The Judgment Won and Still Nobody's Been Trained

A Judgment the Government Won't Contest and Won't Apply Either Articles 14 and 16

guarantee equality before law and equal opportunity in public employment - the Supreme Court's March 11 Rohith Nathan judgment applied exactly this logic to find DoPT's creamy-layer income test irrational: it used parental salary to exclude the children of PSU and private-sector employees from OBC reservation, while exempting the children of government employees on equivalent salaries from the same test.

The court called this "hostile discrimination" and ordered corrective measures within six months. The government has not appealed this finding. It has instead gone back to the same Supreme Court asking for permission not to apply it to the one cohort most directly affected by it right now.

The Gap Between "Struck Down" and "Applied" This is a

subtler failure than an agency defying a court order - DoPT accepts the ruling's correctness in principle. What it is contesting is timing: whether the corrected creamy-layer standard must apply retrospectively to candidates whose CSE 2025 results were declared on March 6, five days before the judgment came down.

The Centre's application effectively asks the court to let this specific batch proceed under the old, now-unconstitutional standard, while presumably applying the corrected one going forward. That distinction matters enormously to the 958 candidates in limbo - some of whom may have been wrongly excluded from OBC quota benefit under exactly the discriminatory test the judgment invalidated, meaning their final selection outcome could itself be affected by which standard applies.

Why This Isn't Really About Six Months' Delay

The foundation course delay looks, on its face, like routine administrative friction - a court date on September 17, a tentative August 24 start pushed back. But the substance underneath is a genuine constitutional question the Supreme Court itself will now have to resolve a second time: does correcting an "hostile discrimination" finding under Articles 14 and 16 require reopening the specific selection process it tainted or can a corrected standard apply only prospectively while the tainted batch proceeds on the old rules?

Indian constitutional law has no settled, uniform answer to when a judicial finding of unconstitutionality must be applied retrospectively versus prospectively - this is precisely the kind of genuinely unsettled question where the Supreme Court's September 17 hearing will function as a rare live instance of the court deciding its own judgment's temporal reach.

For the exam, the sharpest insight is that a Supreme Court victory for OBC candidates on the creamy-layer test does not automatically translate into a remedy for the specific candidates it should protect - the Centre's retrospective-application question means the very cohort excluded under the discriminatory standard could still be trained and allocated under it, with correction reserved only for future examination cycles.