Why young Muslims from Bengal want the Supreme Court to restore their OBC status

“The High Court judgement hit my job prospects hard,” said Shahanawaz Ali Molla. “After the cancellation of my OBC certificate, I have had to fill exam forms as a general category candidate, in which the competition is stiffer.”

Molla is a 27-year old history graduate from Pathradaha village in Nadia district of West Bengal. The son of a daily wage agricultural labourer, with a family income less than Rs 6,000 a month, he hails from the Muslim Molla community that the West Bengal government included in the state list of Other Backward Classes in 2010.

The inclusion enabled students like him to get access to college seats reserved for OBC applicants. Molla had hoped that it would also help him secure a public sector job, which, like millions of other young people across the country, he sees as a path towards economic security.

But his hopes came crashing down in May when the Calcutta High Court cancelled the Other Backward Class categorisation of 77 communities, most of them Muslim, including Molla’s. This rendered over 5 lakh OBC certificates, like the one with Molla, void.

The West Bengal government challenged the judgement in the Supreme Court, which refused to stay it last month. As a result, the 77 communities are no longer listed in the OBC category in the online application forms for public sector jobs.

Even the results of several exams that Molla had appeared for as an OBC candidate, before the High Court ruling in May, are stuck because public agencies are awaiting clarification from the government about the status of reservation for candidates from these 77 communities.

Instead of waiting in despair, Molla decided to join the legal fight. He has filed an application in the Supreme Court seeking permission to intervene in the appeal being heard by the apex court against the High Court’s verdict.

Millions left in lurch

Molla has filed the application along with Wasim Akram Mondal, a 26-year old from the Pukhuria village in Nadia. Mondal is from the Muslim Mondal community, which was also notified as an Other Backward Class in 2010.

The Muslim Molla and Muslim Mondal communities were among 56 communities subsequently placed in a sub-category labelled OBC-A, designated as “more backward”, alongside 52 communities placed in the sub-group called OBC-B, designated as “backward” on September 24, 2010. Within the 17% OBC quota in the state, OBC-A would get 10% and OBC-B was entitled to 7%.

This categorisation has also been done away with by the High Court judgement.

Like Molla, Mondal too is the son of an agricultural labourer. His family’s monthly income varies between Rs 4,000 and 5,000 and the value of the total assets owned by them is under Rs 1 lakh.

Mondal was the first person in his family to matriculate and finish schooling. He graduated from an open university and has since been preparing for recruitment exams for the posts of constable and clerk, besides other Group D posts – which are entry level, non-technical, support roles in government bodies.

“There are thousands in my village and my community who have been adversely affected by the High Court judgement,” Mondal told Scroll. “Our OBC certificates are useless now.”

Community leaders of the affected Muslim OBCs had been considering legal action to overturn the High Court ruling and reached out to lawyers in Delhi. Their counsel suggested that those affected directly by the High Court verdict apply as intervenors.

As the community leaders began looking for youngsters who would be willing to get involved, they eventually narrowed down on Molla and Mondal.

“People in our family and community get scared when they hear about getting involved in court affairs,” said Molla. “But I am educated so I understand my rights and that the Supreme Court will help us.”

Mondal asserted: “We are not doing anything wrong.”

In their intervention applications, Molla and Mondal have requested that they be allowed to make submissions before the Supreme Court. This is because the High Court had not heard anyone from the denotified OBCs before cancelling their OBC status.

“We also don’t have too much faith in the state government counsel,” activist Md Pasarul Alam told Scroll. Alam, based in North Dinajpur, is a political and social activist who is leading the advocacy efforts for the Muslim communities affected by the High Court judgement. “They argued before the High Court mainly on procedural grounds and did not bring up any empirical evidence or reports about our backward status.”

Alam said, “It is best that we represent our interests on our own before the court.”

The intervention applications were listed for September 9 but the case did not come up for hearing. The matter is now likely to be listed on September 30, as per the Supreme Court website.

High Court judgement

The High Court’s ruling was based on three planks: that the government’s OBC classification orders in 2010 and 2012 suffered from procedural impropriety, were not based on objective data and instead incorrectly relied on the religious identity of the notified communities. Many legal experts, however, found these arguments unconvincing.

The High Court held that the West Bengal Commission for Backward Classes was not adequately consulted and that the notification orders were rushed, possibly for political reasons. But experts pointed out that the classification of each of the 77 communities as backward was based on recommendations by the commission, and that making political imputations about legislative or executive actions is beyond the court’s remit.

The court ruled that the surveying just 5% of the population, without holding public hearings, compromised the credibility of the data and reflected hastiness. Experts, however, said that even the BP Mandal-led Socially and Educationally Backward Classes Commission, whose findings were used to grant Other Backward Class reservation across the country, surveyed the representative sample of only a few villages. Such a strict standard was not applied to the classification of non-Muslim groups as backward.

The High Court also noted that religion cannot be the sole criterion to identify backward classes, as backwardness must be established on social, economic and educational grounds. However, as Molla and Mondal’s applications argue, their communities were recognised as backward based on social and educational factors, not just religion.

The High Court judgement came out in the midst of the Lok Sabha election in May. Both Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Union Home Minister Amit Shah used it to stoke fears that the Opposition INDIA bloc, if voted to power, would take away reservation benefits from Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and Other Backward Classes, and hand them over to Muslims. This ignored the fact that backward Muslim communities have OBC reservation in 14 states and Union Territories, several of which are ruled by the Bharatiya Janata Party and its National Democratic Alliance.

Scholars have long pointed out that a majority of Indian Muslims are converts from Dalit communities. Such Muslim communities have been recognised as backward by both the Mandal Commission and the National Commission for Backward Classes.

Reality of backwardness

About 30% of the population of West Bengal is Muslim. The socio-economic backwardness of a large proportion of this population has been well-documented even outside the findings of the West Bengal Backward Classes Commission.

The Census Report of the Bengal province, published in 1902, stated that the social stratification within the Muslim community resembled the Hindu caste system in terms of division, graded inequality and orthodox caste customs enforced through caste-based governing committees and rural police committees.

The Census reports of 1931 and 1951 repeat the observation of caste-based stratification among Muslims in Bengal.

Most recently, a 2014 study by three nonprofits highlighted the dire socioeconomic conditions of Muslims in West Bengal with abysmally low indicators in criteria such as the availability of infrastructure, electricity, drinking water, irrigation, health, education, employment and other basic amenities.

Alam, the Muslim OBC activist from Bengal, said that it had been falsely claimed that only Muslim groups were given OBC status after 2010 and that they were given religion-based reservation. “Only socially and economically backward and politically deprived communities among Muslims are listed as OBCs,” he said.

He said that the vast majority of Muslims in Bengal are socio-economically backward. “That is why in spite of making up 30% of the population, Muslims hold only a tiny percentage of government jobs.” State government data from 2016 showed that 5.7% of government employees in the state were Muslim.

Alam also pointed out that the OBC reservation in West Bengal is 17%, which is lower than the 27% set aside for the category in every other state. “In some places, this figure is higher than that,” he said. “Therefore, this is a concern for the entire OBC community in Bengal: why is it being deprived of over 10% reservation?”