Question

In the context of the Constitution of India, a pension scheme differentiates between employees retiring before and after a specified cut-off date. Those excluded challenge the classification as arbitrary. The constitutional issue would primarily attract:

• A. Legislative competence of the State
• B. Article 14 and the principle of classification
• C. Doctrine of eclipse
• D. Doctrine of severability

Hint:

Whenever a question involves:

• Cut-off dates,

• Different treatment of similarly situated persons,

• Allegations of arbitrariness,
immediately think of Article 14 and the doctrine of reasonable classification.

Answer 1

The Correct Option is B

This question can be approached by first naming what the excluded employees are actually complaining about, and then matching that complaint to the constitutional doctrine designed to address it.

1. What the complaint is: the excluded employees are not disputing who had the power to frame the pension scheme, and they are not arguing that any part of an old law has become invalid because of a later constitutional provision, they are saying that dividing employees by a cut-off retirement date is arbitrary and unfairly excludes them from a benefit others receive.
2. What kind of doctrine that calls for: a complaint about unequal treatment between similarly placed groups is, by definition, an equality complaint, and Article 14 is the constitutional home for equality complaints, subject to the well-established exception that reasonable classification is permitted.
3. The specific test that applies: under Article 14, a classification survives only if there is an intelligible differentia distinguishing the included group from the excluded group, and that differentia bears a rational nexus with the object the pension scheme is trying to achieve.
4. Why the other doctrines do not apply: legislative competence asks a who-can-legislate question, the doctrine of eclipse deals with pre-Constitution laws becoming inconsistent with rights, and severability deals with cutting out an invalid clause from a valid statute, none of these match a complaint about unequal treatment between two groups of pensioners.

Since the complaint is specifically about unequal treatment through classification, the doctrine that squarely applies is Article 14's reasonable classification test.

The correct answer is Article 14 and the principle of classification.

Answer 2

A useful check here is to ask, for each option, what question is this doctrine actually designed to answer, and then see which of those questions matches what the excluded employees are asking the court to decide.

1. Legislative competence answers: did this law-making body have the constitutional power to enact this law on this subject. Nothing in the facts suggests the pension scheme was made by a body lacking power to do so, the dispute is entirely about how the scheme treats different employees, not about who made it.
2. Doctrine of eclipse answers: does an old, pre-Constitution law that has become inconsistent with a fundamental right stay dormant instead of dying, and can it revive later. There is no suggestion here that this pension scheme predates the Constitution or that a later provision has overtaken an earlier valid law.
3. Doctrine of severability answers: if part of a statute is unconstitutional, can that part be cut out while the rest of the statute survives. The facts do not ask whether one clause of the scheme can be separated from another, they ask whether the classification itself, as a whole, is valid.
4. Article 14 and classification answers: does dividing people into groups for the purpose of a benefit or burden rest on an intelligible basis that is rationally connected to the scheme's purpose. This is exactly the question the excluded employees are raising when they call the cut-off-date division arbitrary.

Matching the real question being asked in the facts, whether unequal treatment through a cut-off date is justified, to the doctrine that answers exactly that question points to Article 14.

So the correct answer is Article 14 and the principle of classification.