Climbing to power, quota by quota

NEW DELHI: No matter how hard the anti-quota protesters tried, they could not have stalled Wednesday’s decision to enforce a 27.5 per cent reservation for the OBCs in central educational institutes from next year. On the face of it, the push seems to have come from caste parties like the RJD, DMK, PMK and JD (U), backed by the Left. The truth is that neither the Congress nor the BJP had the will to oppose it.

Ever since VP Singh rolled out the Mandal juggernaut in 1990, the entire political class has been sucked into the caste conundrum. It’s unleashed a new brand of politics with reservations emerging as the cutting edge of OBC empowerment. In the bitter fight for social, political and economic hegemony, there is little place for the merit argument or talk of affirmative action, not when quotas can be used to short circuit the system.

There may be a logic to the caste politics of the smaller parties that have used reservations as a tool to power their way to the high table. In Tamil Nadu, the Dravidian parties wielded it successfully to oust the Brahmin-dominated Congress several decades ago. In north India, parties like the SP and BSP in UP and the RJD and JD(U) in Bihar are slowly but surely edging out the Congress and BJP.

The capitulation of the two premier national parties to reservation politics has to be seen through the north Indian prism. Both are aggressively wooing the non-Yadav smaller backward castes and the Dalits in an effort to recapture the Hindi heartland. “Over the past 16 years, OBC and Dalit parties have emerged as a major force in north India and they are dictating national politics,” explained Congress MP Madhu Yashki, a member of the OBC MPs Forum. “The Congress and the BJP are now realising the potential of OBC and Dalit politics.”

The effect is telling. Today, in sheer numbers, the BJP actually has the largest number of OBC, SC and ST MPs in Parliament. Of its 132 MPs in the Lok Sabha, as many as 57 belong to these groups. That’s more than one-third. And while its national leadership may be dominated by upper castes, its state level leaders in the Hindi belt are largely OBCs, whether it’s Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chauhan, BJP’s deputy CM in Bihar Sushil Modi, Vinay Katiyar or Kalyan Singh in UP.

“No party can escape the political logic of numbers in a democracy,” JD(U) leader Sharad Yadav said. “We are the majority. There’s no Lok Sabha seat in India where OBCs and SCs are not present. Upper caste parties like the BJP have to accommodate us.”

It’s a similar story in the Congress. The numbers are smaller than the BJP’s, but even the Congress has some 20 OBC MPs (out of 150 MPs) in the Lok Sabha and 15 (out of 71) in the Rajya Sabha. It also actively supports two parliamentary forums, one for the OBCs and another for the SCs and STs. In fact, both are headed by Congress MPs. With reservations forming the backbone of backward caste politics, indeed of SC/ST politics as well in the era of Mayawati and Ram Vilas Paswan, the silence of the Congress and BJP needs no explanation. Both have failed to come up with a strategy to beat the Mandal effect. The BJP succeeded briefly, when Hindutva captured the imagination of the non-Yadav backward castes in the early nineties and helped the party make the great leap forward in national politics. It’s floundering now after being burnt by the communal fires the philosophy lit.

As the battle for UP hots up with state assembly elections due early next year, the caste question is likely to increasingly dominate political discourse. It was probably with this in mind that neither the Congress nor the BJP made any effort to stop the quota decision.

Ironically, VP Singh, who unleashed Mandal, never benefitted politically from his decision. The dividends were reaped by Lalu Yadav, Mulayam Singh Yadav and later Mayawati who emerged as a Dalit counter to the Yadav-driven backward caste politics. It remains to be seen what the Congress gains from the gamble it has taken with Wednesday’s decision.