The new Bharatiya Janata Party government in West Bengal announced on Monday that it would scrap the state’s list of Other Backward Classes and reduce the OBC reservations of jobs in educational institutions and government jobs from 17% to 7%. The decision was made in keeping with a Calcutta High Court judgement from May 2024, minister Agnimitra Paul said at a news conference.The move in effect reverts the state’s list of OBCs to its composition in 2010, nullifying the OBC status of as many as 76 caste groups. Most of those adversely affected by this development are Muslims.Monday’s announcement came days after the state government said it would re-verify about 48 lakh OBC certificates issued in the 15 years during which the Trinamool Congress was in power. The two decisions dismantle OBC reservations as Bengal has known them in recent years.This is in line with one of the BJP’s long-held criticisms of former chief minister Mamata Banerjee. The Hindutva party alleges that Banerjee’s OBC reservation policy was aimed at what it calls the appeasement of Muslims, and not the upliftment of genuinely backward groups. But Bengali Muslim academics worry that the sweeping changes will undo the little upward mobility that their otherwise marginalised community has experienced of late.A brief historyThe trajectory of OBC politics in Bengal differs dramatically from the Hindi belt. While OBC groups in those parts had become entitled to a 27% quota in government jobs after 1990, the eastern state had capped reservations for them at just 7% till as late as 2010.The Left government, which ruled Bengal between 1977 and 2011, had granted OBC status to only 66 castes even as the lists of such castes in other states swelled. The number of Muslim castes among those that Kolkata recognised as backward was merely 12.Critics put this down to the Left’s historical aversion to caste politics and its avowed commitment to class-based mobilisation.However, Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, the last communist to serve as the chief minister of Bengal, tried to change this, albeit belatedly. Faced with rising anti-incumbency, particularly among Muslims who made up about a fourth of the state’s population then, Bhattacharjee revised his OBC reservation policy.File photo of the late Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee. Credit: Dibyangshu Sarkar/AFPIn a span of a few months, his government added dozens of new castes to Bengal’s OBC list and increased the quota to 17%. Of this, 10% was earmarked for the “Most Backward” caste groups. Muslims constituted the bulk of this category, which was christened OBC-A in bureaucratic parlance. The remaining 7% of the quota came to be known as OBC-B.But the last-minute move failed to stop Mamata Banerjee from unseating the Left and becoming chief minister in the 2011 Assembly elections. Though she differed with the Left on most issues, her government continued with the same OBC reservation policy and recognised more Muslim castes as backward. In fact, the Trinamool would often boast that it had granted OBC status to over 90% of the state’s Muslims.More SIRs to comeThis markedly Muslim tilt in Bengal’s OBC politics is what the BJP takes exception to.“Those who are actually OBCs did not get any benefit,” alleged Debjit Sarkar, the party’s chief spokesperson in the state. “Every aspect of governance in Bengal needs an SIR [special intensive revision]. Everything needs to be investigated deeply.”Sarkar echoed what Agnimitra Paul, Bengal’s new minister for women and child development and social welfare, had told reporters on Monday. “We will set up a new inquiry,” she had promised.The minister was presumably referring to fresh surveys that the West Bengal Commission for Backward Classes will conduct to identify backward caste groups. In May 2024, when the Calcutta High Court had first scrapped the changes made to the state’s OBC list since 2010, it was this body that had come under the spotlight.“The commission has been reduced to a handmaiden or a compulsively obedient pet,” the court had observed then. “It appears that the primary and sole consideration for the commission had been to make religion-specific recommendations.”