The West Bengal government’s decision to cut Other Backward Classes (OBC) reservation to seven per cent even as it enacted a new law to determine who qualifies for such benefits has raised questions over whether it has put the cart before the horse.
The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government said the twin bills passed by the Assembly merely implement the 2024 Calcutta High Court judgment that struck down the inclusion of several OBC communities by the previous Trinamool Congress (TMC) government for lack of adequate empirical backing.
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The amended law requires the West Bengal Commission for Backward Classes to conduct surveys, collect data and examine the social and educational backwardness of communities before recommending additions or deletions to the OBC list.
The government, however, has already restored the pre-2010 OBC list, removed 113 communities and reduced reservation from 17 per cent to seven per cent, even before the survey exercise began.
Rebel TMC MLA criticises govt
Sabina Yasmin, the MLA now aligned with the Ritabrata Banerjee faction of the TMC, flayed the government’s decision to remove communities from the OBC list and reduce reservation without undertaking the fresh survey exercise envisaged under the amended law.
The issue is not merely one of legislative sequencing. It reflects the BJP’s long-standing political position that the previous TMC government had expanded the OBC list to appease Muslim voters.
The new policy reverses that expansion, even though the commission has yet to examine afresh whether many of the excluded communities satisfy the statutory criteria for OBC status.
The rollback has affected communities unevenly. Of the earlier 102 Hindu communities, 48 have been removed, leaving 54 on the revised list, a reduction of 47.1 per cent.
Among Muslim communities, 65 of the earlier 77 sub-groups have been removed, leaving only 12 on the list, a reduction of 84.4 per cent.
The rollback has disproportionately affected Muslim communities, reinforcing the BJP’s long-standing contention that the previous TMC government had expanded the OBC list largely in favour of Muslims.
Govt rejects discrimination charges
The government, however, rejected allegations of religious discrimination, maintaining that it has merely restored the legal position that existed before the additions struck down by the courts and that every community remains free to seek inclusion through the statutory process laid down in the amended law.
The BJP argued it had little alternative as the high court had invalidated the inclusion of a large number of OBC communities under the previous TMC government, ruling that the additions had been made without following the commission’s statutory role. The Supreme Court also declined to stay that judgment.
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State Backward Classes Welfare Minister Gourishankar Ghosh claimed that the amendments merely restore the legal position that existed before while ensuring that any future inclusion takes place only after proper surveys are conducted by the commission.
From the government’s perspective, the rollback is therefore a legal correction rather than a policy choice.
However, the amended law itself envisages a fresh survey and assessment by the commission before communities are added to or removed from the OBC list.
“The government should have allowed that statutory process to conclude before reducing reservation and restoring the earlier list,” said political commentator and author Amal Sarkar.
Bengal’s reservation policy over the decades
The changes mark one of the sharpest reversals in Bengal’s reservation policy in three decades.
The Left Front introduced a five per cent OBC reservation in 1994 before raising it to seven per cent.
In 2010, the then Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee government expanded reservation to 17 per cent after classifying OBCs into two categories.
The subsequent Mamata Banerjee government substantially enlarged the OBC list by adding new communities, many of them Muslim, a process that was later struck down by the courts.
The Suvendu Adhikari government has now rolled the system back to the pre-2010 position.
Another unresolved question concerns those who have already secured government jobs, educational benefits or other entitlements on the basis of OBC status.
While the legislation changes the list prospectively, questions remain over the future position of candidates belonging to communities that have now been excluded, particularly in ongoing recruitment processes.
“It is also unclear whether any administrative issues could arise for those already in government service who had obtained the benefit of reservation before the rollback,” a government employee, who had availed of the quota, said on condition of anonymity.
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According to official sources, the government has already scrapped the existing 100-point reservation roster used in recruitment and directed officials to prepare a fresh roster reflecting the reduced quota.
That creates a transition period in which implementation may prove as contentious as the legislation itself.
This comes at a time when caste enumeration has emerged as one of India’s central political issues.
Across the country, political parties have argued that reservation policy should be guided by updated survey data on social and educational backwardness.
Against that backdrop, Bengal has become one of the few states where reservation has been scaled back before a fresh statutory assessment of backwardness is made based on field surveys and data.
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