Supreme Court refuses to order rotation of SC/ST reserved seats, says it is for Parliament

The Supreme Court on Wednesday refused to order the rotation of constituencies reserved for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes in the Lok Sabha and state Assemblies, holding that whether such seats should change over time is a matter for Parliament, not the courts.

A bench of Chief Justice of India Surya Kant and Justices Joymalya Bagchi and V. Mohana dismissed an appeal against an Allahabad High Court judgment that had upheld Section 9(1)(c) of the Delimitation Act, 2002. The Chief Justice told the petitioner he was "dialling the wrong number", according to LiveLaw and ETV Bharat, and left him free to take his case to elected representatives.

The case

The petitioner, Jagdish Singh, is a voter in the Kadipur Assembly constituency in Uttar Pradesh's Sultanpur district, which has been reserved for Scheduled Castes for decades, LiveLaw reported. He argued that keeping the same seats reserved without rotation violated the rights to equality and free expression under Articles 14, 15 and 19, limited voters in those seats to candidates from one community, and benefited a few families.

He asked for a system like the one used for panchayats and municipalities, where Articles 243D and 243T of the Constitution provide for reserved seats to be rotated.

Section 9(1)(c) of the Delimitation Act says reserved constituencies should, as far as practicable, be located in areas where the proportion of Scheduled Castes or Scheduled Tribes is comparatively large. Because populations shift slowly, the same seats tend to stay reserved from one delimitation to the next.

What the courts said

The bench held that it could not rewrite the Constitution or the statute to add a rotation requirement that Articles 330 and 332, which provide for reserved seats in the Lok Sabha and Assemblies, do not contain, according to reports of the hearing in LiveLaw and the Free Press Journal. Whether reserving seats where these communities are concentrated entrenches caste divisions was a question for the legislature, the court said.

Justice Bagchi said voters in a multiparty democracy should vote on ideology rather than caste or religion, and that courts could not decide democratic choices that belong to voters, LiveLaw reported.

The High Court, in a July 2026 judgment by Justices Alok Mathur and Amitabh Kumar Rai, had held that Articles 330 and 332 fix the number of reserved seats while Article 327 leaves the method of identifying them to Parliament. LiveLaw reported that the High Court observed that rotation might better serve social and political justice, but that the choice belonged to Parliament.

The written order was not available on the Supreme Court's website when this report was filed, so this account is based on reports of the hearing; no primary document could be checked.

Why it matters

The question will return as the country prepares for its first delimitation of Lok Sabha and Assembly seats since the freeze on seat numbers, which is tied to the first census taken after 2026. The next census is under way, with population enumeration due in 2027. Any new delimitation exercise will again decide which seats are reserved, and under the current law it will do so by population concentration, not rotation.

In West Bengal, 68 of the 294 Assembly seats are reserved for Scheduled Castes and 16 for Scheduled Tribes, under the 2008 delimitation. Wednesday's ruling leaves that arrangement, and the method behind it, unchanged unless Parliament amends the law.