Supreme Court Stays Calcutta HC Order Pausing West Bengal's Attempts to Notify New OBC List
The high court's order passed last month is 'surprising' and 'prima facie erroneous', the top court has been quoted as saying.
New Delhi: The Supreme Court has put on hold a Calcutta high court order staying the West Bengal government's attempts to notify a new list of OBC communities, finding the lower court's reasoning 'surprising' and 'prima facie erroneous'.
A bench of the Supreme Court comprising Chief Justice B.R. Gavai as well as Justices K. Vinod Chandran and N.V. Anjaria on Monday (July 28) passed an interim order staying the Calcutta high court's judgment passed last month.
'Reservation is part of the executive functions. This is the settled law right from Indra Sawhney; the position is that the executive can do it … legislation is not necessary,' the bench, which called the high court's order 'surprising', said per LiveLaw.
It was also quoted as saying that the high court's reasoning was 'erroneous' at first glance.
A copy of the apex court's interim order in the matter is awaited.
The high court on June 17 had stayed the West Bengal government's attempts to notify a new list of OBC communities, finding that it had on the face of it 'proceeded in hot haste' to try and bring back the same communities and quotas that the court had struck down in May last year.
Justices Rajasekhar Mantha and Tapabrata Chakraborty of the high court added that the government had done so 'by executive orders and not in exercise of state's legislative functions'.
The government ought to have placed the relevant reports before the legislature 'for amendment and introduction of classes in the schedule' of the West Bengal Backward Classes Act, 2012, the high court had said, which LiveLaw cited Justice Gavai as disagreeing with on Monday.
Last week too the chief justice while listing the case for hearing had indicated that the executive can indeed classify communities for reservation as has been the case since the top court's Indra Sawhney judgment of 1992, which among other things upheld quotas for OBCs.
West Bengal's Trinamool Congress-led government decided to prepare a new list of OBC communities after the Calcutta high court in May last year struck down lakhs of OBC certificates it had issued since 2010.
In that judgment the high court, which had also struck down some sections of the 2012 Backward Classes Act, said that the government's decision to notify 77 Muslim communities as backward amounted to an 'affront to the Muslim community as a whole'.
'This court's mind is not free from doubt that the said community has been treated as a commodity for political ends … Such reservation is therefore also an affront to democracy and the Constitution of India as a whole,' the bench comprising Justices Mantha and Chakraborty had ruled.
The state government challenged this judgment in the Supreme Court and ultimately withdrew it. It later challenged the high court's June 17, 2025 judgment in the top court.
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