KOLKATA: Amid the Supreme Court’s ongoing hearings on issues concerning Muslim communities included in West Bengal’s State OBC lists, the National Commission for Backward Classes (NCBC) has recommended that the Union government remove 35 communities, predominantly Muslim, from the State’s Central OBC list.
NCBC Strikes down 35 Castes from West Bengal in Central OBC List – All of them Muslim
The NCBC has removed 35 castes from the Central OBC List and every single one of them belongs to the Muslim community.
This raises serious questions about the policy of clubbing religious… pic.twitter.com/L4TZcwqHIj
— Amit Malviya (@amitmalviya) December 3, 2025
“This recommendation follows the NCBC’s ongoing review of West Bengal’s OBC list, prompted by the large number of Muslim communities included. Most of the 35 communities proposed for exclusion are Muslim, with one or two possibly being non-Muslim,” said Hansraj Gangaram Ahir, who chaired the panel that made the recommendation. West Bengal is just months away from its next Assembly election.
Ahir, whose term as NCBC chairperson concluded on December 1, spoke to sources after the Social Justice Ministry informed Parliament this week that the Commission had submitted its recommendation to the government to remove 35 communities from West Bengal’s Central OBC list. He, however, declined to name the specific communities, stating, “That is a matter for the government to decide.”
The recommendation to exclude these communities comes months after the NCBC began examining 37 communities listed in West Bengal’s Central OBC list in 2014, just before the Lok Sabha elections. Of these, 35 were Muslim communities. When asked in the Lok Sabha about the NCBC’s review of these communities, the Social Justice Ministry stated on December 2, 2025, that 35 communities had been recommended for removal from the state’s Central OBC list.
The government noted that the NCBC submitted its recommendation on the exclusions in January this year. Under the rules governing the inclusion and exclusion of communities from Central OBC lists, any recommendation must be signed by the Chairperson, Vice-Chairperson, and all Members of the Commission. However, at the time the recommendation was submitted, the NCBC had only a Chairperson and one Member, with no Vice-Chairperson in place.
According to the 102nd Constitution Amendment Act, once the NCBC’s advice is received, the government must present any changes to the Central OBC lists in Parliament, after which the President can notify the revised lists. Government sources said that the Social Justice Ministry currently holds NCBC recommendations for inclusion and exclusion in the Central OBC lists of nine states.
Since taking charge in December 2022, Ahir has steered the NCBC’s focus toward reviewing OBC lists in states including West Bengal, Karnataka, and Kerala. The process began with a field visit to West Bengal in February 2023, after which Ahir highlighted the “high number of Muslim communities” in the state’s OBC lists.
The Commission’s scrutiny of OBC lists in Opposition-ruled states like West Bengal and Karnataka later became part of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) political narrative, suggesting that Opposition parties had been appeasing Muslim voters ahead of the 2024 Lok Sabha elections.
On December 3, 2025, BJP leader Amit Malviya shared the Social Justice Ministry’s response on social media, claiming that all 35 communities recommended for exclusion were Muslim, and criticised Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee for her government’s “regressive politics.” Malviya asserted that the Narendra Modi-led central government was “correcting decades of appeasement-driven distortions and ensuring true social justice based on backwardness, not vote-bank politics.”
