‘Jitni Aabadi, Utna Haq’: With Kolar call, Rahul firms up caste line, links it to income disparity

He also suggested that reservation for SC and STs should be proportionate to their population and sought removal of the Supreme Court-mandated 50% cap on reservation.

Certainly, it is not the first time that Rahul has made an outreach to Dalits or tribals. In fact, he had aggressively courted them very early in his political career. From sharing meals and spending nights with tribal and Dalit families (in 2009 he even got the then British Foreign Secretary David Miliband to do the same with him) and batting for rights of tribals in Odisha’s Niyamgiri Hills, he has made attempts to reach out to them.

In 2013, his remarks at a Scheduled Caste conference that Dalits need the “escape velocity” of Jupiter to achieve success had drawn much attention – and equal part puzzlement.

However, his pitch for release of data of a Socio Economic Caste Census (SECC) conducted under the UPA government in 2011 and a relook at reservation based on population numbers, in his Kolar speech, is his most forceful intervention so far.

His slogan “Jitni Aabadi, Utna Haq” paraphrased a catchy slogan first given by Dalit icon and BSP founder Kanshi Ram to put across his message: “Jiski jitni sankhya bhaari, uski utni hissedari (Share as per one’s strength)”.

It also comes against the context of the BJP trying to put Rahul on the backfoot by painting his remark saying “why do all thieves have the Modi surname” – over which he has been convicted for defamation – as reflective of his anti-OBC mentality.

By pushing for a caste census, Rahul lends his voice to the demand of regional forces in the Hindi heartland — the JD(U) and RJD in Bihar and the Samajwadi Party in Uttar Pradesh. Almost all these parties, which champion the cause of social justice, shot to prominence in the post-Mandal years, which saw implementation of reservation for OBCs.

In fact, the Nitish Kumar government in Bihar is in the process of conducting its own caste-based census.

And it is not just the heartland parties. The DMK chief and Tamil Nadu Chief Minister, M K Stalin, recently brought together leaders of several Opposition parties on a common platform to fight for social justice.

Most of the parties, and now the Congress, feel caste is the antidote to the BJP’s unchecked Hindutva consolidation.

In its heydays, the Congress had a formidable OBC vote bank. The party’s grip on the OBCs, at least in the Hindi belt, started shrinking after the implementation of the Mandal Commission report in the 1990s, which unleashed a wave of OBC assertion and the emergence of leaders like Mulayam Singh Yadav, Lalu Prasad and Nitish Kumar.

Over the last nine years, the BJP too has made major inroads into OBC communities, Dalits and tribals.

A senior Congress leader said Rahul’s plan appears to be to check the BJP’s Hindutva push by talking about caste, and framing the income disparity debate – another issue close to Rahul’s heart — in the context of backwardness. “The political message is that there is concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a few people … and in effect a majority of the people are not enjoying the fruits of the nation’s development… And that this can happen only when there is a special dispensation for SCs, STs and OBCs,” the leader said.

Rahul’s caste census pitch takes forward a resolution passed at the Congress’s Raipur National Executive, promising that if voted back to power, it would conduct a Socio-Economic Caste Census along with the decennial census besides creating a dedicated ministry for the empowerment of OBCs.

A leader said that the Congress, however, has a hard road ahead, given the space it has ceded (incidentally to parties, which are now its comrades in arms in the Opposition unity project). “Even in the case of Mandal, unfortunately, the Congress has not been able to vociferously publicise that the very basis of a backward classes commission came from the Constitutional provision of Article 340. Had Article 340 not been there, a backward classes commission and its recommendation would not have happened at all,” the leader said.

He added: “The first backward class commission was set up by the Nehru government (headed by Kaka Kalelkar). The second was the Mandal commission. While the Mandal commission report was accepted by the V P Singh-led Janata Dal government, it was not implemented during V P Singh’s time, it was implemented by P V Narasimha Rao. Also Mandal II happened during UPA time when reservations for OBCs in institutions of higher and professional education were introduced.”

A leader close to Rahul said he realises that the Congress needs to reclaim the space it has ceded on the issue, especially in the Hindi heartland. “It is a political statement apart from the social justice angle.”

That the Congress is intent on this was reflected in the prompt letter written by Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge to Prime Minister Narendra Modi demanding an up-to-date caste census. Writing a day after Rahul’s speech, he argued that meaningful social justice and empowerment programmes were incomplete in the absence of such data.

Kharge also referred to the SECC conducted by the UPA government during 2011-12 covering some 25 crore households, findings of which came out towards the end of its term. A UPA minister said a call was taken to let the next government release the data.

“For a number of reasons, however, the caste data could not get published even though Congress and other MPs demanded its release after your government came to power in May 2014… This (caste) census is the responsibility of the Union Government,” Kharge wrote to the PM.

Asked why the UPA government had not released the Socio Economic and Caste Census, former Union law minister M Veerappa Moily said it was not ready before it was voted out of power.