In contrast to the Modi government's affidavit episode, the Bihar parties which are part of the INDIA alliance have spoken of how the caste survey can change politics for the better.
Ahead of the third meet of the Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance – INDIA – at Mumbai on August 31 and September 1, Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar has said that the caste survey in Bihar has been completed.
“Its data is being compiled. It will be published soon,” Nitish said.
His remarks coincided with the Narendra Modi government filing two successive affidavits in the Supreme Court with regard to its stand about the caste survey in Bihar. The Union government, in paragraph five of its first affidavit on Monday, August 28, said, “Only the Centre can conduct a census or any action akin to census”.
Hours later, it purged this remark in another affidavit, saying that the paragraph had “inadvertently crept in” and, as such it had no objection against the caste survey in Bihar.
The Union government’s action has sparked a massive row with INDIA leaders – mainly those of the Rashtriya Janata Dal and Janata Dal (United) – hitting out at Prime Minister Modi and the Bharatiya Janata Party. The opposition leaders accused the government of continuously conspiring against the interests of Dalits and backward classes of the country.
“The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh-BJP represents the forces that have perpetrated atrocities on the poor for centuries and are still doing it. The poor people have understood Modi’s machinations now. They are determined to drive Modi out of power in 2024”, the RJD supremo Lalu Prasad Yadav told this writer ahead of leaving for Mumbai.
“The Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) is playing every trick in its bag to impede the caste survey in Bihar. I appeal to him to correct his anti-poor mindset”, the RJD’s national spokesman Manoj Jha said.
Bihar deputy CM Tejashwi Yadav said, “The BJP’s conspiracy has been exposed. It’s utterly scared now”.
Also read: Congress’s Push for Caste Census Is a Step Towards Ideological Unity in Opposition Ranks
BJP’s worries
Apart from Hindutva and its continuous hate campaign against minorities, what has benefitted the BJP at the elections most, particularly 2014 onwards, is the shift of the major chunk of the backward classes and Dalits votes to it in the Hindi heartland comprising Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Bihar.
The implementation of the Mandal Commission report in the 1990s led the regional parties – Samajwadi Party in Uttar Pradesh and Janata Dal in Bihar – to have complete sway over the Other Backward Classes or OBC voters who broadly constituted about 60% of the votes in these regions.
However, these regional parties in Bihar and UP suffered multiple splits and the BJP eventually got many of these splinter groups in its fold. The Hindutva party’s work was relatively easy in Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan because these states did not have strong regional parties and the BJP was locked in direct contest with the Congress, which did not play OBC politics.
In addition to that, the RSS cadres worked meticulously at the ground level to incorporate the non-Yadav OBCs and non-Jatav Dalits in Uttar Pradesh in the Hindutva fold. In Bihar, RSS’s comparative lack of success notwithstanding, the BJP was indirectly benefited by the extremely backward classes (EBCs) and Dalits voting for the JD(U), with which it was in an alliance.
The statistics gathered by a CSDS survey suggests that only 17 % of OBCs had voted for BJP in 1996 Lok Sabha elections. The figures largely remained the same in the 2004 and 2009 elections. However, the BJP got 43% of the OBC votes in the 2014 elections. The Hindutva party’s OBCs vote share further swelled with 48% of them voting for it in 2019 polls.
In fact, perhaps recognising the importance of OBCs votes for his party, the PM announced the Vishwakarma Yojna in his Independence Day address, his last ahead of the 2024 polls. The scheme involves giving financial and technological help to ironsmiths, wood workers, goldsmiths and others engaged in leather and aluminium-related occupations in rural India.
Also read: The Point Is That There Is Not Enough Social Justice, Not That There Is Too Much
Caste survey
In such a backdrop, the caste survey acts as a tool for Nitish Kumar to take on the BJP’s clout among OBCs and bring them back to the fold of the regional parties in the Hindi heartland.
