NCBC drops 35 Bengal Muslim castes from Central OBC list, BJP slams Mamata govt’s appeasement politics

Kolkata, Dec 3 The decision of the National Commission for Backward Classes (NCBC) to strike down 35 castes from West Bengal in the central Other Backward Classes list, all from the Muslim community, proves the appeasement politics pursued by the Mamata Banerjee-led Trinamool Congress government in the state, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) said on Wednesday.

The information on the NCBC’s move came through a reply given by Union Minister of State for Social Justice and Empowerment B. L. Verma to an unstarred question raised by Jagannath Sarkar, the BJP’s Lok Sabha member from Ranaghat in Nadia district of West Bengal.

“The National Commission for the Backward Classes has given its advice for the exclusion of 35 castes from the Central List of OBCs for the state of West Bengal on 03.01.2025,” Verma’s reply said.

Reacting to this, the BJP’s Information Technology cell chief and the party’s central observer for West Bengal, Amit Malviya, issued a statement on Wednesday morning saying that the step by the NCBC raised serious questions about the grouping of religious communities under OBC quotas for scoring political gain, which in turn denied genuinely backward Hindu groups their fair share.

“The Modi government is correcting decades of appeasement-led distortions and ensuring real social justice based on backwardness, not vote-bank politics. Mamata Banerjee’s regressive politics have run their course,” Malviya said.

Earlier this month, the Supreme Court deferred the hearing in the West Bengal OBC list case for four weeks and made it clear that the Calcutta High Court should not continue with further proceedings while the matter is before the apex court.

In an interim order issued on June 17 this year, a Division Bench of the Calcutta High Court had directed the West Bengal government not to publish the final notification for the new OBC list till July 31 this year.

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