By cancelling all Other Backward Classes (OBC) certificates issued by the West Bengal government after 2010, the Calcutta High Court has struck at the darkest instincts of appeasement of not just the Mamata Banerjee government but of Indian polity in general. Remember, the Left was still in power in 2010 in Bengal, when the legislation was created.
Nakedly soliciting Muslim votes by misusing the OBC quota is not unique to West Bengal. Karnataka and many other states have been brazenly doing it.
Taking advantage of the ambiguity in the Constitution in defining ‘Backward Classes’ and bending the guarantee under Article 15.1 that the State shall not discriminate on the basis of religion, race, caste, or gender, Muslims were brought under the OBC quota by the PV Narasimha Rao government. The Sachar Committee report was used as groundwork for the abomination.
The Rao government was in overcompensation mode since the fall of the Babri masjid, bringing in a slew of constitutional blunders like the Places of Worship Act, the suicidal new Waqf Act, and the OBC lollipop for Muslims.
All this not only robbed the share of the genuinely backward, but also brazenly incentivised conversions to Islam and demographic change, placing Bharat’s destiny on a doomed path.
Why should Muslims, the 200-million strong second largest religious group in India with a global Ummah of nearly two billion, eat into the share of OBCs?
That is precisely what the Calcutta High Court ruling questions by cancelling all OBC certificates issued during the tenure of the Trinamool Congress administration led by Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee since 2011. The Bench struck down many parts of the West Bengal Backward Classes (Other than Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes) (Reservation of Vacancies in Services and Posts) Act, 2012.
But the most remarkable part of the judgment by the division bench of Justice Tapabrata Chakraborty and Justice Rajasekhar Mantha was the blunt wording.
“This court’s mind is not free from doubt that the said community has been treated as a commodity for political ends. This is clear from the chain of events that led to the classification of the 77 Classes as OBCs and their inclusion to be treated as a vote bank. Identification of the classes in the said community as OBCs for electoral gains would leave them at the mercy of the concerned political establishment and may defeat and deny other rights,” it noted.
The court observed that the decision of the State was an affront to the Muslim community as it was being treated purely as a vote bank.
The National Commission for Backward Castes had discovered that 118 of 179 groups in the Bengal OBC list were Muslims! In the Most Backward Class category, of 81 communities 73 are Muslim and only eight are Hindu. Of the 98 communities in Category B, 45 are Muslim and the rest Hindu.
The state’s Muslim population in 2011 was 27 per cent. How can one-fourth of the population snatch three-fourths of OBC benefits?
Besides, NCBC chairperson Hansraj Gangaram Ahir found that illegal immigrants from Bangladesh and Myanmar’s Rohingya had made their way into the beneficiaries list. He said state officials initially claimed that these were Hindus who had later converted to Islam. Asked for proof, they slinked away.
Earlier, a Constitution bench of the Supreme Court under CJI YK Sabharwal had stated that the concerned State will have to “show in each case the existence of the compelling reasons, namely, backwardness, inadequacy of representation and overall administrative efficiency before making provision for reservation…the State has to collect quantifiable data showing backwardness of the class and inadequacy of representation of that class in public employment in addition to compliance of Article 335.”
The Calcutta High Court has gone as far as calling the practice of arbitrarily giving Muslims a slice of the OBC quota a fraud on the Constitution.
“The State has reserved to itself, an uncanalised power of picking and choosing at its convenience as to when it would or would not consult the Commission for the purpose of identification of the backward classes for the purpose of reservation,” said the judgment.
The Court said that by arrogating to itself the power to ignore the NCBC “at its own sweet will whim and fancy”, the state is guilty of “fraudulent legislative power and consequently a fraud on Constitutional power under Article 16 (4) of the Constitution.”
The biggest confirmation of the court’s concerns came from Mamata Banerjee herself right after the judgment. She publicly declared that she would not abide by the order.
Abhijit Majumder is a senior journalist. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect News18’s views.
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