New Delhi: The Madras high court on Monday (November 1) said that the Tamil Nadu government’s decision to implement 10.5% reservation for the Vanniyar community was unconstitutional, and struck it down.The Special Reservation Act, 2021 was passed by the previous AIADMK government on February 26 this year, just before the state assembly elections, and set aside 10.5% of the 20% reservation granted to most backward classes and denotified communities in Tamil Nadu specifically for the Vanniyars.After the M.K. Stalin-led government gained power in the state, it approved the order that had been passed before the elections, formalising the 10.5% reservation for Vanniyars in public and private educational institutes and in state government jobs.However, a bench of Justices M. Duraiswamy and K. Murali Shankar has now ruled that this reservation is illegal as there is not enough data and evidence to prove the extreme backwardness of the Vanniyar community. The judgment reads:“The impugned enactment has been passed by the State without any quantifiable data on population, educational status and representation of the backward classes in the services and the sub-classification done by virtue of the impugned Act solely based on population data, in the absence of any objective criteria, is illegal in the eye of law and in violation of the Constitution of India.”Though the order has been nullified, the court made it clear that those who have already benefitted from the reservation will not be affected.The Pattali Makkal Katchi, a party representing Vanniyar interests and an ally of the previous AIADMK government, expressed disappointment at the court’s order, Hindustan Times reported, and urged the state government to appeal it in the Supreme Court. The PMK, according to The News Minute, had played a key role in formulating the Act.The high court was hearing a bunch of writ petitions challenging the constitutional validity of the law. The petitions had also questioned why the law was enacted just hours before model code of conduct came into force. In its counter-affidavit, the government had claimed that the allegations of the reservation being politically motivated were “baseless”. “In a democratic polity, an elected government cannot be barred from exercise of its power to make a policy to legislate any law during its tenure/until the last minute it holds power to meet the public opinion at large,” the government had said, according to The Hindu.