The Court Fixed the Discrimination. It Never Said From When.

The Gap Between Correcting a Wrong and Timing It Articles 14 and 16

did the substantive work in Union of India v. Rohith Nathan. Article 14 guarantees equality before the law; Article 16 extends that guarantee specifically to public employment. The Supreme Court used both to strike down a 2004 clarificatory letter that had, since then, applied a salary-based creamy-layer test only to the children of private and PSU employees - while government employees' children were assessed purely by their parents' service rank, with no salary component at all.

Two OBC candidates, identically well-off, could be treated completely differently depending on whether a parent worked for the state or a private company. That is precisely the kind of arbitrary classification Article 14 exists to prohibit and the Court said so plainly.

But here is what the March 11 judgment did not do and what nobody currently disputes it needed to do: specify from which date its correction takes effect. This is not a gap in Articles 14 or 16 - it is a separate, older doctrinal problem that Indian constitutional law has never fully codified: when the Supreme Court corrects a legal wrong, does that correction reach backward into processes already underway or only forward from the judgment date?

The doctrine that exists to answer this - prospective overruling, first used by the Supreme Court itself in Golaknath v. State of Punjab (1967)

• is discretionary. A bench can invoke it. Nothing requires it to. That discretion is exactly what the DoPT is now litigating for. Its argument is not that Rohith Nathan was wrongly decided - the Centre isn't contesting the equality logic at all. Its argument is administrative: CSE-2025 candidates who cleared the exam and await service allocation relied, in good faith, on the pre-March 11 rules that governed their entire selection process. Applying the correction retroactively to their cohort specifically, the DoPT says, would trigger fresh claims from candidates previously denied non-creamy-layer status, destabilise settled seniority going back to 2012 and do all of this while offering no actual benefit beyond the numerical fix a supernumerary post already provides. This is where Priya's core question about constitutional silence becomes concrete: the framers built elaborate machinery for equality claims under Articles 14 and 16, but left the timing of judicial correction to case-by-case judicial discretion, with no settled test for weighing a corrected class's rights against a relying class's reasonable expectations. Until the special bench rules - likely the same Narasimha-Mahadevan combination that decided Rohith Nathan itself, since they now sit separately - CSE-2025 candidates remain in a genuine constitutional grey zone: not wronged by the ruling, but not yet placed by it either.