SIR in Bengal: Calcutta HC asks ECI to clarify whether OBC certificates issued after 2010 can be used as supporting documents

Posted on by Vividh Bharathi

Kolkata, Dec 24 (IANS) A single-judge bench of the Calcutta High Court, on Wednesday, directed the Election Commission of India (ECI) to clarify Other Backward Class (OBC) certificates issued by the West Bengal government after 2010, which were scrapped earlier by the high court, as supporting documents for the second phase of the three-stage Special Intensive Revision (SIR) in the state.

Last week, the West Bengal unit of Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), approached the Calcutta High Court’s single-judge bench of Justice Krishna Rao seeking court’s intervention in restricting presentation of OBC certificates issued by the state after 2010, as supporting documents during the hearing session on claims and objections on draft voters’ list, which was published on December 16.

The matter came up for hearing on Wednesday, and finally, Justice Rao said that the Commission could only take a decision on whether these OBC certificates would be treated as valid supporting documents or not.

Justice Rao also directed the Commission to present its observation in the matter within the next seven days.

While the petition in the matter was moved at the Calcutta High Court last week, the petitioner’s counsel said that on May 22 last year, the Calcutta High Court’s division bench of Justice Tapabrata Chakraborty and Justice Rajasekhar Mantha scrapped all OBC certificates that were issued by the West Bengal government after 2010.

While scraping those certificates, the division bench also ruled that those certificates should not be allowed to be used for any purpose in the future.

Hence, the petitioner’s counsel had said that such cancelled OBC certificates should not be used as documents of identity proof in the second phase of the three-stage SIR in the state.

The ECI had already released the draft voters’ list in West Bengal on December 16.

Now the process of hearing on claims and objections on the draft voters’ list will start from next week, and that process will involve verification of identity documents.

The ECI had specified 13 documents as documentary evidence of identity proof. These include Scheduled Caste, Scheduled Tribe, and OBC certificates.

The West Bengal BJP unit 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.

–IANS

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