SC Stays Calcutta HC Order Pausing New OBC List in Bengal

NEW DELHI:
The Supreme Court on Monday stayed a Calcutta High Court order that had paused the publication of the new Other Backward Class (OBC) list in West Bengal.

A Bench led by Chief Justice of India (CJI) B.R. Gavai termed the impugned Calcutta High Court order both “surprising” and “prima facie erroneous”.

The Bench, also comprising Justices K Vinod Chandran and N.V. Anjaria, disagreed with the Calcutta HC’s view that the West Bengal government ought to have taken the state Assembly’s approval before introducing the new OBC list.

“How can the Calcutta High Court pass a stay like this? Reservation is part of the Executive functions. This is the settled law right from the Indira Sawhney (judgment) that the Executive can do it. Executive instructions are enough for providing reservations and legislation is not necessary,” remarked the apex court.

After parties urged the top court to decide the matter itself, the CJI Gavai-led Bench issued a notice on the West Bengal government’s Special Leave Petition and listed the case for hearing after two weeks.

“Issue notice. In the meantime, there shall be a stay to the impugned order (of the Calcutta HC),” the Supreme Court said.

In an interim order passed on June 17, a Division Bench of the Calcutta High Court had asked the West Bengal 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 Mamata 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 interim order passed on June 17, the Justice Chakraborty-headed Bench issued a stay on the issuance of the final notification for a revised OBC list in West Bengal till July 31.