The Lotus and the Mandal pond

class="keywordtourl" href="https://indianexpress.com/about/bjp/" class="">BJP has played its caste card carefully. It had tried to do this in the other major Hindi-belt states too. Among those who joined the party fairly recently were Nagamani, now a Union minister of state, former Union minister Jai Narain Nishad and Lok Sabha MP, Sushdeo Paswan, from Bihar. All of them had earlier contested and won as Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) candidates. In other words, the BJP is also trying to form a separate OBC/Dalit front in Bihar too.

In Rajasthan, it played a different hand. Here, one should first try and understand why the Ashok Gehlot government lost in Rajasthan. Surveys conducted by important agencies predicted that, given his clean image, he could cause great trouble for the BJP. The results, however, belied this assumption. Despite being an OBC leader with a clean image, Gehlot was defeated. The answer as to why this happened could lie in a question: Why in Rajasthan alone did the BJP launch a movement for reservations for the upper castes in government jobs? It may be recalled that Gehlot had a resolution passed for it and had demanded the Union government to amend the Constitution to this effect. The BJP followed this up by fielding a royal against Gehlot in feudal-minded Rajasthan. The Congress, in contrast, made a backward caste leader, the chief minister of Rajasthan, but did not encourage the OBCs to look upon him as their leader. Instead it attempted to push reservations for the upper castes through him.

Now look how the BJP played its politics in Madhya Pradesh. Digvijay Singh, as the state’s chief minister, had attempted to enlarge the reservation fold for the backward castes to cover up to 27 per cent of them. The BJP decided to take him on by making Uma Bharati — an OBC — their chief ministerial candidate. The party realised that in MP, the backward castes and Dalits had acquired a growing political presence but were still without a leadership they could claim as their own. The Congress shied away from bringing OBC leaders like Subhash Yadav and Yamuna Devi to the forefront and paid the price for it.

In fact, the BJP has always displayed a better understanding of the kind of political challenges it faces in various states. For instance, in Chhattisgarh, it did not announce its chief minister before hand. Later, although 26 of its 50 legislators, were tribal leaders and just nine belonged to the upper castes, it made an upper caste man the state’s chief minister. The BJP knew that, compared to other states, backward caste politics in Chhattisgarh was neither mature enough or aggressive enough to pose a challenge.

But its astuteness may not make things easier this time in Uttar Pradesh. This is because Mulayam Singh Yadav has centred his base on the backward castes, constituting 52 per cent of the state’s votes. He has even adopted an anti-Dalit attitude to consolidate this grouping. It is well known that the Rajnath Singh government had attempted to split the OBC votebank in the state. This was in response to the general impression that most of the benefits of reservation in UP have gone to the Yadavs and that the non-Yadav OBCs could be attracted to the BJP given the right promises.

The fact is that backward caste politics in UP did not evolve through a movement but was a response to the Mandal Commission recommendations. The consolidation could not be sustained for too long. OBC leaders who came into their own — most of whom were Yadavs — concentrated on becoming leaders within their particular caste. This, not surprisingly, alienated the minor and economically weaker backward caste communities, who were then open to aligning themselves with larger parties like the BJP. Rajnath Singh was not, of course, completely successful in his attempt to fracture the backward caste base, as his party’s poor showing in the UP assembly elections of 2002 revealed. However, the attempt to achieve this shows how astutely the BJP has worked out its caste equations.