“The caste survey in Bihar is going to prove a watershed in the history of India. All the states must adopt it. The Centre should have carried out the caste census in 2021 itself, but it delayed it. Now the time has lapsed,” the Bihar CM said ahead of the INDIA meet at Mumbai.
Nitish’s dumping of the BJP and joining the grand alliance in August 2022 paved the way for the caste survey in the state with the RJD and his deputy Tejashwi supporting it. The survey is also putting pressure on the Union government to carry out caste census at the national level. It has also led to Nitish cementing his proximity with the Samajwadi Party under Akhilesh Yadav. Yadav has suffered heavily on account of losing his non-Yadav OBC votes to the BJP in his state.
The RSS-BJP is known to have caste Hindus – Brahmins and Banias (business communities) – at the core of its socio-political base. The RSS invariably has had Chitpavans – a sub-caste of the Brahmins – heading it ever since its formation in 1925. The upper crust of the BJP too is layered with caste Hindus.
“The BJP’s work for the backwards and marginalised sections is only peripheral and cosmetic in nature. The Samajwadi Party is highly appreciative of the caste survey in Bihar and has continuously been demanding the Union government conduct a caste census at the national level too,” the senior Samajwadi Party leader and professor at Lucknow University, Sudhir Panwar, said.
The BJP, ostensibly, had supported Nitish when he had moved the resolution for the caste survey in the Bihar legislature. The party also supported the alliance parties’ representatives in their meeting with the PM to demand a caste census early last year.
But the party got jittery when the Nitish government set in motion the process. Outwardly, BJP leaders kept speaking in favour of the caste survey but the saffron cadres led a covert operation to ensure it did not happen.
The Hindu Sena, Akhilesh Kumar and others were among seven groups and individuals – all directly or indirectly associated with the RSS – who challenged the caste survey in the Patna high court on the ground that it would “imperil the unity and integrity” of India. The Patna HC initially put an interim stay on the survey but later allowed it.
These RSS cadres and sympathisers then challenged the HC’s order in the Supreme Court. The PMO was, apparently, exposed when the Solicitor General of India Tushar Mehta questioned the caste survey in Bihar on August 21 and said that the government would file an affidavit to that effect in the SC.
The government did file the affidavit but dithered on it. Clearly, the BJP is in a state of confusion on a sensitive issue that might dominate the discourse of 2024 elections.
https://thewire.in/caste/modi-caste-census-bihar-nitish-tejashwi-india
With the Opposition firmly casting its lot in favour of a caste census, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) had already been pushed into a corner. Now, with the numbers and data coming in, allowing people to project what the situation in the rest of the country might be, as regards the ‘Backward-Forward’ cleavage, there are implications on politics and imagination.
An account of caste by cold numbers emerging threatens the BJP’s manifesto for 2024.
1. Historically, whether Gandhi in Champaran, Jaiprakash Narayan in Sitab Diara or Lalu Prasad in Phulwaria, Bihar has been seen to lead from the front when it comes to crafting a political opposition with national consequences. The Bihar government’s steady plod pushing through a caste census, at a time when the Modi government is unable to even hold the routine decadal census, let alone a caste census, sends out a clear political signal that it can be done at an all-India level. Odisha and Jharkhand’s socio-economic caste ‘surveys’ are ongoing. BJP will be harder pressed to explain why it cannot be done nationally.
2. The Hindu ‘majority’ argument takes a beating as this quantifies a sense of the real majority that exists. Sanatan Dharma is being pitched as a key weapon to attack the Opposition after Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) leader Udhayanidhi’s comments on it. Modi himself has led the attack. But this will be busted by the data. To the extent that Sanatan Dharma is seen to be about maintaining caste hierarchies eternally (Sanatan). OBC + SC + ST = 84% of the population, said the Opposition as it did the math may force the BJP to rethink that route. A keen awareness of the massive caste divide fostered by caste numbers, as opposed to a Hindu-Muslim one, which the BJP would like to impose as the only one, spells trouble for the BJP.
