New Delhi: After the Telangana government issued an order providing 42% reservation for backward classes (BCs) in local bodies, petitions were filed arguing it was ‘unconstitutional’. The weapon was familiar: the judicially created 50% ceiling on reservations. The high court has now put an interim stay on the order.This legal battle, however, is merely the surface manifestation of a deep, unresolved political war over the meaning of equality in the Indian republic.To understand what is truly at stake, we must reframe the question. Don’t ask, ‘Why is there a 50% ceiling?’ First, ask where that number came from. It is not in the Constitution. No Article dictates it.It is a judicial creation.And once we recognise that, our inquiry shifts from the technical (‘What does the law say?’) to the political (‘Why did the judiciary say what it said, and whose interests does this serve?’).1. The original sin: reservation as an ‘exception’The ‘50% ceiling’ rests on a foundational, and deeply flawed, interpretation of the Constitution.This framing of reservation as a limited measure has roots in pre-independence India. The Poona Pact, for instance, where B.R. Ambedkar conceded the demand for separate electorates under pressure from M.K. Gandhi’s fast, can be seen as the moment where representation for the Scheduled Castes was reframed: not as a fundamental right of an oppressed nationality, but as a “concession” granted by the magnanimous Hindu majority.This idea of concession, not right, could be seen as the political precursor to the judicial logic that followed.The judicial story begins with a conflict between a state attempting an expansive social justice measure and a judiciary acting as a brake. In M.R. Balaji v. State of Mysore (1963), the Supreme Court examined a policy that reserved 68% of seats in educational institutions for backward communities.In striking down the measure, the court constructed a particular narrative about equality. It positioned Article 15(1), which prohibits discrimination, as the “general rule”. It viewed Article 15(4) – which allows special provisions for backward classes, SCs and STs – as an “exception”.This was a crucial intellectual move. By framing it this way, the court established a hierarchy: the rule is primary; the exception is secondary and must be contained. An exception, the court argued, cannot “swallow” the rule. If the special provision becomes dominant, the rule of non-discrimination is rendered meaningless.This framing proved to be a profound ideological choice.It designates the historical privilege of a few upper castes as the unspoken “norm” by terming it the “general” category.This privilege is “caste capital”; accumulated advantages in literacy, land, wealth and social networks. Over generations, this caste capital was converted into modern currency: qualifications, professional achievements and control over institutions. By not officially recognising these advantages, the Constitution allowed the upper castes to cloak themselves in the casteless “general” category, capture the opportunities of a new India, and insist they did so through fair competition. This “general” category is the unmarked category of privilege.From this premise, the court made a short, arbitrary leap. It declared, “generally”, that a special provision should be less than 50%. It was a judicial rule of thumb, a line drawn in the sand, representing what the court felt was a balance between the “competing interests” of the backward classes and the interest of the “rest of society” in “merit” and “efficiency”.The more honest way to read the Constitution is to see Article 15(4) not as an exception to 15(1), but as its most emphatic clarification. It is the substantive soul that gives life to the formal body of equality. Formal equality, treating everyone the same, is a charade in a society founded on graded inequality. True equality demands we treat unequals unequally to undo historical disadvantage.Article 15(4) is the definition of substantive equality in the Indian context. But in Balaji, the judiciary chose the other path.2. The Mandal moment: hardening the ceilingFor nearly three decades, the 50% ceiling remained a judicial guideline. The ground hardened with the nine-judge bench verdict in Indra Sawhney v. Union of India (1992), the Mandal Commission case.This judgment is complex.It was a significant step for social justice, upholding reservations for Other Backward Classes (OBCs) in Union government jobs. For the first time, a Supreme Court majority accepted caste as a legitimate indicator of backwardness. The law was forced to acknowledge social reality.But in acknowledging this reality, the court also contained it. Confronted with the massive upper-caste backlash in north and western India to the Mandal recommendations, the judiciary sought a ‘balance’. It did so by reaffirming and solidifying the 50% ceiling from Balaji, presenting it as a settled principle needed to ensure “efficiency” in administration.The protests were stripped of their moral pretensions and exposed for what they were: not a principled fight for fairness, but a raw defense of group