Bengal announces 10 % job quota for Muslims

Andhra move for 4 % quota turned down by HC.

A move that could yield a shower of votes may just turn to naught. The West Bengal government announced 10 per cent reservation in jobs for socially, educationally and economically backward Muslims under the Other Backward Classes (OBC) category on a day a Constitution bench of the Andhra Pradesh High Court struck down a similar move by the Andhra Pradesh government, which had passed a law, and issued a government order in 2007 providing 4 per cent reservation to 15 groups belonging to the Muslim community.

West Bengal goes to Assembly polls in 2011, and this move comes months before the big event.

Predictably, the BJP crowed at the Andhra Pradesh court order. “The state Congress government has provided reservation to 15 Muslim groups after enrolling the groups in Backward Classes as ‘BC’ ‘E’ group since 2007 which deprived the rights of backward class students, who lost about 14,000 seats in engineering and 800 seats in medical stream,” state BJP chief B Dattatreya said. However, School Education Minister in the Congress government in Andhra Pradesh, D Manikya Vara Prasad, told reporters in Guntur that he would now appeal in the Supreme Court.

He said similar reservations prevailed in Karnataka and Tamil Nadu and it was based on the Ranganathan committee recommendations, he added.

The minister pointed out that conflicts between the higher judiciary and government on social welfare measures were common.

He agreed that the Constitution prohibited discrimination on the basis of religion but added that the Muslim reservation was based on social and economic backwardness.

The West Bengal government has carried out an identical measure and until the appeal is admitted in the Supreme Court, the move will endure.

By its move, the state government has brought into the political arena, a ticklish political issue: who is really the benefactor of the Muslims in West Bengal. The Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee government has also made it politically difficult for both the Congress and the Trinamool Congress to take a stand against the move.

The Rajender Sachar committee report observed that in Marxist-ruled West Bengal, where over 25 per cent of the population are Muslims, the community has only 4.7 per cent of employees in “higher positions” and in the lower categories only 1.8 per cent are Muslims, whereas the national average is 5 per cent. In response, the CPI (M) had said that not affirmative action but socio-economic development was needed to develop the Muslims.