The National Commission for Backward Classes has recommended that the Union government remove 35 communities, most of them Muslim, from West Bengal’s Central Other Backward Classes list, The Hindu reported on Wednesday.

The recommendation was confirmed by the Union Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment in Parliament on Tuesday. This followed a review of 37 communities added to the list in 2014, ahead of the Lok Sabha elections, the newspaper reported. Of these, 35 were Muslim communities.

Hansraj Gangaram Ahir, under whose chairmanship the recommendation was made, said that the suggestion followed the commission’s scrutiny of West Bengal’s Central Other Backward Classes list “in light of a high number of Muslim communities being listed” in it.

Ahir, whose tenure as the National Commission for Backward Classes chairperson came to an end on December 1, noted that “most of the communities” identified for exclusion were Muslim. “One or two of them may be non-Muslim communities,” The Hindu quoted him as saying.

He also refused to name the communities, saying it was “a matter for the government to decide”.

The commission’s recommendation must be presented in Parliament under the 102nd Constitutional Amendment, which mandates legislative approval and presidential notification before any changes to the Central Other Backward Classes list can take effect.

However, the Union Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment has not specified when the recommendation will be presented in Parliament for final approval, The Tribune reported.

Bharatiya Janata Party social media cell chief Amit Malviya on Wednesday criticised the West Bengal government’s classification, alleging that it was a “policy of clubbing religious groups into OBC quotas for political gain, while depriving genuinely backward Hindu communities of their rightful share”.

He claimed that the Union government was “correcting decades of appeasement-driven distortions and ensuring true social justice based on backwardness, not vote-bank politics”.

The recommendation made by the commission comes amid the Supreme Court hearing a petition against an order of the Calcutta High Court quashing the classification of 77 communities, a majority of them Muslim, under the state Other Backward Classes category.

In May 2024, the High Court cancelled all Other Backward Classes certificates issued in West Bengal after 2010, saying that “religion indeed appears to have been the sole criterion” for granting the status to the 77 communities.

The High Court’s decision was expected to affect nearly five lakh certificates.

In May, the state government told the Supreme Court that it would conduct a fresh survey to identify Other Backward Classes in West Bengal within three months.

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