interest; in essence, ‘upper castes fighting against the reduction in their quota of seats’.The 50% rule transformed from a rule of thumb into a near-inflexible doctrine. It was a judicial assurance to agitated upper castes that while OBCs would be let into the house, they could only occupy a limited part. The other half would remain the “open” category; a space dominated by communities that have never needed reservations.The Indra Sawhney judgment did allow one crucial exception: the rule could be relaxed in “extraordinary situations”, particularly in remote areas where backward communities were an overwhelming majority. This opened a theoretical window, an admission that the 50% figure was not absolute.3. The present impasse: the “triple test”This brings us to today. The battle has shifted to local bodies.In K. Krishna Murthy v. Union of India (2010), the Supreme Court laid down a ‘triple test’ that states must satisfy before providing OBC reservations in local governments. The test shows how judicial intervention creates obstacles to social justice. It says states must:Set up a commission for a rigorous empirical inquiry into backwardness concerning local bodies.Specify the proportion of reservation required based on the commission’s findings.Ensure that total reservation for SCs, STs and OBCs does not exceed 50%.The third condition elevates the 50% ceiling to a rigid precondition for any local body reservation. The demand for ‘quantifiable data’ is another hurdle, as the Union government has until recently refused to conduct a caste census, leaving states with imperfect data and commissions whose reports are easily challenged. The process becomes a legal and administrative minefield, designed to frustrate and delay political empowerment.4. The final act: the EWS quotaFor decades, courts held up the 50% wall as sacrosanct. Any attempt by SC, ST or OBC communities to breach it was met with grave warnings about violating the Constitution’s ‘basic structure’.But the ceiling’s sanctity has always been a convenient fiction, a principle of selective piety. For years, states from Chhattisgarh and Tamil Nadu to Rajasthan and Bihar have breached this supposedly inviolable limit with little judicial consequence.Then came the 103rd Constitutional Amendment, creating a 10% reservation for the Economically Weaker Sections (EWS). This amendment, and its subsequent validation by the Supreme Court, exposes the entire doctrine for what it always was.The 50% so-called rule was breached with astonishing ease, not for the historically oppressed, but for the dominant castes who are the primary beneficiaries. The ceiling was never a neutral principle of equality, but a political tool of containment; a wall designed to regulate entry for some, while a private gate could always be installed for others.The EWS quota also performs a conceptual sleight of hand.It severs reservation from its only coherent justification – remedying historical, caste-based injustice – and reframes it as a simple poverty-alleviation scheme. This was the central argument of anti-Mandal forces, now enshrined in the Constitution.Conclusion: a ceiling on justiceSo, to come back to the original question: Why the 50% ceiling?It is not a constitutional requirement, but a judicial invention.It was born from a flawed view that treats provisions for the oppressed as an “exception” to equality, not its essential substance.It was solidified into doctrine to assuage upper-caste anger during the anti-Mandal agitation.It is now used via the ‘triple test’ to place procedural roadblocks in the path of political reservation for OBCs.Its demolition for the EWS category reveals its true purpose: a barrier meant only for the oppressed, not for the privileged.Ultimately, its function is to act as a ceiling not on reservations, but on justice.It ensures that no matter how numerous the oppressed communities are, often 70-80% of a state’s population, their access to state power remains permanently capped. It guarantees that the 15-20% of the upper-caste population will always have at least 50% of opportunities in the “open” category they dominate by converting their historical “caste capital” into modern “merit”.This could also explain the historic resistance to the caste census, usually from dominant and the privileged caste groups, as it would ultimately reveal the thin sliver of the demographic that claims to be the “general” category.Reservation is not a poverty alleviation program. It is a remedy for a sick society, a mechanism for representation to counter the effects of historical oppression. The 50% ceiling, therefore, is an arbitrary limit placed on that remedy.The struggle against this ceiling is not a mere legal quibble over numbers. It is a political and ideological struggle to redefine the very meaning of equality; to finally move from a formal equality that preserves privilege to a substantive equality that dismantles it. It is a struggle to assert that the claims of the vast, historically dispossessed majority are not an ‘exception’ to be managed, but are, in fact, the central, unresolved question of Indian democracy.