Saying that it was “constitutionally invalid,” Union Home Minister Amit Shah on Sunday lauded Karnataka’s decision to scrap four per cent reservation for Muslims under 2B Other Backward Classes (OBCs) category.
Shah also slammed the Congress party for introducing the reservation in the first place, and called it “vote bank politics.”
Addressing public gatherings in the state, Shah said that “BJP never believes in appeasement. So, it decided to change the reservation. Therefore we abolished the four per cent reservation given to the minorities and gave two per cent to the Vokkaligas and two per cent to the Lingayats.”
“The reservation for minorities is not Constitutionally valid. There is no provision in the Constitution to give reservation based on religion. This Congress government did it for its appeasement politics and gave reservation to the minorities,” Shah added.
Shah also said that Chief Minister Basavaraj Bommai-led BJP government also tried to do away the injustice to the Scheduled Castes by introducing a new internal reservation.
The entire 2B category was only for the Muslims and the BJP government scrapped it saying that it was not constitutionally tenable and divided the four per cent quota equally among the two dominant communities of the state: Vokkaligas in 2C reservation category and Veerashaiva-Lingayats in 2D reservation category.
With this, 2B became redundant while Vokkaligas’ reservation went up from four per cent to six per cent and Lingayats from five per cent to seven per cent.
With inputs from News18
