Clarifying that his government has not brought any new changes in the OBC reservation matrix, Chief Minister Siddaramaiah on Thursday said that Muslim reservation in the OBC reservation matrix has been there since the 1970s.
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In the courts
“Muslims have been part of backward class reservation since the L.G. Havanur Commission Report in 1974. The current Karnataka government has not made any changes to the backward class reservations. The previous government had taken away the 4% BC reservation under category 2B to Muslims and the matter has been pending in the Supreme Court, with the previous Basavaraj Bommai government giving an undertaking that it would not implement the changes during the pendency of the case in the Supreme Court,” he said in a note issued here. He was responding to the statement of the National Commission of Backward Classes, which has said that it would summon the Chief Secretary over an alleged “overrepresentation” of Muslims in the postgraduate medical admission during 2021-2022 and 2022-2023.
‘Politically motivated’
The Chief Minister said: “When the matter stands thus, the NCBC in a politically motivated move has issued a press note on an issue that does not concern it. The law is clear that the State governments have the power to determine their own list of castes and communities to be categorised as backward classes. The NCBC has no role in it.”
He said that the NCBC note is “motivated” to create confusion in the State when it is going for election. “It gives the impression that the Congress government of Karnataka has given a new reservation to Muslims. This is a blatant lie. The fact remains that the BC reservation of Muslims has been in existence since March 3, 1977 and it has withstood legal scrutiny.” Successive backward class commissions, namely, Havanur, Venkataswamy, Chinnappa Reddy, and Ravi Verma Kumar, have recognised Muslims subject to income ceiling as backward class, and that this has been the position of law, he added.
Meanwhile, the former chairperson of the Karnataka Backward Classes Commission C.S. Dwarakanath said in a release that historically, various commissions, from the pre-Independence Miller Commission, have recognised Muslims as “backward classes” in Karnataka. “Notably, Muslims, along with other religious minorities like Christians, Jains, Buddhists, and Sikhs, are included in the list of backward classes.” It is “unacceptable that the chairman of the NCBC appeared unprepared and uninformed about reservation matters,” he said.
