Mandal orphaned as messiahs stoop to conquer

Neither Singh nor any of his wayward disciples like Laloo Prasad Yadav and Mulayam Singh Yadav today talk of social justice. The Mandal plank which sought to legitimise political aspirations of the upwardly mobile peasant castes is today a non-issue.

In fact, the reverse process seems to have set in. The manifestoes of the UF, theJD and even the RJD today talk of job reservations to the poor among the upper castes. And both Laloo Yadav and Mulayam Singh the two supreme field commanders of social justice forces in the Hindi belt are busy wooing the upper castes.

That these illustrious leaders of the social justice school are more interested in running each other down than in combating upper-caste parties like the Congress and the BJP is reflected in the line-up for the Lok Sabha elections.

In UP, the break-up of the SP-BSP combine in 1995 marked the turning point and the BSP’s honeymoon with the BJP indicated that social justice was no longer a binding force in the politics of the Hindi heartland.

Today, an isolated SP and a fragmented JD are at war with each other as their Marxist brethren watch helplessly. Ditching the UF bandwagon, SP chief Mulayam has already cemented a deal with the Congress in Maharashtra and is now contemplating selective `tactical coordination’ with it in UP also.

In Bihar, Laloo’s social justiceconstituency is being continuously eroded by splits and defections. The process started with the formation of Nitish Kumar’s Samata Party in 1994. It was followed by the parting of ways by Sharad Yadav and Ram Bilas Paswan and company.

The Samata Party, though nominally paying lip service to the social justice cause, has contested two elections in Bihar in alliance with the BJP and is going for the third joint venture in current Lok Sabha polls.

Even Paswan and Sharad Yadav have no scruples in taking tacit help from the BJP block to put rival Laloo on the mat.

The regional outfits known as Janata Dal in Karnataka and Orissa had never even pretended a passionate zeal for social justice even during V. P. Singh’s political peak days. The late Biju Patnaik was disdainful of Singh’s Mandal politics from the beginning. In Karnataka the leader of the landed Vokkaliga community H. D. Deve Gowda had turned the clock back on land reforms.

No wonder, a large chunk of the Orissa JD broke away to form a Biju JDunder the leadership of the Kalinga satrap’s son Navin Patnaik and has entered into a deal with the communal BJP. The marriage between Ramakrishna Hegde’s Lok Shakti and the BJP in Karnataka also tells the same tale.

Why has social justice — a movement with great democratising potential — fizzled out? Have the issues like empowerment of those sections of population which were hitherto denied participation in governance on the basis of caste, community, gender become irrelevant?

The answer, perhaps, lies in the fact that politicians claiming allegiance to the principle of social justice never took it seriously as a movement, to be sustained by a collective purpose, a shared vision.

In fact, they were in a hurry to routinise its political role by acquiring a bureaucratic structure in the form of various Dals or political parties. Partly this was also due to to the fact that though Mandal as a political plank was thrown up in 1990, the political mobilisation of upwardly mobile caste clusters for a sharein power had been started much earlier — by the likes of Charan Singh in UP and Karpoori Thakur in Bihar.

By using their outfits as vehicles to capture and control the state power, Laloo and Mulayam gradually turned them into organisations devoted to its members’ personal gains — often in ways which were illegitimate and clandestine.

Against this backdrop, the break-up of the SP-BSP alliance in UP can be treated as a fight for spoils of office among the ruling elites of the Mandal and Bahujan varieties of the emergent ruling elite.

A similar metamorphosis took place in Bihar when Kurmis and Koeries broke away from Laloo Prasad’s MY — Muslim-Yadav — formation or when Ram Vilas Paswan parted company with Laloo Yadav subsequently.