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Calcutta HC grants interim stay on WB's OBC list notification till Jul 31
ANI General News
The Calcutta High Court on Monday gave an interim stay on the West Bengal government's recently issued notifications on the OBC list till July 31.
This order is a big setback for the Mamata government.
A division bench comprising Justice Tapabrata Chakraborty and Justice Raja Sekhar Mantha passed the interim order while hearing petitions challenging the state's classification of communities under the Other Backward Classes (OBC) category.
Judges said that necessary steps should be taken regarding the 66 communities belonging to the OBC category.
In this latest OBC notification there are listed 140 communities. However, OBC certificates issued before 2010 under the 1993 law remain valid for employment and admissions.
The bench warned that the executive cannot bypass legislative procedures, stating that half the process was followed and the rest done unilaterally.
Petitioners claimed the survey was flawed, with limited samples and negligible changes from the earlier list. The state admitted that college admissions and recruitment are stalled due to the case.
During the hearing, Solicitor General Ashok Chakraborty, representing the Centre, pointed out that the National Commission for Backward Classes (NCBC) had sought clarification from the state on how Muslim and OBC classifications were identified.
The NCBC minutes mentioned that several communities had converted from Hinduism to Islam, complicating census data.
Justice Rajasekhar Mantha raised the question to state, saying, "You have done half the work according to the 2012 OBC Act. Then you have gone back to the 1993 Act. Why is this? Why didn't you amend the 2012 Act? You have been providing benefits for the last 15 years. The law says that a survey has to be done after 10 years. That survey has not been done.
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The British government paid for Brotherhood ideologue Yusuf al-Qaradawi to attend a conference in Turkey, and funded two Islamist youth organisations at home, the Federation of Islamic Student Societies and Young Muslim Organisation. This process gathered momentum in the coming years, as the UK concluded that the war in Afghanistan was unwinnable. In 2011, the Foreign Office paid for Taliban leader Abdul Salaam Zaeef to attend a conference in London, and he was then privately hosted for a hunting vacation in Scotland. Leaked diplomatic correspondence reveals, Frampton and Ehud Rosen write, that American authorities were more hawkish in their public statements on the Brotherhood. Simultaneously, they intensified efforts to identify so-called moderates who would reject violence and thus hollow out the jihadist threat from within. The Brotherhood also proved a key ally in the long struggle to dethrone the regime of President Bashar al-Assad in Syria. The Alamoudi case wasn't the only one to show the perils of that path. The prosecution of the Holy Land Foundation—alleged to have channelled millions of dollars to Hamas—threw up disturbing evidence of connivance by linked organisations named as unindicted coconspirators: the Council on American-Islamic Relations and the North American Islamic Trust. The case collapsed in 2007, but documents released during the trial established deep links between these networks and the Brotherhood, Zeyno Baran notes. Across the Middle East, the Brotherhood's significance has appeared to wane, as new jihadist groups like the Islamic State have emerged, and the threat from al-Qaeda to the West has diminished. The ideas of the Brotherhood and its networks, however, continue to provide the bedrock for Islamist movements across the world, holding up a vast and complex system of ideological persuasion and fundraising. Banning the Brotherhood, as well as sister organisations like the Jamaat-e-Islami, won't end terrorism. To misuse the issue to smear Muslim communities as a whole—a real danger under Trump—holds out the threat of alienating millions of believers at least as hostile to terrorism as the rest of their nations. The decision will, however, signal the end of a toxic romance between Islamism and the West, and make clear that ideologies propagating hate and violence cannot be tolerated in democracies. Praveen Swami is contributing editor at ThePrint. His X handle is @praveenswami. Views are personal. (Edited by Prasanna Bachchhav)
