MANDAL SERVED WITH A PINCH OF SAFFRON 

When the Bharatiya Janata Party swept the assembly elections in Uttar Pradesh in the summer of 1991, the former prime minister, V.P. Singh, made a prescient remark, 'Kalyan bina kalyanva nahin.' Playing on the chief minister's name, he spelt out that there could be no success even for the party of Hindutva unless it made a bow to the logic of lower caste assertion. A decade later, he stands vindicated, as the ruling coalition in Lucknow attempts a major gamble, making sweeping changes in the reservation policy in the run-up to another assembly poll. Mandal or rather the politics of a Mandalized society is now central to the plans of the Rajnath Singh-led BJP. It may be ironical that a political movement committed to the unity of all Hindus irrespective of caste should try splintering the electorate further on caste lines. But the creation of Uttaranchal made it inevitable that in the absence of its only sub-regional bastion, the savarna Hindu dominated party would try another card. Its own attempts to build up an other backward classes leadership ran aground by late 1999. Kalyan Singh was at odds with the older social base of the party, and virtually at war with the Atal Bihari Vajpayee regime in New Delhi. After his exit, two successive chief ministers tried to rally upper castes while limiting any damage he might have inflicted. It is the failure of such attempts that led to the new reservation initiative. The social justice commission favours the break up of the OBCs and the scheduled castes into smaller sub-sets, the former into three and the latter into two. As a sop to the upper castes, it also suggests a five per cent quota for the poor among them. The bite, however, is in the former set of proposals. The Mandal classes comprise just over half the electorate, but the quantum of reservation for them is to be fixed at 28 per cent. The Yadavs, who have been the most politically assertive of them, are eligible for a sub-quota of five per cent only. On the face of it, this is an innocuous measure: sub-quotas of the Mandal list exist in many states including neighbouring Bihar. The obvious logic of this is to pit the Yadavs against the lower OBCs. The key community to which Mulayam Singh Yadav belongs would find its own interest for government jobs at odds with less well off brethren from other, less privileged Mandal castes. The lower backward class groups are highly populous and make up about 37 per cent of the total population. It is here that the BJP hopes to strike gold, rallying them around its new image as their benefactor. The entire logic of Mandal was quite to the contrary. It sought to unify the backward classes as a whole. Interestingly, another Rajput chief minister, V.P. Singh, implemented the existing quotas for the OBCs in 1980, partly to offset the dominance of Brahmins in the government. The next major break came in 1990, when the Mulayam Singh-led Janata Dal government extended the Mandal commission recommendations to the state. The most significant outcome of these changes was to alter the line-up of leaders at the apex of the pyramid of power. From 1989 to 1999, for a whole deca de, there was no chief minister from the upper castes. Yet, the divisions among the OBCs and the Dalits emerged as significant over time. Unlike Laloo Prasad Yadav in Bihar, Mulayam Singh had to contend with an autonomous Dalit-led party in the shape of the Bahujan Samaj Party. The latter has built a formidable network of SC communities across the state, but it mainly rests on the solid support of the Jadavs. Due to their control of the leather trade and their lead in education, social reform and political mobilization, they dominate the party. The chief minister has taken a page from Kautilya's book. Since he cannot defeat his adversaries, he hopes to divide their camps. Over the last decade, the Hindutva party has held central ground due to the division between the Dalits and the Mandalites. The new Rajnath Singh initiative tries to go a step further. He hopes to contain the reach and power of the most assertive of the Dalit and OBC communities. The immediate litmus test in UP is a simple political one. But here the logic of numbers and the history of caste assertion both weigh heavily against any immediate gains. For one, the lower strata of the OBCs do not at the moment have strong or articulate leaders who can rally them together around the new plans. They are also educationally deprived to a degree that even some Dalit groups are not. By contrast, the Mandal report came just at the time when groups like the Yadavs, Lodhs and Kurmis were in a position to take advantage of it. The gameplan for both Mayavati and Mulayam is a simple one. They are demanding a higher quantum of reservations. Having opened the Pandora's box, it is not so easy for the BJP to clamp down on it. Both will also redouble efforts to reach out to the minorities who, with over one in six votes, will be all the more crucial. True, the new scheme provides for reservation for Muslim OBCs, but most Muslims are self-employed and the plank is unlikely to hold much appeal. If the backward class card has its limitations, so too does the Dalit card. The break-up among the 21 per cent reserved for scheduled castes is revealing. The Jadavs and Pasis would have access to less than half these jobs. This is a more ambitious step than even the changes in the Mandal list. Not only because two key leaders, Ram Vilas Paswan and Mayavati, come from these respective communities. No state in India has yet pushed through sub-categories among the SCs in its positive discrimination schemes. A bid to do so in Andhra Pradesh by the chief minister, N. Chandrababu Naidu, failed last year. It ran afoul of the SC/ST commission and even led to concern being voiced by the president. A division of the Dalits on caste lines looks too much of an upper caste plot to divide groups who have for centuries been crushed under the heel of the caste-based social order. What better way than to revive sub-categories and groups in some garb, was the refrain of critics. Despite its pitfalls, Rajnath's is a step that will have long term consequences. For the BJP, it is the most audacious bit of social engineering it has attempted in any state in the country. It is a measure of how high the stakes are that it has put Mandalite means before the symbolism of the mandir, with an unabashedly upper caste administration having to speak the language of its rivals. 'Good governance' as a slogan was fine but it is not a vote winner. The upper castes are not capable of putting the party back in office even if it mops up all their votes. The mandir card cannot be played in too brazen a manner as long as the BJP is part of a multi-hued coalition at the Centre. Much rests on the political impact of the new reservations policy in India's most populous state. The test will be in how far it delivers the party from the downward slide it has been caught up in over the last two years. If it fails, much else will be at risk.