Calcutta HC Cancels 5L Muslim OBC Certificates. Can Mamata Take Advantage?

West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee at United India Rally. 

(Photo Courtesy: Twitter/@AITCofficia)

It is strange how nobody is talking about the immediate fallout of the Calcutta High Court’s decision to cancel an estimated half a million Other Backward Classes (OBC) certificates — issued mostly to Muslims — by the Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee-led Trinamool Congress government in West Bengal since 2012 and the preceding Left Front regime.

While Mamata has announced from the rooftop that she will not “accept” the order passed by Justices Tapabrata Chakraborty and Rajasekhar Mantha and will appeal to the Supreme Court to get the decision revoked, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah lost no time in welcoming the judgment and heaping praise on the justices for striking down Mamata’s policy of “snatching reservation meant for Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, and OBCs and giving it to Muslims for their votes.”

While Bharatiya Janata Party and Trinamool Congress leaders trade charges amid calls to haul them up before the court for contempt, the Calcutta High Court’s order passed last week will lead to a windfall gain for the TMC this week in the last round of polling on 1 June — in as many as nine Lok Sabha seats —  an aspect strangely nobody is talking about.

How Mamata Can Capitalise Electorally

Without a doubt, Mamata has got the upper hand electorally by smartly branding it as a “BJP order”, as opposed to a High Court order. Come Saturday, thanks to Mamata’s stand, the Muslim community is bound to vote emphatically for TMC candidates and in far greater numbers than they would have if such an order had not been passed bang in the middle of the elections.

As it is, North and South Kolkata, Diamond Harbour, Jadavpur, Dum Dum, Barasat, Bashirhat, Joynagar, and Mathurapur constituencies have a high to very high percentage of Muslim voters. Now, even those Muslims who were veering towards the Congress Party, Communist Party of India (Marxist) or Indian Secular Front candidates, will vote en masse for Mamata’s candidates as she has taken up cudgels for the beleaguered community, brightening the TMC’s overall prospects in Bengal – a state the BJP is desperate to win despite Muslims accounting for 27 percent of the population.

Importantly, among Trinamool candidates who will romp home by bigger margins in the wake of the contentious High Court order, is Abhishek Banerjee, Mamata’s heir-apparent and second-in-command. He is a contestant in the Diamond Harbour parliamentary seat at Kolkata’s doorstep where Muslims, comprising 38 percent, play a big role in deciding the winner. He has been scathing in his criticism of the verdict that Modi and Shah are praising to the skies in their election speeches for dealing a blow to Mamata’s Muslim “appeasement” policy.

The infirmities of the order scrapping the OBC status of 77 caste groups, out of which 75 are Muslims, have been brilliantly spotlighted by legal scholar Faizan Mustafa. Mustafa points out that one of the four grounds cited by the two judges for cancelling the certificates is that the West Bengal government chose the Muslim castes for conferring OBC status through executive orders and not through the legislative process.

But the reasoning flies in the face of the Supreme Court laying down in the Indra Sawhney case that reservation can indeed be provided by executive order. Moreover, the Constitution has empowered the President of India to include any caste or tribe within the SC or ST under Articles 341 and 342 in consultation with the Governor, which means that there are other pathways to reservation besides the legislative route.

Mustafa also bluntly refutes Calcutta High Court judges’ controversial contention that Muslim castes were included in backward classes on grounds of religion, arguing that they were given reservations not due to their religion but their backwardness. Advocating that Muslims get the same privileges as their non-Muslim counterparts, he rightly asks why the “appeasement” tag is deployed only in cases of reservation for clearly backward Muslim castes or Pasmanda Muslims — and not when Patidar, Gujjar, Jat, Marathas and Economically Weaker Section reservations are announced.

This is not the Only Reason Why Calcutta HC Has Hit the Headlines

If Mamata has publicly called last week’s order “kalankit”, or tainted, one can’t help but wonder whether she made the remark due to what is happening of late in the Calcutta High Court.

Justice Rajasekhar Mantha, who delivered the verdict with Justice Tapabrata Chakraborty, has been in the gunsights of some members of the Bar Association since last year for giving blanket protection to BJP leader Suvendu Adhikari by issuing written orders to the West Bengal police not to register any FIR against him.

More recently, Justice Abhijit Ganguly took premature retirement and is in the electoral fray from the Tamluk seat as a BJP candidate after endlessly gunning for Abhishek and Mamata from the bench.

And to make matters worse, days before last week’s order, retiring Judge Chitta Ranjan Das, disclosed at his farewell that, “I was, and I am, a member of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangha (RSS)”. The trio haven't exactly covered themselves with glory. Given this backdrop, the order scrapping five lakh OBC certificates issued mostly to Muslims was bound to raise a stink.

(SNM Abdi is a distinguished journalist and ex-Deputy Editor of Outlook. This is an opinion article and the views expressed are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)