Kolkata, Dec 17 (IANS) The West Bengal unit of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on Wednesday approached a single-judge bench of the Calcutta High Court seeking the court’s intervention to restrict the use of Other Backward Class (OBC) certificates issued by the West Bengal government after 2010 -- which were earlier scrapped by the High Court -- as supporting documents during the second stage of the three-stage Special Intensive Revision (SIR) exercise in the state.
The single-judge bench of Justice Krishna Rao admitted the petition. The matter is expected to come up for hearing before Justice Rao’s bench later this week.
Counsel for the petitioner pointed out that on May 22 last year, a division bench of the Calcutta High Court comprising Justice Tapabrata Chakraborty and Justice Rajasekhar Mantha scrapped all OBC certificates issued by the West Bengal government after 2010. While scrapping those certificates, the division bench had also ruled that they should not be allowed to be used for any purpose in the future.
Hence, the petitioner’s counsel argued that such cancelled OBC certificates should not be used as documents of identity proof during the second stage of the three-stage SIR exercise in the state.
The Election Commission of India (ECI) had already released the draft voters’ list in West Bengal on Tuesday. The process of hearing claims and objections on the draft voters’ list is scheduled to begin next week, and this process will involve verification of identity documents.
The ECI has specified 13 documents as acceptable documentary evidence of identity. These include Scheduled Caste, Scheduled Tribe and OBC certificates. In this context, the West Bengal unit of the BJP has approached the Calcutta High Court with a plea to stop the use of the cancelled OBC certificates as identity documents in the SIR exercise.
At the time this report was filed, there was no reaction from either the Trinamool Congress or the state government on the matter.
--IANS
src/pgh