Bengal govt urges SC to urgently hear its plea against interim stay on new OBC list

New Delhi, July 24 The West Bengal government on Thursday urged the Supreme Court to urgently list for hearing its plea challenging the interim stay imposed by the Calcutta High Court on issuing the new Other Backward Class (OBC) list.

Appearing before a bench headed by Chief Justice of India (CJI) B.R. Gavai, senior advocate Kapil Sibal mentioned the matter and sought an urgent hearing on the state government’s plea.

In response, CJI Gavai agreed to list the case on Monday (July 28).

In an interim order passed on June 17, a division bench of the Calcutta HC had asked the state government not to publish the final notification for the new OBC list till July 31 this year.

A bench of Justices Tapabrata Chakraborty and Rajasekhar Mantha prima facie opined that the previous four to five notifications issued by the West Bengal government on the fresh survey to prepare the fresh OBC list were in violation of the apex court orders.

The fresh OBC list was supposed to include 140 communities, and the interim stay was perceived as a major blow to the Mamta Banerjee-led state government.

In its plea filed before the apex court, the state government has argued that if the interim stay imposed by the Calcutta High Court on issuing the final notification for the fresh OBC list prevails till July 31, the process for recruitments under this category, as directed by the apex court earlier, would be stalled.

Earlier in May 2024, the Calcutta High Court had 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.

The West Bengal government had moved the Supreme Court against this, and in March this year, the apex court allowed the state government to conduct a fresh survey to identify the OBCs in the state.

Claiming that the fresh survey process was a blatant example of appeasement politics, a petition was filed before the Calcutta High Court challenging the pattern of the survey. The plea accused the state government of entertaining applications only from those 113 OBC communities that were scrapped by the Calcutta High Court last year. In an order passed on June 17, the Justice Chakraborty-headed bench issued an interim stay on the issuance of the final notification for a revised OBC list in West Bengal till July 31.

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