The Calcutta high court decision to scrap other backward classes (OBCs) certificates awarded illegally to 77 communities,on Wednesday, has come as a shock to the Mamata Government, which aims to reverse the order by going to a higher court. The TMC government has rejected the high court order. The Court in its judgment called the classification process illegal, as the majority of the certificates were given to Muslims only.
Prime minister Narendra Modi hailed the decision and said that the court’s verdict was a tight slap to opposition parties, along with the West Bengal government for issuing unwarranted OBC certificates to Muslims just for using them as a vote bank. He added that the TMC crossed every limit in their obsession with appeasement.
The judgment sparked a political controversy with chief minister Mamata Banerjee saying she won’t accept the ruling, and Union home minister Amit Shah accusing the Bengal government of appeasement.
Around 500,000 people’s fate will be decided after the verdict. The court barred the state from appointing people from these communities with immediate effect but said those appointed so far on the basis of OBC certificates will not be touched.
A division bench consisting of justices Tapabrata Chakraborty and Rajasekhar Mant said that it is of the view that the selection of 77 classes of Muslims as Backward is an affront to the Muslim community as a whole. This court’s mind is not free from doubt that the said community has been treated as a commodity for political ends.
The bench added, “Identification of the classes in the aid community as OBCs for electoral gains would leave them at the mercy of the concerned political establishment and may defeat and deny other rights. Such reservation is therefore also an affront to Democracy and the Constitution of India as a whole.”
As of now the West Bengal allocates 17% of its reservations to OBCs, split into two categories: OBC A, which accounts for 10% and includes 81 communities (56 of which are Muslim), and OBC B, which makes up 7% and encompasses 99 communities (41 of which are Muslim).
Muslims play a significant role in the 17 Lok Sabha seats that will be contested in the sixth and seventh phases of the general elections in West Bengal. The Trinamool Congress (TMC) currently holds 12 of these seats, while the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) holds seven.
The court also invalidated key sections of the 2012 law that subclassified the OBC pool. Of the 77 communities designated for OBC status by the Left Front government in 2010, 42 were earmarked, with 41 being Muslim. In 2012, the TMC government included another 35 communities, 34 of which were Muslim, through a notification issued on May 11, 2012.
This ruling is a clear setback for the TMC, which relies heavily on Muslim support and under whose governance the reservation benefits were implemented. Md Yahiya, Chairman of the West Bengal Imams Association, criticized the verdict, questioning why similar scrutiny is not applied to reservations for scheduled castes and tribes.
The court stated that the state authorities violated constitutional provisions by practicing protective discrimination without adequate data to justify the subclassifications. It mandated the backward classes welfare department and the backward classes commission to report to the legislature with recommendations on including or excluding communities in the OBC list.
The ruling responded to petitions filed between 2010 and 2020, alleging that since the TMC’s rise to power in 2011, many communities received OBC reservations without an evaluation of their economic status.
The court noted that in 2010, the Left Front government, led by Buddhadeb Bhattacharya, introduced a 10% reservation in state jobs for “economically, socially, and educationally backward” Muslims under the OBC-A category, based on recommendations from the National Commission for Religious and Linguistic Minorities. This reservation policy was continued and expanded by the TMC after it came to power in 2011.
West Bengal’s Muslim population was 27.01% in the 2011 census and is estimated to have increased to around 30%. Despite the court’s ruling, Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee asserted her commitment to maintaining the OBC reservation system and expressed intent to challenge the decision in a higher court.
BJP leader Amit Shah, addressing rallies in Bengal, criticized the OBC reservations as measures to appease Muslims.
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