. The petition argues that the state’s move is arbitrary, discriminatory, and constitutionally unsustainable. What is at stake is not simply a lapsed ordinance. It is the steady hollowing out of institutional mechanisms that once acknowledged the measurable backwardness of sections of the Muslim community in Maharashtra.
In 2014, the then Congress–NCP government introduced an ordinance granting 5 percent reservation to Muslims under a Special Backward Category referred to as SBC-A or SEBC for identified communities. The policy was not framed as a blanket religious quota. It was grounded in data identifying nearly fifty Muslim sub-communities as socially and educationally backward. Caste certificates and validity certificates were issued accordingly. The ordinance also granted 16 percent reservation to Marathas. When the matter reached the Bombay High Court in November 2014, the court stayed implementation. The ordinance subsequently lapsed in December 2014 because it was not converted into a statute within the constitutionally mandated timeframe.
The lapse of the ordinance did not erase the underlying findings regarding backwardness. Significantly, when examining the matter, the Bombay High Court had invalidated the Maratha quota but upheld the 5 percent reservation for Muslims in government and aided educational institutions, observing that quantifiable data justified inclusion of the identified Muslim sub-communities. The court also ensured that the reservation did not breach the Supreme Court’s 50 percent ceiling on total reservations. In other words, the judiciary did not reject the premise that sections of the Muslim community in Maharashtra were socially and educationally backward. It accepted that premise within constitutional limits.
What has now occurred is not a judicial reversal but an executive withdrawal. The current government led by Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis has declared that all decisions and circulars linked to the 2014 ordinance stand cancelled. No new caste or validity certificates will be issued. No admissions will be granted under the 5 percent quota. The state’s position is that since the ordinance lapsed years ago, the matter is closed. Yet the petition before the Bombay High Court contends that such closure is neither automatic nor neutral. It demands that the state produce the quantified data relied upon to justify the cancellation and argues that no adverse finding was recorded by the State Backward Class Commission against the Muslim SEBC classification.
The core constitutional question is whether the executive can extinguish a policy recognizing demonstrable backwardness without fresh data, consultation, or reasoned justification. Reservations in India are not acts of charity. They are instruments flowing from Articles 14, 15, and 16 of the Constitution, aimed at substantive equality. When the state recognizes backwardness through data and then withdraws recognition without a comparable evidentiary exercise, it risks violating the very principle of non arbitrariness that undergirds Article 14. The petition asserts precisely this. It claims that the withdrawal lacks a factual foundation and disregards earlier judicial acknowledgement of backwardness among the specified Muslim communities.
The broader political context cannot be ignored. Since 2014, legal and administrative interventions affecting Muslims across India have rarely taken the form of dramatic constitutional amendments. Instead, they have unfolded through incremental executive decisions, procedural reinterpretations, and selective policy withdrawals. Each move is presented as routine governance. Taken together, they redraw the boundaries of belonging. In Maharashtra, the divergence is instructive. When Maratha reservations faced legal obstacles, the political system mobilized sustained legislative and legal energy to revive and defend them. No comparable urgency animated efforts to secure the Muslim quota framework after the ordinance lapsed. This difference in institutional will reveal how majoritarian priorities shape the afterlife of welfare policy.
The immediate impact of the cancellation is administrative, but its consequences are social. Recognition as a socially and educationally backward group is not merely symbolic. It determines eligibility for certificates, admissions, and recruitment processes that structure access to mobility. By halting issuance of caste and validity certificates and foreclosing admissions under the 5 percent category, the state effectively closes an acknowledged route into higher education and public employment. In a context where representation of Muslims in state services remains disproportionately low, such closure compounds rather than corrects inequality.
There is also a question of institutional consistency. The High Court had previously confined the Muslim quota to government and aided institutions and ensured that it did not breach the 50 percent ceiling mandated by the Supreme Court. The framework that survived judicial scrutiny was already limited and constitutionally trimmed. The present withdrawal does not respond to a judicial directive striking it down. It removes a scheme that had been partially upheld within constitutional parameters. That distinction matters because it underscores that the current shift originates in executive choice rather than constitutional compulsion.
Another dimension concerns reliance and expectation. For years after 2014, administrative processes acknowledged the classification through issuance of certificates. Students and families structured educational decisions around that recognition. Even if the ordinance formally lapsed, the state’s conduct created a practical regime. Abruptly extinguishing that regime without transitional safeguards disregards the principle that governance must account for legitimate expectations generated by its own actions. The Constitution does not treat citizens as passive recipients of fluctuating executive moods.
For Muslims in Maharashtra, the stakes are immediate and material. Access to government colleges and public employment is not a symbolic concession but one of the few constitutionally structured routes out of entrenched disadvantage. For the constitutional order, the implications are equally stark. The cancellation of the 5 percent reservation is therefore not a technical tidying up of a lapsed ordinance. It reflects an ideological choice about who merits structural support from the state and who must navigate inequality without it.
Paresh Hate is a Bahujan queer researcher, writer, documenter and activist and the Lead Content Manager at Dalit Voice.