Mandal second, 30 years on

(Illustration by C R Sasikumar)

Thirty years in the past, the then prime minister, V P Singh carried out the Mandal Fee report, initiating what I’ve referred to as a “silent revolution”. It triggered a socio-political course of that resulted in some social emancipation and the rise to political energy of plebeians on the expense of the higher and dominant castes.

The Mandal second was primarily political, even when what was at stake was the extension of optimistic discrimination via a 27 per cent quota for the OBCs within the civil service. The higher castes immediately mobilised to stop a reform that may curb their public sector job alternatives, which was precious previous to the financial liberalisation of 1991. Their resistance aroused indignation among the many decrease castes and resulted in a consolidation of OBC teams. Many OBCs stopped voting for upper-caste notables and most popular to elect representatives from their very own social milieu to Parliament.

Within the Hindi belt, the proportion of OBC MPs practically doubled from 11 per cent in 1984 to greater than 20 per cent within the 1990s, whereas the proportion of upper-caste MPs dropped from 47 per cent in 1984 to under 40 within the 1990s. By 2004, upper-caste presence within the Lok Sabha had fallen to 33 per cent, whereas 25 per cent of MPs had been OBCs. This turnaround was thanks initially to the Janata Dal, and later, to its regional offshoots, together with the Samajwadi Get together in UP and the Rashtriya Janata Dal in Bihar.

Although the Janata Dal disintegrated within the early 1990s, it didn’t have an effect on the dynamics of democratisation the celebration had set in movement. First, all events, together with the Congress, had been pressured to area a number of OBC candidates having realised that they may not depend on outdated clientelist mechanisms to get upper-caste notables elected. The OBCs constituted over half of the inhabitants and the brand new “OBC vote” couldn’t be ignored. Second, new public insurance policies designed for the OBCs had been carried out not solely by the events representing them, but additionally by the Congress. When it returned to energy in 2004, the Congress set a quota of 27 per cent for OBCs in public universities. This resolution, referred to as Mandal II, as soon as once more provoked the ire of the higher castes. So what’s left of the “Mandal second”, politically and socially, now?

This “silent revolution” introduced on a counter-revolution, a revenge of the elite whose vanguard has been the BJP. The BJP’s Hindu nationalism had the benefit of transcending caste identities within the identify of Hindu unity and its combat towards the risk from Islam. This backlash culminated in 2014, when the Hindutva model of national-populism gained traction with some OBCs due to the alchemy achieved by Narendra Modi — for the primary time, the chief of the BJP was a pure product of the RSS who belonged to an OBC caste. As Modi offered himself as a self-made man, a former chaiwallah, and didn’t defend optimistic discrimination, he was the right antidote to Mandal for the middle-class higher castes. By taking the BJP to its first electoral triumph, Modi additionally allowed higher castes to consolidate their place within the Lok Sabha on the expense of the OBCs. In 2014, the proportion of MPs from the higher castes rose to 44.5 per cent, on a par with its illustration within the 1980s, whereas the share of OBC MPs dropped to 20 per cent, in accordance with the database SPINPER (Social Profile of India’s Nationwide and Provincial Elected Representatives) constructed by Ashoka College and CNRS-Sciences Po.

Modi didn’t appeal to OBC voters solely primarily based on his plebeian background and Hindutva. He additionally submerged caste politics within the identify of improvement and sophistication. He offered himself because the defender of the “neo middle-class” that had come into being within the 2000s owing to the rise of OBCs who had benefited from the Mandal quotas and financial progress. Younger OBCs had been migrating from the village as a result of attraction of jobs. Even when such jobs had been unstable and badly paid, they normally enabled these former rural inhabitants to enhance their dwelling circumstances. Modi’s neo middle-class discourse was class-based however had no affinity with socialism. Quite the opposite, as a substitute of asking for extra equality and redistribution, it made advantage the primary criterion of social justice, a repertoire that had turn out to be step by step hegemonic after the1991 reform however which the UPA authorities balanced with some socio-democratic insurance policies (together with Mandal II).

If Modi sealed the destiny of quota politics, the “Mandal second” was over a few years earlier. OBC politics has been a sufferer of the success of OBC insurance policies in two methods. A saturation level was reached when the Centre and states launched the 27 per cent OBC quota and the judiciary refused to permit the entire quantity of reservation to transcend 49 per cent. Events representing the OBCs may no extra say, “vote for me, you’ll get extra reservations”.

Second, some jatis inside the OBC spectrum benefitted extra from the reservations than others. The Yadavs are a working example. We will infer from the Indian Human Improvement Survey that they’ve cornered extra reservations than others. In UP, 14.5 per cent of the Yadavs occupied a salaried job in 2011-12 (the final spherical of the survey) towards 5.eight per cent for the Kurmis, 5.7 per cent for the Telis, 6.7 per cent for the Kushwahas, 3.5 per cent for the Lodhs.

The Yadavisation of UP and Bihar, through the rule of the SP and RJD respectively, has divided the OBCs. Some jatis had been alienated, to such an extent that they began to not vote together with the Yadavs. In Bihar, Kurmis adopted Nitish Kumar and created a separate celebration as early as 1994. In UP, the BJP was shrewd sufficient to appoint candidates from non-Yadav jatis in an effort to consolidate a non-Yadav OBC vote by capitalising on the resentment of those castes vis-à-vis the Yadavs. This technique was apparent within the 2019 elections when poor OBCs voted extra for the BJP than for the BSP-SP alliance regardless of the elitist picture of the previous — 59 per cent of the “poor” OBCs supported the BJP, towards 33.5 per cent who turned to the BSP-SP alliance.

The explanation why the “wealthy” and “center” class OBCs voted extra for the BSP-SP alliance than the “poor” OBCs turns into clear the second the jatis are factored in: The SP stays a Yadav celebration to a big extent and Yadavs are typically richer than Gadariyas, Kushwahas, Telis and Lodhis, who resent Yadav domination and the best way the latter has cornered a big proportion of the reservations. The unity drawback affecting the OBCs is much like the one confronting the Dalits in UP — the non-Jatav SCs resent the socio-economic rise of the Jatavs and distance themselves from the BSP, which is seen as a Jatav celebration. Lots of the non-Jatav SCs vote for the BJP now. This push issue, nonetheless, is strengthened, within the case of the decrease OBCs in addition to the decrease SCs, by a pull issue. By supporting the Hindutva forces, these jatis additionally attempt to sanskritise themselves and be accepted by the Hindu “excessive custom”.

So, is it “sport over” for Mandal politics? Not essentially, given the truth that if quotas have been granted to OBCs they aren’t fulfilled. In 2015, OBCs represented solely 12 per cent of Class A workers within the central authorities providers, 12.5 per cent of Class B and 19 per cent of Class C employees — which meant 18 per cent of the entire workforce, nearly 10 proportion factors lower than what that they had been promised in 1990. It’s a deficit OBCs could contemplate value preventing for.

The author is senior analysis fellow at CERI-Sciences Po/CNRS, Paris, professor of Indian Politics and Sociology at King’s India Institute, London, and non-resident scholar on the Carnegie Endowment for Worldwide Peace

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