If Lallu is brighter than Mohan…?

The question that found solution to India's most difficult political problem: too much stability

The quaint headline of this article is borrowed from a man more maligned than celebrated. Also, mostly forgotten. B.P. Mandal led the controversial commission looking at demands of the Other Backward Classes (OBCs). He submitted his 426-page report in 1980, just as Indira Gandhi returned to power. She promptly buried it. It remained there for another decade until on August 7, 1990, Prime Minister V.P. Singh announced its implementation, and his Independence Day speech a week later talking about this became a turning point. It set India, or at least big-town India, ablaze, resulting in many unfortunate self-immolations by upper-caste students who feared loss of opportunity.

This 68th anniversary of Independence coincides with the 25th of that event. The theme of this issue is solutions to some of the most challenging problems facing India. There wasn’t, and isn’t, a more important problem needing resolution than social, economic and political inequality. This is what Mandal was explaining in his report, with such brilliant prescience, in that Lallu versus Mohan question.

What if, he asked, a boy called Lallu lives in a village, cannot get English-medium education, does not have TV in his home, and has none of the exposure that, say, one called Mohan, who lives in a city, has? Lallu is likely to be less articulate in English, less confident in social interactions, and won’t be able to compete with Mohan even if he happens to be brighter than him. You will end up pronouncing Mohan more meritorious even if Lallu is more deserving.

Did Mandal succeed in turning the old merit argument inside out, which was his intention?

 

Look at the evidence. Our prime minister now, the first with a full majority since 1984, is also our first OBC candidate elected to that job. You could argue that H.D. Deve Gowda was one too, but that only further strengthens the argument. Chief ministers of five out of our six largest states (Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Karnataka, Rajasthan and Maharashtra) are OBCs. In fact, in states that add up to nearly half of all of India’s population, all major claimants for power are OBCs or Dalits. Uttar Pradesh and Bihar are too familiar to detail here, but even in Rajasthan now, it is Vasundhara Raje versus Sachin Pilot, a Gujjar.

One reason the BJP has risen so spectacularly in this period is the large-hearted ease with which it has embraced this change and empowered this new Mandalised underclass, defying its own DNA (sorry about that!) of reverentially following a Brahminised hierarchy. Many of the Sangh Parivar affiliates have also kept pace, notably the Vishva Hindu Parishad, and Pravin Togadia, Vinay Katiyar, even Sadhvi Prachi are from the backward castes, as are some of the nuttier BJP/VHP headline hunters such as Sadhvi Niranjan Jyoti and Sakshi Maharaj. The RSS, particularly its Nagpur clergy, has so far resisted this change, but I can anticipate with certainty that a similar transformation will be visible there sooner than you think.

One reason the Congress has continued to decline meanwhile is that it has produced no significant OBC leaders except the offspring of some veterans and the few it borrowed or stole from here and there, including Ram Naresh Yadav in Uttar Pradesh (yes, the Vyapam governor of Madhya Pradesh) and Shankarsinh Vaghela in Gujarat, have made limited impact. Its only OBC leader who wields power is Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah. And remember, he was stolen fairly recently from Deve Gowda’s party.

The 1989-91 period in our politics was utterly chaotic. But a new order emerged from it. Two anti-Congress mass impulses rose in the heartland at that juncture, Mandir and Mandal. Both were contradictory, as the first impressed the upper-caste Hindus and the second sought to create a new caste divide even if the purpose was to narrow it.

 

Both united in the face of a common enemy, Rajiv Gandhi. But the unworkable partnership lasted less than a year, as L.K. Advani, the leader of Mandir, started his Rath Yatra for Ayodhya, only to be thwarted by the star of Mandal, Lalu Prasad Yadav. In the years to come, Mandal got the better of Mandir. If the BJP has had to Mandalise itself by grooming a new backward caste leadership, Ayodhya has been a non-issue for 23 years and, in UP as well as Bihar, the BJP has been denied power by children of Mandal, you can see which idea was more powerful. I believe the larger BJP/RSS idea, of uniting through religion what caste had divided in Hindu society, was destroyed by Mandal.

But that wasn’t the solution we are talking about. India’s biggest problem, until 1989, was the TINA (there is no alternative) factor which made the Congress the only show in town. In spite of brief interruptions, it continued ruling at the Centre and in most of the states. In a way, then, we had remarkable political stability for four decades after Independence. This was too much stability, and no democracy can grow like that. It stagnates and vegetates. For a nation to progress, its politics has to be competitive. That wasn’t possible, because the Congress had the killer vote combination. In the heartland, it had ruled with a Muslim-Brahmin combination that attracted a significant enough number of the rest. With the Congress the only party likely to defeat the BJP, Muslims had no other choice.

Mandal broke that embankment. Credible backward caste parties and leaders emerged out of the coalition first built under V.P. Singh that swept UP and Bihar. Most of these leaders were old Lohiaite/socialists whose secular credentials were formidable. They gave Muslims a choice. Two things resulted. One, the Congress was decimated and never got a national majority again. Two, soon enough neither the Congress nor the BJP was able to rule any of these states again except as a junior partner of a caste-based party. As the BJP did with Nitish Kumar, and is now trying to return to power in alliance with Jitan Manjhi.

Unlike the BJP, however, the Congress did not accept the new reality. It also has limitations given the hereditary nature of its leadership across all categories. V.P. Singh’s government may have lasted less than a year, but his revenge on the Congress is total. In fact, if politics were a game of cricket, I would call it a case of Congress, caught V.P. Singh, bowled Mandal.

It was widely feared that implementation of the Mandal Commission recommendations would destroy the economy, destabilise our society. Twenty-five years later, this week, it only made us socially more cohesive, and by destroying ossified Congress vote banks created space for genuinely competitive politics and economics. It has demolished the Hindu Rate of Growth and checked the BJP’s rampant Hindutva.

 

First lesson in caste politics

No, it wasn’t V.P. Singh or Sitaram Kesri. It was old Babu Jagjivan Ram, the last and the greatest Dalit leader after Ambedkar with a pan-national appeal. His real achievement was that public opinion, by and large, saw him as a mainstream leader. He’s arguably been the most respected, and loved, defence minister in our history with his leadership in the 1971 war.

In the early eighties, drawing inspiration from the moth-balled Mandal report, the governments of Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh set up their own state-level commissions. Both reports, introducing OBC reservations, were implemented in 1985. Both states erupted in riots, and remember, it was five years before V.P. Singh set Delhi on fire. As always happened in Gujarat, whatever a riot may have begun for, it became Hindu-Muslim. I was sent to cover it for india today. Truth to tell, it was the first time I came across OBC and Mandal factors.

Opponents of reservations had what looked like a genuine argument on merit. Until I went to see Jagjivan Ram, now in political wilderness and so patient to teach a reporter. Reservation, he said, was not about economics, but empowerment. He talked about a friend of his from Agra, from his own “Chamar” caste, who was now a “crorepati” but still wanted his son to be appointed an assistant sub-inspector of police. “My friend told me,” Babuji said, “even if I have hundreds of crores, a Brahmin will not salute my son. But if he is a police officer, a Brahmin constable would have to.”

But more important, he told me to go read that Mandal report and even flagged the section where that Lallu versus Mohan question figured. And then he said, Rajiv is silly, he should implement Mandal now if he understands the realities of rural India.

“But maybe Rajiv doesn’t understand rural India, being so urban-bred,” I said, somewhat helpfully.

“Arrey, who says so?” Babuji said, his weather-beaten face glowing with mischief. “He has been to Asian Games Village so many times.”