Also read: Bihar’s Much-Awaited Caste Census Puts OBC-EBC Groups at Politically Dominant 63%
3. The Modi government went ahead in 2019 with the controversial 10% Economically Weaker Section reservations. The judiciary helped and waived off the 50% ceiling for it. With the so-called ‘General’ (saamanya, read ‘upper castes’) category now getting revealed to be a mere 15.52%, and if extrapolated all-India, it is a tough call to defend why OBCs should be content with a relatively low percentage of the pie, so disproportionate to their share in population while the ‘General’ get to have their cake? Essentially, who will defend, 10% for 15.2%, but only 27% for 63.13% of the population, which is what 36.01% (Extreme Backward Castes) + 27.12% (OBCs) adds up to.
4. In the past decade, the support for the BJP among OBCs has seen a sharp rise. To hold onto that is key to any hopes it may have of coming back to power in May 2024. Already nervous about the Opposition pivoting to turning into a wide network of OBCs, that too ‘non-dominant’ OBCs as chief ministers and in the state leadership (Siddaramaiah, M.K. Stalin, Pinarayi Vijayan, Bhupesh Baghel and Ashok Gehlot, to name just the chief ministers), and with numbers now revealing the disparity between who has real power and who does not, keeping the 44% of the OBCs who voted for the BJP in 2019 onside could prove to be a challenge.
Last week, Rajasthan chief minister, Ashok Gehlot in very striking remarks put his caste identity as a ‘non-dominant’ OBC in Rajasthan out upfront as he called for a “mali or gardener model of good governance,” where all kinds of flowers and flora flourish. Rahul Gandhi has re-emphasised, that of the 90 secretaries to the government of India, only three are OBCs. Being the sole OBC party, which the BJP has been keen to project itself becomes hard to prove once data on disparity is out.
5. The BJP has always called for ‘samrasta’ or harmonious stability and not ‘samajik nyay’ or social justice, with its pitch to OBCs and Dalits being one of accommodation, but within the Hindutva framework. Such a stark contrast between numbers and where they stand in their share in power challenges ‘accommodation’. A call for justice becomes hard to bottle up.
6. The BJP had led from the front this year, calling for nixing reservation for Muslims, trying to whip up communal divides by making it ‘Muslim versus all else’, and arguing till as far as the Supreme Court to justify why reservation for Muslim backwards needed to be nixed. The Supreme Court Bench asked tough questions which led the former Basavaraj Bommai government in Karnataka to freeze its policy.
In Telangana, on April 24, home minister Amit Shah openly pitched for scrapping any quota for Muslim backwards calling it “unconstitutional”. But with cold numbers emerging on where the divides and disparities are, it would be tough to argue that Muslims are creaming off benefits meant for others. The BJP cannot be faulted for not trying. BJP MP Sanjay Jaiswal is quoted by BBC Hindi as saying that the “rightful due of Backwards has been cut into by Lalu and Nitish including Kulhadiya and Shershahbadi, upper caste Muslims amongst Backwards”. But Jaiswal hastened to add that it was the BJP’s finance minister in the state who allocated Rs 500 crore for the caste census in the state.
Also read: Why Is the Modi Regime So Worried About The Caste Survey in Bihar?
7. The BJP had been hurt badly in 2015 by Rashtriya Syawamsevak Sangh (RSS) chief Mohan Bhagwat expressing his feelings about reservation in an interview to Organiser and Panchjanya. This time, he has gone out of his way to say that the RSS is okay with caste reservations for as long as is necessary. But the fact remains that caste sits very uneasily in the Sangh’s scheme of things. The divisions pointing to inequity and rank discrimination are not merely one of many faultlines in India but an essential feature of social and political life in the sub-continent. A caste census with numbers of socio-economic status makes the numbers hard to ignore, wish away or divert from.
