Centre’s neglect has cost states right to notify OBC list: Congress

The Narendra Modi government’s “negligence and lack of care” have resulted in a “blunder” while legislating the National OBC Commission, jeopardising the right of states to notify their own list of Other Backward Classes (OBCs), the Congress said on Saturday.

Demanding immediate amendments to correct the flawed legislation, Congress MP and lawyer Abhishek Singhvi said the Modi regime had committed a mistake by “not adding a clarification” in the 2018 legislation to protect States' rights - “despite repeated words of caution by Opposition MPs” - resulting in recent Supreme Court judgements that have hurt the States’ rights to notify the OBC list.

This flawed legislation, he said, had resulted in “an assault on Federalism.”


Singhvi said instead of admitting the mistake, the BJP and the Centre “are now trying to divert the focus” by indulging in “comic self-congratulating back slaps” for the PM and the Centre. “For what these comic self-congratulatory shows are meant for? For denying the States’ their right to notify OBC list!”

Referring to the day in Parliament in August 2018 when the Modi government got the Constitutional amendment passed with support of the Opposition to create the Commission, Singhvi said: “The Opposition speakers in the Parliamentary debate had repeatedly asked the government to make sure that by chance, by inadvertence, by mistake and by oversight it does not happen that the established power of the States to recommend names for inclusion, to make their own State’s list should not go. The funny part was then minister Thaawarchand Gehlot and several BJP MPs including Bhupendra Yadav all said the intention was not to take away the States’ rights. Yet, that is precisely what has happened”.

Singhvi further said, “In your (Centre) obstinacy, negligence, lack of attention to detail, you did not add a two-line clarification that the creation of a National Commission does not mean the States will not have a list of closure and exclusion at the state. Now, unfortunately, your blunder is costing the country dear.”

He added that the creation of the National OBC Commission has been interpreted by the Supreme Court in recent judgments “by saying absent ‘the clarification’ the State can only recommend but there will be only one list, the Central list. Is it not a very serious assault on the fundamentals of Federalism?”