New Delhi: Justices Arun Monga and Yogendra Kumar Purohit of the Rajasthan high court have called parts of an “epilogue” added to a recent order a “mistake”. In Ganga Kumari vs State of Rajasthan, a police constable’s petition related to horizontal reservation for transgender persons, the division bench provided interim relief to the applicant.Meanwhile, one of the judges, Justice Monga, had added an “epilogue” to the order, which made observations about the controversial new amendments to the Transgender Persons Act.The observations made on March 30 were to the effect that the Rajasthan government should keep constitutional guarantees of equality and the statutory position – referring to the 2014 NALSA judgement and parliamentary law – in mind when implementing the Ganga Kumari order, or when it frames rules related to reservations for transgender persons.On April 2, however, the court revised the epilogue to say that at the time, amendments to the Transgender Persons Act were yet to get presidential assent or be notified.President Droupadi Murmu assented to the Bill on March 30, but after the judgement was passed.“Upon our re-reading of the epilogue, it appears that by mistake the […] text was included therein, although it was neither intended nor necessary,” the court said, referring to a large portion of the epilogue.The Wire has learnt that this development follows an application submitted to the court by the petitioner constable’s counsel, who wanted the epilogue to not be treated as part of the original judgement. The court did not accept this request. However, it decided that certain paragraphs of the epilogue would be deleted.The new epilogue is markedly different from the original, in that it no longer carries the specific critiques of the controversial amendments. Instead, it says, among other things:“In this backdrop, the epilogue, therefore, is [a] statement of facts in the process of [a] changing legal landscape. The same is rather a caveat that it remains open, and indeed, still incumbent upon the State of Rajasthan to ensure that any policy framework evolved pursuant to the directions, in the judgment above, is within the contours of the existing law as on the date of the judgment i.e. 30.03.2026.”Put simply, the court is saying that the Rajasthan government must ensure that its directions in the case are followed fully – not just with respect to the individual petitioner getting the relief it has ordered, but in terms of how the state government redraws its policy for reservation to transgender persons.In the petition, the police constable had challenged the state government’s inclusion, in 2023, of transgender persons in the Other Backward Classes (OBC) list for reservations in employment. This happened in several (individual) steps. First, in 2014, the Supreme Court ruled, in the NALSA judgement, that transgenders are ‘socially and economically backward’. However, in the eighties, the Mandal Commission had made ‘social and educational backwardness’ the primary category to determine whether a social group had to be included in the OBC category. Essentially putting two and two together, in 2023, the Rajasthan government included transgender persons on the state’s OBC list. This was appealed by the constable before the Rajasthan high court.However, while the hearings were still underway, the Union government amended the Transgender Persons Act, changing the definition of transgender to a “medicalised” version in late March 2026 – on the very day of the March 30 hearing, in fact.It would appear that this combination of factors – the state government’s policy on transgender reservations based, as per the high court, on a misreading of social and educational backwardness, and the about-to-be-changed definition of transgender in the parliamentary law – contributed to the Rajasthan high court judge’s decision to clarify the position on the crucial matter through the first epilogue.Therefore, even though the petition before the high court did not refer to the latest amendments or the Transgender Persons Act, the court added that note. At first, it said these amendments in the Transgender Persons law were, to paraphrase the high court, not quite constitutional. But even in the amended epilogue, the judge clarifies that the previous epilogue was a “statement of fact”.The observations in the earlier epilogue included:“Selfhood is not a matter of concession, it is a matter of right”, meaning that medical tests were not envisioned as the route to determine gender identity. (The court has retained this observation in the new epilogue, to explain the logic behind the wording of the first epilogue).“Legal recognition of gender identity … conditioned upon certification, scrutiny or other forms of administrative endorsement” were not part of NALSA. (This remains so, since NALSA stands)“What was recognised by the Supreme Court [in NALSA] as an inviolable aspect of personhood now risks being reduced to a contingent, state-mediated entitlement”. (This has come to pass through the amended Transgender Persons Act.)Why the case before the high court?The constable approached the court over the inclusion of transgender persons in the state OBC list due to the peculiar situation it created. Under the constitutional scheme, any individual who belongs to a Scheduled Caste (SC) or Scheduled Tribe (ST) cannot also belong to the OBC category, and vice versa.The Rajasthan government rules, therefore, created what legal scholars call a “perverse” outcome. A transgender person entitled to SC or ST status (by birth) cannot also be an OBC (by status). Not just that, while backward classes are identified on the basis of caste, SC and ST communities are identified on the basis of social status, remoteness, birth-based discrimination and so on – the criteria are completely different.Recognising these oddities, the high court granted interim relief in the constable’s case, of 3% additional weightage in marks for all transgender candidates in state employment and educational institutions. It also referred the state government to Karnataka’s 2021 “horizontal reservation model” and Tamil Nadu’s efforts at inclusivity as templates worth emulating (rather than the approach it had taken of clubbing transgenders within the ‘OBC’ category). The verdict stands.Revised epilogueWhile certain specific sentences now stand deleted, the new epilogue still retains one core point. Its order on April 2 with the revised epilogue notes the following:“At the time of authoring the judgment … this court proceeded on the foundational premise articulated in NALSA judgment … that the right to self-identify one’s gender is an intrinsic facet of dignity, autonomy and personal liberty under Articles 14, 15, 16 and 21 of the constitution, [the] bottom-line being, selfhood is not a matter of concession, it is a matter of right.“Be that as it may, the directions in the main judgment have been passed as per the prevailing legal position on the date of the judgement and are meant to be complied with accordingly.”The effect is that the court goes from commenting on the amendment’s constitutional implications towards retaining the direction and outcome of its order. In other words, the direction to the state government survives, but the constitutional critique becomes the backdrop, subtly retained it as context. The reason for this is hinted at in the epilogue: it is because the “…the proposed Bill seeks to amend the 2019 Act by taking away the right to self-determination or self-proclamationof being a third gender”.The new epilogue says that the state government must formulate a policy to ensure the representation for transgender persons that toes the statutory line. That is, Rajasthan must provide 3% interim relaxation to transgender persons as the court directed on March 30, and it must revise the reservation rules – but now as per the amended transgender persons act. What is no longer stated is that the government cannot make rules that ingore or violate the constitutional directives and conventions on representation and equity.