13. Now we come to close grips with the principal point debated before us. When is a second class high, going by marks? For any layman the meaning is clear. For any purpose-oriented interpretation the decoding is simple. High is the antithesis of low and a high second class is, therefore, a contrast to a low second class. When the range of second class marks is wide, of the candidate who gets that class with marks within the lower half bracket you cannot say he gets a high second class. If he manages to get 48% marks he barely gets a second class — not a high second class. And common sense, which is not an enemy of court sense, points clearly to the meaning of high second class as one where the marks fall a little short of first class marks and he narrowly misses first class. In the context of Ordinance 9 and its purpose and the collection of words used viz. “first class or a high second class”, the interpretation will misfire if we disregard the intent and effect of the adjective “high” and indifferently read it to mean merely the minimum marks needed to bring the candidate within the second class. High is high and a superior second class denotes marks somewhere near first class marks. Assuming we relax, dilute and liberalise the rigour clearly imported by the draftsmen by using the expression ‘high second class’, still it is impermissible to render the word ‘high’ nugatory or make, by construction, that intensive adjective redundant. Nor are we impressed with the strange submission that the university has all these years treated a high second class to mean a mere second class, and, therefore, English has lost its potency in the Allahabad University and high includes low. Such bathetic semantics must be rejected since continuing commission of wrong does not right it.”