8. Memories of the Mandal Commission in the 1990s (which recommended 27% reservation for OBCs in employment) and how it put the kamandal (call for Hindufication) on the back foot, forcing the BJP to rework its strategy spring to mind. There are two reports now under review by the BJP, the Rohini Commission looking at the central OBC list which has submitted its report and UP’s committee, a four-member social justice committee headed by retired Allahabad high court judge Justice Raghvendra Kumar to examine a division of the OBC quota appointed by chief minister Adityanath in May 2018 waiting to be adopted or acted upon. Both called for ‘sub-categorisation’ amongst OBCs.
The BJP’s ideological predecessor, the Jana Sangh, vociferously opposed ‘sub-categorisation’ when Karpoori Thakur in Bihar, E.M.S. Namboodripad in Kerala, Karnataka’s Devraj Urs and others went ahead and introduced it. It is prevalent in 11 states at present. The BJP, as a smart tactic, may have wanted to consider this in 2017-18, to take down the ‘dominant’ OBC castes. But now, with the political scenario changing dramatically after its re-election in 2019, and of the BJP’s total votes, 48.9% coming from across almost all OBCs, including so-called ‘dominant castes’, would it risk rocking its boat by ‘sub-categorisation’?
9. The BJP’s strategy, and a successful one so far, has been to divide OBCs as a category. It woos numerically smaller OBCs, but separately, to prevent a sense of a consolidated OBC group or Backward-Forward divide emerging. When such a divide emerged in 2015 in Bihar’s Assembly Election when Lalu and Nitish first came together, it led to the BJP shrinking to merely 53 seats in the Bihar Assembly and down to party number 3.
The emergence of numbers after a census is a significant move and will cause a disruption. It is worth watching out for it to unfold, going into 2024.
https://thewire.in/politics/nine-reasons-why-the-bihar-caste-census-could-shake-up-national-politics
@jamahir @RiazHaq
Ahead of the third meet of the Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance – INDIA – at Mumbai on August 31 and September 1, Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar has said that the caste survey in Bihar has been completed.
“Its data is being compiled. It will be published soon,” Nitish said.
His remarks coincided with the Narendra Modi government filing two successive affidavits in the Supreme Court with regard to its stand about the caste survey in Bihar. The Union government, in paragraph five of its first affidavit on Monday, August 28, said, “Only the Centre can conduct a census or any action akin to census”.
Hours later, it purged this remark in another affidavit, saying that the paragraph had “inadvertently crept in” and, as such it had no objection against the caste survey in Bihar.
The Union government’s action has sparked a massive row with INDIA leaders – mainly those of the Rashtriya Janata Dal and Janata Dal (United) – hitting out at Prime Minister Modi and the Bharatiya Janata Party. The opposition leaders accused the government of continuously conspiring against the interests of Dalits and backward classes of the country.
“The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh-BJP represents the forces that have perpetrated atrocities on the poor for centuries and are still doing it. The poor people have understood Modi’s machinations now. They are determined to drive Modi out of power in 2024”, the RJD supremo Lalu Prasad Yadav told this writer ahead of leaving for Mumbai.
“The Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) is playing every trick in its bag to impede the caste survey in Bihar. I appeal to him to correct his anti-poor mindset”, the RJD’s national spokesman Manoj Jha said.
Bihar deputy CM Tejashwi Yadav said, “The BJP’s conspiracy has been exposed. It’s utterly scared now”.
Also read: Congress’s Push for Caste Census Is a Step Towards Ideological Unity in Opposition Ranks
BJP’s worries
Apart from Hindutva and its continuous hate campaign against minorities, what has benefitted the BJP at the elections most, particularly 2014 onwards, is the shift of the major chunk of the backward classes and Dalits votes to it in the Hindi heartland comprising Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Bihar.
