Brahmins score in Cong’s new social math

That the lucky one had to be a Brahmin was a foregone conclusion. The issue under discussion last Saturday was additional qualification and Prasada had the essential requisites—family background, grassroot politician, hard worker and, of course, loyalty to the Nehru-Gandhi family.

Prasada’s induction into the Union Council of Ministers was meant to send yet another message to the Brahmin community in UP—that the party, said to be the original Brahminical organisation, was desperate to win them back, mainly from the BJP.

Only last September, Rita Bahuguna Joshi, daughter of H.N. Bahuguna, had been appointed president of the state Congress unit despite her unproven organisational skills, lack of political stature, and dismal performance as Mahila Congress chief.

Then Pramod Tiwari was re-elected leader of the Congress Legislature Party though AICC general secretary Rahul Gandhi had his reservations about Tiwari’s uninspiring record on this post, according to Congress sources.

But the Congress’s decision to rediscover and project its Brahminical credentials is not limited to UP alone as the grand old party of India seeks to retain and regain its traditional votebank among Dalits that is slipping away to an aggressive BSP under Mayawati.

An overwhelming majority of the PCC chiefs in North India as also in the West come from upper castes—Brahmins in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, and Uttar Pradesh (C.P. Joshi, Suresh Pachauri and Rita Joshi); Kshatriyas/Thakurs in Gujarat, Maharashtra and Himachal Pradesh, (Bharatsinh Solanki, Prabha Rau and Viplove Thakur) and dominant and influential castes in Delhi (J.P. Agrawal) and Punjab (Rajinder Kaur Bhattal).

Though Chhattisgarh PCC chief Charan Das Mahant belongs to the backward class, the Congress chose to bring back a heavyweight like V.C. Shukla into the party fold recently to put its message across to the Brahmin community.

Congress leaders argued that the composition of the party leadership in different North Indian states reflected the social reality. They argued that the Congress was only trying to revive its traditional support base, that is, Dalits, Muslims and upper castes.

“In Uttarakhand, for instance, we have a Dalit PCC chief, and so is the case in Haryana. In Jharkhand, we have a tribal heading the party. There is absolutely no pattern in favour of any caste,” contended a senior Congress leader.

For that matter even Bihar PCC chief Sadanand Singh belongs to a backward class, but his continuation in the post has more to do with the fact that the Congress has given up on the state and is content with the role of RJD’s junior partner, said Congress sources.

Another section of party leaders argued that with caste-based regional parties like the SP, the RJD, and the BSP digging their heels in different states and striving to expand their area of influence, the Congress should be focusing on Dalits and backward castes instead of falling back on its old formula of social engineering led by Brahminical upper castes.