Opinion | NCBC’s Bengal Recommendation Exposes A Decade Of TMC’s Entrenched Appeasement Politics |
On 2 December, the Central government revealed a development that has shaken West Bengal’s political landscape: the National Commission for Backward Classes (NCBC) has recommended the withdrawal of 35 communities, most of them Muslim, from the Central OBC list in the state. The disclosure, made in the Lok Sabha by the Ministry of Social Justice & Empowerment, is not a sudden or isolated event. Rather, it is the culmination of a decade-long saga of blatant procedural violations, religiously motivated policymaking, and systemic misuse of constitutional provisions under the Trinamool Congress (TMC) government.
The NCBC reviewed 37 communities that were added to the Central OBC list in 2014 out of 46 originally proposed by the West Bengal government in 2011 and found that 35 lacked the necessary criteria for being classified as “backward".
The panel’s recommendation, submitted in January 2025, came after the West Bengal Chief Secretary failed to appear for five scheduled hearings in 2024. This absence was not merely an administrative lapse but a telling display of the TMC’s habitual disregard for due process whenever it comes to furthering its Muslim vote-bank strategy.
A Long Record Of Procedural Violations By The TMC
The TMC’s attempts to force Muslim communities into the OBC category are neither accidental nor disguised. For years, the party has treated constitutional institutions as inconveniences to be bypassed rather than bodies to be respected. This attitude was most visibly condemned by the Calcutta High Court on 22 May 2024, when it struck down OBC certificates issued to 77 groups between 2010 and 2012, calling out the rampant illegality behind their inclusion.
The court found glaring lapses in the methodology of the West Bengal Backward Classes Commission, which had surveyed merely 5 per cent of the population belonging to the enlisted communities—an egregious violation of the........