The implementation of the Mandal Commission report in the 1990s led the regional parties – Samajwadi Party in Uttar Pradesh and Janata Dal in Bihar – to have complete sway over the Other Backward Classes or OBC voters who broadly constituted about 60% of the votes in these regions.
However, these regional parties in Bihar and UP suffered multiple splits and the BJP eventually got many of these splinter groups in its fold. The Hindutva party’s work was relatively easy in Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan because these states did not have strong regional parties and the BJP was locked in direct contest with the Congress, which did not play OBC politics.
In addition to that, the RSS cadres worked meticulously at the ground level to incorporate the non-Yadav OBCs and non-Jatav Dalits in Uttar Pradesh in the Hindutva fold. In Bihar, RSS’s comparative lack of success notwithstanding, the BJP was indirectly benefited by the extremely backward classes (EBCs) and Dalits voting for the JD(U), with which it was in an alliance.
The statistics gathered by a CSDS survey suggests that only 17 % of OBCs had voted for BJP in 1996 Lok Sabha elections. The figures largely remained the same in the 2004 and 2009 elections. However, the BJP got 43% of the OBC votes in the 2014 elections. The Hindutva party’s OBCs vote share further swelled with 48% of them voting for it in 2019 polls.
In fact, perhaps recognising the importance of OBCs votes for his party, the PM announced the Vishwakarma Yojna in his Independence Day address, his last ahead of the 2024 polls. The scheme involves giving financial and technological help to ironsmiths, wood workers, goldsmiths and others engaged in leather and aluminium-related occupations in rural India.
Also read: The Point Is That There Is Not Enough Social Justice, Not That There Is Too Much
Caste survey
In such a backdrop, the caste survey acts as a tool for Nitish Kumar to take on the BJP’s clout among OBCs and bring them back to the fold of the regional parties in the Hindi heartland.
“The caste survey in Bihar is going to prove a watershed in the history of India. All the states must adopt it. The Centre should have carried out the caste census in 2021 itself, but it delayed it. Now the time has lapsed,” the Bihar CM said ahead of the INDIA meet at Mumbai.
Nitish’s dumping of the BJP and joining the grand alliance in August 2022 paved the way for the caste survey in the state with the RJD and his deputy Tejashwi supporting it. The survey is also putting pressure on the Union government to carry out caste census at the national level. It has also led to Nitish cementing his proximity with the Samajwadi Party under Akhilesh Yadav. Yadav has suffered heavily on account of losing his non-Yadav OBC votes to the BJP in his state.
The RSS-BJP is known to have caste Hindus – Brahmins and Banias (business communities) – at the core of its socio-political base. The RSS invariably has had Chitpavans – a sub-caste of the Brahmins – heading it ever since its formation in 1925. The upper crust of the BJP too is layered with caste Hindus.
“The BJP’s work for the backwards and marginalised sections is only peripheral and cosmetic in nature. The Samajwadi Party is highly appreciative of the caste survey in Bihar and has continuously been demanding the Union government conduct a caste census at the national level too,” the senior Samajwadi Party leader and professor at Lucknow University, Sudhir Panwar, said.
The BJP, ostensibly, had supported Nitish when he had moved the resolution for the caste survey in the Bihar legislature. The party also supported the alliance parties’ representatives in their meeting with the PM to demand a caste census early last year.
But the party got jittery when the Nitish government set in motion the process. Outwardly, BJP leaders kept speaking in favour of the caste survey but the saffron cadres led a covert operation to ensure it did not happen.
The Hindu Sena, Akhilesh Kumar and others were among seven groups and individuals – all directly or indirectly associated with the RSS – who challenged the caste survey in the Patna high court on the ground that it would “imperil the unity and integrity” of India. The Patna HC initially put an interim stay on the survey but later allowed it.
These RSS cadres and sympathisers then challenged the HC’s order in the Supreme Court. The PMO was, apparently, exposed when the Solicitor General of India Tushar Mehta questioned the caste survey in Bihar on August 21 and said that the government would file an affidavit to that effect in the SC.
