After the President awarded India’s highest civilian honour, the Bharat Ratna, to Karpoori Thakur, Prime Minister Modi described him as “a beacon of social justice”. Thakur certainly was one, but during his lifetime, the Sangh Parivar fought against him relentlessly – and vice versa.
Karpoori Thakur belongs to the Indian socialist tradition. He took part in the Quit India Movement as a Congress Socialist Party member in his home state, Bihar, the crucible of the socialist movement in India as well as of the leftist version of kisan politics. In fact, he was the joint secretary of the Bihar Kisan Committee between 1948 and 1952, the year when he was elected as MLA for the first time.
When the Socialist Party split, Thakur joined the Samyukta Samajwadi Party (SSP). He was a supporter of Ram Manohar Lohia who promoted positive discrimination or quotas for the lower castes. Thakur belonged to one of them. In contrast to most of his then comrades, he belonged to the jati of the nais (barbers). In 1967, he popularised the Lohiaite slogan – “Socialists ne bandhi gath/Pichda pave sau me sath (Socialists are now determined to get 60 per cent reservation)”.
That year, the SSP jumped from 6 to nearly 18 per cent of the votes and from 7 to 68 seats. The Opposition parties – the communists, the Jana Sangh and the socialists – formed a coalition called Samyukta Vidhayak Dal (SVD, the united parliamentarian group), of which the SSP was the largest component. A former high caste (Kayasth) Congressman, Mahamaya Prasad Sinha, became the chief minister, but the deputy chief minister was no one else but Karpoori Thakur, who was also the education minister. In this capacity, he removed English as a compulsory subject for matriculation and promoted Hindi in order to democratise education. The SVD government, in five months, could take other significant measures, such as the abolition of land revenue.
Thakur became chief minister of Bihar in 1970, two years after the first OBC socialist CM in the state, B P Mandal. However, Thakur remained at the helm of the government of Bihar for only six months as the SVD coalition disintegrated: The Jana Sanghis and the leftists disagreed on too many topics and “anti-Congressism” – Lohia’s motto – was not strong enough as a cementing force to surmount this division.
A similar scenario repeated itself in the 1970s – with many more lessons that are relevant today. In 1977, the Janata Party swept the polls in Bihar – like elsewhere in the Hindi belt – and Thakur became CM again. His government, for the first time in the state, had much more OBCs (42 per cent) than upper-caste members (29 per cent). In 1978, before the formation of the Mandal Commission, Thakur announced new quotas for Bihar, on the basis of the Mungeri Lal Commission, that had been appointed by a Congress CM, Daroga Lal Rai, in 1971 and which had submitted its report in 1976. Following the Mungeri Lal Commission’s report, Thakur distinguished between Other Backward Classes and Most Backward Classes for the first time. He introduced quotas of respectively 8 and 12 per cent for these two groups.
Upper castes immediately opposed this reform. Their demonstrations were supported by the Jana Sanghis who were supposed to support Thakur as a component of the Janata Party. They finally withdrew their support to Thakur’s government on April 19, 1979, and provoked the fall of the government, with the help of a group of Scheduled Caste MLAs close to Jagjivan Ram, the then deputy chief minister. This episode illustrated the persistence of what American political scientist Paul Brass called the “coalition of extremes”, that associated upper castes and Dalits who were both afraid of the rise of the OBCs/ MBCs.
This coalition immediately found another expression in the formation of a new government, headed by Ram Sunder Das (a Dalit), but comprising of 50 per cent upper caste and only 20 per cent of OBCs; not even one representative from Most Backward Classes (MBCs) was part of it. This government amended Thakur’s reservation policy by deducting from the quotas of the SCs, STs, OBCs and MBCs the posts that members of these groups got via the “General” category. But Thakur had prepared the ground for the reservation policy which was to culminate in V P Singh’s Mandal moment, another occasion for the Sangh Parivar to criticise what The Organiser called “a Shudra revolution” and for the Hindu nationalist party, now called the BJP, to withdraw from a coalition party, the Janata Dal, in the name of social conservatism.
Ironically, today, Narendra Modi, the last incarnation of this school of thought is greeting Karpoori Thakur. Well, better late than never, but will the Modi government replicate his policy and, for instance, introduce a specific quota for the MBCs, a reform that would make a caste census even more necessary? So far only Bihar – again – has conducted such a survey. Will Bihar show the way to progressive politics again?
While Bihar remains imbued with the socialist ethos, socialist political forces have vanished – Thakur’s career illustrates this trend very clearly. In 1980, he joined Charan Singh’s Lok Dal before seceding for creating his own Lok Dal, the LD(K) and withdrawing in the background.
The writer is a senior research fellow at CERI-Sciences Po/CNRS, Paris, professor of Indian Politics and Sociology at King’s India Institute, London
Thakur became chief minister of Bihar in 1970, two years after the first OBC socialist CM in the state, B P Mandal. (Express archive) 
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