Kolkata: West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, while addressing the Assembly on the second day of the monsoon session on Tuesday, accused the opposition BJP of ‘unnecessarily’ making controversies over the new list of Other Backward Class (OBC) communities prepared by the state government following a directive from the Supreme Court.
Accusing the BJP of unnecessarily politicising the issue, the Chief Minister said that religion has no connection with the fresh survey on determining the people to be included in the OBC category.
“There are 49 castes in the OBC-A category, while there are 91 castes in the OBC-B category. Shortly, 50 more castes will be included. The survey is based on economic backwardness. The survey has not been conducted on the basis of religion,” the Chief Minister said in the House.
However, the BJP legislators protested, claiming that the Chief Minister was providing misleading information. They demanded that the Leader of Opposition (LoP) in the state Assembly, Suvendu Adhikari, should also be allowed to present his views in reply to the comments from the Chief Minister.
Since the Speaker of the House, Biman Bandopadhyay, refused to give that chance to the LoP, the BJP legislators staged the walkout.
Adhikari said that the BJP’s counsel will present their views on this issue during the next hearing on the matter at the Supreme Court.
To recall, in May last year, a division bench of the Calcutta High Court cancelled all the OBC certificates issued in West Bengal after 2010, which ideally meant that all such certificates issued during the current Trinamool Congress regime in the state since 2011 stood cancelled.
Following this order from the division bench of Justice Tapabrata Chakraborty and Justice Rajasekhar Mantha, over 5,00,000 OBC certificates issued during that period stood cancelled and could not be used for enjoying the reservation quota for jobs.
The West Bengal government moved the Supreme Court on the Calcutta High Court order, and in March this year, the apex court allowed the state government to conduct a fresh survey to identify the OBCs in the state.
The fresh survey started. However, since the beginning of the survey, the BJP has questioned the style and format of conducting the fresh survey by the state government.
Adhikari claimed that the state government’s fresh survey was being conducted in the same manner, which did not hold ground in the court and was scrapped by the Calcutta High Court.
(IANS)