The government did file the affidavit but dithered on it. Clearly, the BJP is in a state of confusion on a sensitive issue that might dominate the discourse of 2024 elections.
https://thewire.in/caste/modi-caste-census-bihar-nitish-tejashwi-india
Nine Reasons Why Numbers Revealed by Bihar Caste Census Could Shake Up National Politics
The BJP’s argument rests on Hindus accepting their place in the larger Hindutva tent, and the only dividing line to be one of against minorities. Caste numbers emerging could upend all that.With the Opposition firmly casting its lot in favour of a caste census, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) had already been pushed into a corner. Now, with the numbers and data coming in, allowing people to project what the situation in the rest of the country might be, as regards the ‘Backward-Forward’ cleavage, there are implications on politics and imagination.
An account of caste by cold numbers emerging threatens the BJP’s manifesto for 2024.
1. Historically, whether Gandhi in Champaran, Jaiprakash Narayan in Sitab Diara or Lalu Prasad in Phulwaria, Bihar has been seen to lead from the front when it comes to crafting a political opposition with national consequences. The Bihar government’s steady plod pushing through a caste census, at a time when the Modi government is unable to even hold the routine decadal census, let alone a caste census, sends out a clear political signal that it can be done at an all-India level. Odisha and Jharkhand’s socio-economic caste ‘surveys’ are ongoing. BJP will be harder pressed to explain why it cannot be done nationally.
2. The Hindu ‘majority’ argument takes a beating as this quantifies a sense of the real majority that exists. Sanatan Dharma is being pitched as a key weapon to attack the Opposition after Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) leader Udhayanidhi’s comments on it. Modi himself has led the attack. But this will be busted by the data. To the extent that Sanatan Dharma is seen to be about maintaining caste hierarchies eternally (Sanatan). OBC + SC + ST = 84% of the population, said the Opposition as it did the math may force the BJP to rethink that route. A keen awareness of the massive caste divide fostered by caste numbers, as opposed to a Hindu-Muslim one, which the BJP would like to impose as the only one, spells trouble for the BJP.
Also read: Bihar’s Much-Awaited Caste Census Puts OBC-EBC Groups at Politically Dominant 63%
3. The Modi government went ahead in 2019 with the controversial 10% Economically Weaker Section reservations. The judiciary helped and waived off the 50% ceiling for it. With the so-called ‘General’ (saamanya, read ‘upper castes’) category now getting revealed to be a mere 15.52%, and if extrapolated all-India, it is a tough call to defend why OBCs should be content with a relatively low percentage of the pie, so disproportionate to their share in population while the ‘General’ get to have their cake? Essentially, who will defend, 10% for 15.2%, but only 27% for 63.13% of the population, which is what 36.01% (Extreme Backward Castes) + 27.12% (OBCs) adds up to.
4. In the past decade, the support for the BJP among OBCs has seen a sharp rise. To hold onto that is key to any hopes it may have of coming back to power in May 2024. Already nervous about the Opposition pivoting to turning into a wide network of OBCs, that too ‘non-dominant’ OBCs as chief ministers and in the state leadership (Siddaramaiah, M.K. Stalin, Pinarayi Vijayan, Bhupesh Baghel and Ashok Gehlot, to name just the chief ministers), and with numbers now revealing the disparity between who has real power and who does not, keeping the 44% of the OBCs who voted for the BJP in 2019 onside could prove to be a challenge.
Last week, Rajasthan chief minister, Ashok Gehlot in very striking remarks put his caste identity as a ‘non-dominant’ OBC in Rajasthan out upfront as he called for a “mali or gardener model of good governance,” where all kinds of flowers and flora flourish. Rahul Gandhi has re-emphasised, that of the 90 secretaries to the government of India, only three are OBCs. Being the sole OBC party, which the BJP has been keen to project itself becomes hard to prove once data on disparity is out.
