Congress’s missed opportunities: Why BJP ‘anti-OBC’ charge against Rahul Gandhi cuts deep

The Congress has been struggling with the OBC question since soon after Independence. In the following years, the backward classes demanded a quota on the lines of reservation for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, plus political representation. In 1953, the Jawaharlal Nehru government constituted the first OBC commission under Kaka Kalelkar. But though it submitted its report in 1955, this kept gathering dust.

Gradually, OBCs in the Hindi heartland flocked to Ram Manohar Lohia, powering his politics in the early Sixties. After his demise, Charan Singh emerged as their leader.

In April 1977, the Congress government in UP led by N D Tiwari announced 15 per cent reservation in government jobs for OBCs – arguably the first such move in the country. Within a week, the Tiwari government was dismissed by the Janata Party government led by Morarji Desai at the Centre, which had come to power post-Emergency.

Consequently, it was the Ram Naresh Yadav-led Janata Party government in UP that implemented the reservation in the state – and took the credit for it.

Even the push for an OBC quota in the state was driven by another Congress titan, H N Bahuguna, who constituted a Chhedilal Sathi Commission on the issue as CM.

At a time when the Congress is almost wiped out in UP, to a large part on its failure to cash in on OBC sentiments, one hardly hears any party leader talking about this period in the history of the state.

Later in 1990, the Congress took another blow in the OBC justice politics when its rebel leader V P Singh, as head of the Janata Dal government at the Centre, announced implementation of the Mandal Commission report.

The Mandal Commission had been constituted by the Morarji Desai Janata Party government in 1978, and submitted its report in 1980, but gathered dust for 14 years, for most of which time the Congress held power at the Centre.

In UP and Bihar, the whole anti-Congress battle thus came to be led by OBC leaders – first by Lohia then Charan Singh then Singh, none of whom was an OBC. Later, the rise of regional OBC leaders such as Mulayam Singh Yadav in UP, Lalu Prasad in Bihar and Sharad Yadav from Madhya Pradesh, backed by the Jats in UP, Haryana and Rajasthan, sealed the Congress’s fate.

In a 2006 biography of V P Singh, Manjil Se Jyada Safar, Ram Bahadur Rai quotes him as saying: “Congress leaders were obsessed with power equations. They were least concerned with the social equations and changes taking place. They do not even show concern when the party loses an election… The Congress has lost a decade. It was unable to read the Mandal phenomenon. It took a lot of time to understand the importance of coalition power. It (the Congress) took 15 years to realise that politics has changed. The BJP has shown more flexibility than the Congress on (alliance issues).”

One area on which the BJP showed this flexibility was in projecting OBC leaders such as Kalyan Singh, a Lodh Rajput, in UP, to counter Mulayam. As Mulayam’s support base outside the Samajwadi Party’s Yadav-Muslim core started to fragment, Kalyan rallied several smaller OBC communities behind the BJP – eventually forging a ‘non-Yadav OBC’ vote bank.

When OBC leaders like Kalyan Singh and Uma Bharti became rebels within the party, the BJP revamped its leadership at every level to accommodate the communities politically.

Kalyan’s successor Ram Prakash Gupta (November 1999-October 2000) granted Jats OBC status in UP. In a bid to weaken Mulayam as well as BSP chief Mayawati with her Dalit support base, the government of Rajnath Singh came up with the idea of “reservation within reservation” to divide OBCs and Dalits.

In 2006, came another defining moment in OBC politics. Arjun Singh as Union Human Resource Development Minister in the UPA-1 government fought against pressure to push through 27 per cent reservation for OBCs in admissions to Central government educational institutions, which had been pending since the Mandal report implementation.

This was one of the biggest government decisions in favour of OBCs, but the Congress again hardly made any gains from it.

In 2010, the UPA-2 government initiated the move for a caste census. Then Law Minister Veerappa Moily wrote to then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh for collection of caste/community data in Census 2011. On March 1, 2011, during a short-duration discussion in the Lok Sabha, Home Minister P Chidambaram opposed it. Amid uproarious scenes, PM Singh said: “I assure you that the Cabinet will take a decision shortly.” Later, a Group of Ministers was constituted under then Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee on it.

After several rounds of deliberations, the UPA government decided to go in for a full-fledged Socio Economic Caste Census (SECC) instead, which was conducted at an expense of nearly Rs 5,000 crore, by the Ministry of Rural Development in rural areas and the Ministry of Housing & Urban Poverty Alleviation in urban areas.

The SECC data, excluding caste data, was finalised and published by the two ministries in 2016. However, it remains unavailable. Whenever organisations like the Justice Rohini Commission on sub-categorisation of OBCs have sought the SECC data, they have been told that it is not reliable.

The BJP, incidentally, is also silent on the issue despite the fact that before the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, then Home Minister Rajnath Singh had announced that enumeration of OBCs would be done in Census 2021. (The Census itself is delayed.)

In fact, while the BJP under Narendra Modi and Amit Shah have assiduously crafted an OBC support base, the Modi government has not taken steps of the kind taken under V P Singh and Arjun Singh. The revision of the creamy layer criteria for OBCs has now been delayed for over two years.

However, at a time that political battles are waged and lost in optics, the BJP is far ahead.

V Hanumantha Rao, a Congress leader from Telangana who formed a forum of OBC MPs to pursue demands of backward classes, takes part of the credit for the Manmohan Singh government implementing the OBC quota in admissions. He told The Indian Express: “The Congress has done a lot for the welfare of OBCs. BJP leaders just popularise their OBC surnames and do nothing for them. I have met Prime Minister Modiji thrice with OBC MPs on several pending issues of OBCs, but the government is yet to take any initiative on them.”

However, a senior leader of the Congress admits the party has lost out on the credit game. “It is true that the Congress leadership has been shy to take credit for what it has done for OBCs. Sometimes, the party did not deploy the right person for the job and it is suffering due to that.”

And while there is still no conclusive number regarding OBCs, there are no two opinions on the fact that they matter. The National Commission for Backward Classes lists over 2,600 castes in the central list of OBCs for 27% reservation. The Mandal Commission report put OBCs at 52% of India’s population. A report based on the National Sample Survey Organisation’s 61st round, released in October 2006, put this at 41%.