Muslim quota under OBC tag to be reviewed: Minister
The Bharatiya Janata Party-led state government will soon review the reservation given to 14 Muslim communities under the Other Backward Castes (OBCs) category in the state between 1997 and 2013, the social justice and empowerment minister Avinash Gehlot said on Saturday.
Speaking to the reporters in Jaipur, Gehlot said, “The Congress government granted those reservations to those 14 Muslim communities under the OBC category between 1997 and 2013 based on their appeasement politics. BR Ambedkar, in his Constitution, said that nobody can grant a reservation to a particular community based on their religion. We have all those circulars and therefore we will review it.”
The development came amid the ongoing Lok Sabha elections when the BJP has been pushing the poll agenda against the opposition stating that “they provided reservation to the Muslims unlawfully by scrapping the deserving portion of the Scheduled Caste (SC), Scheduled Tribe (ST), and other OBCs.”
Meanwhile, the Calcutta high court on Wednesday also cancelled the Other Backward Castes certificates of 77 communities in West Bengal since 2010
— of which 75 were Muslim communities, according to a division bench presided over by justice Tapabrata Chakraborty and justice Rajasekhar Mantha.
Citing illegitimacy in the classification process of those communities under the Other Backward Castes category by the West Bengal government, the court order also stated: “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 an affront to democracy and the Constitution of India as a whole.”
Responding to the development, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, during a poll rally in
Delhi’s Dwarka on the same day, called the Calcutta HC verdict a “tight slap” to the chief minister Mamata Banerjee-led Trinamool Congress (TMC) government in West Bengal.
“Just today, the Calcutta high court has given a big slap to the INDIA bloc. The court has cancelled all OBC certificates issued since 2010. Why? Because the West Bengal government issued unwarranted OBC certificates to Muslims to increase their vote bank. They have crossed every limit in their obsession with appeasement,” the PM said during the rally.
Later, while speaking to reporters on Thursday, Union home minister Amit Shah, also said, “The Banerjee-led government in West Bengal granted OBC reservation to around 118 Muslim communities without following any proper process and conducting a proper survey to identify the backward classes. People went to the court and taking cognizance of the matter, the HC had scrapped those certificates issued between 2010 to 2024. I welcome the verdict. She (CM Banerjee) wants to give reservation to the Muslims instead of the deserving OBCs only to keep her vote bank intact.”
Meanwhile, addressing the issue during another rally in Lucknow on Thursday, Rajasthan CM Bhajan Lal Sharma, also said that “the verdict had put an end to Banerjee’s appeasement politics as our constitution doesn’t permit such religionbased reservation.”
Days after the development, the SJED minister Gehlot, on Thursday, claimed that the department has received a slew of complaints over such “religion-based reservation” from the public in the last few months. “It’s high time to review those complaints. A high-level committee will be formed to verify them,” Gehlot said.
At present, Rajasthan has 64% reservation – of which 21% is granted for OBCs, 16% for SCs, 12% for STs, 10% for Economically Weaker Sections (EWS) and 5% for Most Backward Classes (MBC), an official aware of the matter said.
According to the Rajasthan SJED website, a total of 82 communities fall under the OBC category in Rajasthan – of which around 29 are Muslim communities.
Reacting on the matter, Congress spokesperson Swarnim Chaturvedi said, “This is nothing but a politically motivated decision. It was the BJP government which approved this reservation between 1997 and 2013 to those Muslim communities under OBC categories. Later, our government just followed it as per the recommendations of the Mandal Commission report 1990.”