5. The BJP has always called for ‘samrasta’ or harmonious stability and not ‘samajik nyay’ or social justice, with its pitch to OBCs and Dalits being one of accommodation, but within the Hindutva framework. Such a stark contrast between numbers and where they stand in their share in power challenges ‘accommodation’. A call for justice becomes hard to bottle up.
6. The BJP had led from the front this year, calling for nixing reservation for Muslims, trying to whip up communal divides by making it ‘Muslim versus all else’, and arguing till as far as the Supreme Court to justify why reservation for Muslim backwards needed to be nixed. The Supreme Court Bench asked tough questions which led the former Basavaraj Bommai government in Karnataka to freeze its policy.
In Telangana, on April 24, home minister Amit Shah openly pitched for scrapping any quota for Muslim backwards calling it “unconstitutional”. But with cold numbers emerging on where the divides and disparities are, it would be tough to argue that Muslims are creaming off benefits meant for others. The BJP cannot be faulted for not trying. BJP MP Sanjay Jaiswal is quoted by BBC Hindi as saying that the “rightful due of Backwards has been cut into by Lalu and Nitish including Kulhadiya and Shershahbadi, upper caste Muslims amongst Backwards”. But Jaiswal hastened to add that it was the BJP’s finance minister in the state who allocated Rs 500 crore for the caste census in the state.
Also read: Why Is the Modi Regime So Worried About The Caste Survey in Bihar?
7. The BJP had been hurt badly in 2015 by Rashtriya Syawamsevak Sangh (RSS) chief Mohan Bhagwat expressing his feelings about reservation in an interview to Organiser and Panchjanya. This time, he has gone out of his way to say that the RSS is okay with caste reservations for as long as is necessary. But the fact remains that caste sits very uneasily in the Sangh’s scheme of things. The divisions pointing to inequity and rank discrimination are not merely one of many faultlines in India but an essential feature of social and political life in the sub-continent. A caste census with numbers of socio-economic status makes the numbers hard to ignore, wish away or divert from.
8. Memories of the Mandal Commission in the 1990s (which recommended 27% reservation for OBCs in employment) and how it put the kamandal (call for Hindufication) on the back foot, forcing the BJP to rework its strategy spring to mind. There are two reports now under review by the BJP, the Rohini Commission looking at the central OBC list which has submitted its report and UP’s committee, a four-member social justice committee headed by retired Allahabad high court judge Justice Raghvendra Kumar to examine a division of the OBC quota appointed by chief minister Adityanath in May 2018 waiting to be adopted or acted upon. Both called for ‘sub-categorisation’ amongst OBCs.
The BJP’s ideological predecessor, the Jana Sangh, vociferously opposed ‘sub-categorisation’ when Karpoori Thakur in Bihar, E.M.S. Namboodripad in Kerala, Karnataka’s Devraj Urs and others went ahead and introduced it. It is prevalent in 11 states at present. The BJP, as a smart tactic, may have wanted to consider this in 2017-18, to take down the ‘dominant’ OBC castes. But now, with the political scenario changing dramatically after its re-election in 2019, and of the BJP’s total votes, 48.9% coming from across almost all OBCs, including so-called ‘dominant castes’, would it risk rocking its boat by ‘sub-categorisation’?
9. The BJP’s strategy, and a successful one so far, has been to divide OBCs as a category. It woos numerically smaller OBCs, but separately, to prevent a sense of a consolidated OBC group or Backward-Forward divide emerging. When such a divide emerged in 2015 in Bihar’s Assembly Election when Lalu and Nitish first came together, it led to the BJP shrinking to merely 53 seats in the Bihar Assembly and down to party number 3.
The emergence of numbers after a census is a significant move and will cause a disruption. It is worth watching out for it to unfold, going into 2024.
https://thewire.in/politics/nine-reasons-why-the-bihar-caste-census-could-shake-up-national-politics
@jamahir @RiazHaq
