Domicile quota: Karnataka confident of favourable SC verdict

Law and Parliamentary Affairs Minister J C Madhuswamy on Thursday exuded confidence that the Apex Court would uphold the state’s legislation to provide 25% reservation to domicile students.

Briefing reporters after the Cabinet meeting here, Madhuswamy said the Supreme Court’s verdict will be in favour of the state and the National Law School of India University (NLSIU) will have to provide the 25% reservation on its campus.

Madhuswamy said the case was coming up for hearing on Friday and the state was confident that the verdict would be in its favour as similar legislations enacted by other states have been upheld in the past.

The NLSIU and the state government have been locked in a legal battle over providing reservation to Kannadigas.

While the government wants a vertical 25% reservation for students from Karnataka, NLSIU has given horizontal reservation (which means Karnataka students who got seats under merit list have been considered as part of reservation quota).

The minister said the state government, in 2019, had enacted a legislation providing 25% reservation to Karnataka domicile students, but the legislation was struck down by the high court.

“Now, the state has challenged it in the apex court and it is listed for hearing on Friday,” he said.

“As NLSIU had assured us that it will implement the reservation, we had decided not to pursue the case. But since NLSIU tried to circumvent the legislation, we are now pursuing the case all over again,” he said.

In January, the advocates’ associations of Bengaluru and a couple of pro-Kannada outfits staged a protest against NLSIU for not implementing the domicile reservation legislation effectively and alleged that the institution caused injustice to Kannadigas.

After this, Higher Education Minister C N Ashwath Narayan, in a letter dated January 26, raised concerns, stating that “the non-implementation of the 25% domicile reservation violates the law of natural justice, if students selected under all-India quota are considered under domicile reservation.”