Kolkata: Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, on Wednesday, blamed the BJP and the CPI(M) after the Calcutta High Court put an interim stay on the publication of the final notification of West Bengal’s revised Other Backward Classes (OBC) list until July 31.
Speaking to the media persons on Wednesday, the Chief Minister said that both the BJP and CPI(M) were against job reservations for the OBCs.
“This is not the final judgment. We have received a copy of the order, which is being reviewed by our legal team. We had earlier sought three months of time from the Supreme Court to conduct a review and prepare a fresh OBC list. The entire process is being done under the supervision of a corporation for backward classes, which has retired high court judges as members. But all I can say is that both the BJP and CPI(M) are against job reservation for OBCs. This reservation was for people from the backward sections. They want to create hurdles for any positive move of the state government, be it in the sphere of education or the sphere of employment generation,” the Chief Minister said.
Earlier in the day, Trinamool Congress’s state general secretary Kunal Ghosh also said that the fact that the BJP was against OBC reservation in West Bengal was evident from the distribution of sweets by the Leader of the Opposition in the West Bengal Assembly, Suvendu Adhikari, after the Calcutta High Court’s order on Tuesday.
On Tuesday, Calcutta High Court’s division bench of Justice Tapabrata Chakraborty and Justice Rajasekhar Mantha, while putting the interim stay, observed that several notifications issued by the state in connection with the new survey violated the Supreme Court’s directives.
The new OBC list, based on a fresh survey initiated by the state government, was expected to include 140 communities.
The survey followed a commitment made by the West Bengal government to the Supreme Court on March 18, when it challenged an earlier Calcutta High Court order that scrapped all OBC certificates issued in the state since 2010.
The state government had assured the apex court that it would complete a new survey and issue a fresh list within three months.
However, a fresh petition filed in the Calcutta High Court questioned the methodology and scope of the survey, alleging that the state was entertaining applications only from 113 communities whose OBC status was struck down earlier.
Critics, including BJP leaders, have accused the government of disproportionately including members of the Muslim community in the revised list.
To recall, in May 2024, a division bench of the Calcutta High Court had cancelled all OBC certificates issued in West Bengal post-2010, effectively nullifying certificates granted during the Trinamool Congress regime, which began in 2011.
The decision affected over 5 lakh OBC certificate holders, rendering them ineligible for benefits under the reservation quota in government jobs and education.
The state later approached the Supreme Court, which allowed the fresh survey to proceed. However, with the High Court now putting the final notification on hold, the state’s plan to publish a revised OBC list faces another legal roadblock.
