India After Gandhi (105 page)

Among the strongest supporters of the Mandal Commission were two rising politicians. These were Mulayam Singh Yadav, who had become chief minister of Uttar Pradesh late in 1989, and Lalu Prasad Yadav, who became chief minister of Bihar early in 1990. Both were born in poor peasant households, both became politically active at university, joining the then still influential socialist movement. Both were jailed during the emergency, and both joined the Janata Party after it was over.

As their common surname indicated, Mulayam and Lalu were from the same caste of farmer-herders scattered across north and western India. In colonial times Yadavs had often acted as the
lathials
(strongmen) of upper-caste landlords. After Independence, now with lands of their
own, they had steadily gained in economic strength, social prestige and political power. Both Mulayam and Lalu actively reached out to the Muslims, another very numerous (if much poorer) community in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. The arithmetic of this move was electoral, for Yadavs and Muslims each comprised about 10 per cent of the population. In multiway contests – the norm in India – 40 per cent of the vote was usually enough. So any candidate who had sewn up both the Yadav and Muslim votes and persuaded sections of other backward groups to join up had a very good chance of winning.
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As India’s most populous states, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh together sent 139 members to Parliament. General elections were often decided here. In the first four elections the Congress won a majority of seats in UP and Bihar. In 1977, following the emergency, the party was wiped out, but in 1980 and 1984 it recovered, winning 81 and 131 seats respectively. The last was an aberration, a consequence of the martyrdom of Indira Gandhi. In 1989 the Congress fared disastrously, winning a mere nineteen seats in the two states. When mid-term elections were held two years later, it fared even worse, winning just five seats in UP and only one in Bihar.

When V. P. Singh announced the implementation of the Mandal Report the Congress, then in opposition, was lukewarm. The elections of 1991 saw the party return to power, its poor showing in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar compensated by a strong performance in the south. Now, the numbers set out in the preceding paragraph forced a swift reassessment. Were the Congress ever to regain ground in the north, it had to woo back the backward castes. Accordingly, the new Congress prime minister, P. V. Narasimha Rao, issued afresh government order on 26 September 1991, endorsing the Mandal Report but adding the ‘rider that in allotting 27 per cent of jobs to OBCs preference shall be given to candidates belonging to poorer sections’ among them.

Meanwhile, the Supreme Court continued its hearings on the petition placed before it. It finally gave its verdict on 16 November 1992. Seven judges dismissed the petition, upholding the constitutional validity of the Mandal Commission and the orders which sought to implement it. Three others dissented. The judgements were characteristically prolix, filling nearly 500 closely printed pages. The dissenting judges argued that caste-collectivity’ was ‘unconstitutional’; that in deciding on who was disadvantaged, impersonal criteria such as income should be used instead. On the otherside, speaking for the majority, Justice Jeevan
Reddy referred to past judgements where caste had been used as a proxy for backwardness. He invoked the example of affirmative action for black sin the United States, a precedent worthy of emulation in the present case. For,

it goes without saying that in the Indian context, social backwardness leads to educational backwardness and both of them together lead to poverty – which in turn breeds and perpetuates the social and educational backwardness. They feed upon each other constituting a vicious circle. It is a well-known fact that till independence the administrative apparatus was manned almost exclusively by members of the ‘upper’ castes. The Shudras, the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes and other similar backward social groups among Muslims and Christians had practically no entry into the administrative apparatus. It was this imbalance which was sought to be redressed by providing for reservation in favour of such backward classes.
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In upholding the government orders the Supreme Court added two caveats: that reservations should not exceed 50 per cent of the jobs in government, and that caste criteria would apply only in recruitment, not in promotions.

It was the Janata Party that had constituted the Mandal Commission in 1978; it was its new avatar, the Janata Dal, that implemented its recommendations in 1990. Its enthusiasm was not at first shared by rival parties. For the CPI and CPM traditionally saw class, not caste, as the major axis of political mobilization. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) accorded pride of place to (the Hindu) religion. As for the Congress, it presumed to speak for the nation as a whole. However, by the time the Supreme Court passed its judgement, these parties were all prepared to endorse it. For they very quickly realized the political implications of the Mandal Commission Report, and the political costs of opposing it.

The controversy surrounding the Mandal Commission is reminiscent in some ways of the debate, conducted back in the 1950s, around the report of the States Reorganization Commission. As a marker of identity, caste was as primordial as language – as likely to be deplored by modernizing intellectuals, as prone to be successfully used for social and political mobilization. Then, as now, the force of argument was found powerless when faced with the logic of numbers. Then, as now, what began as a contentious and many-sided debate ended with an all-party consensus.

Most reports commissioned by the government of India are read by few people and discussed by even fewer. The reports of the States Reorganization Commission and the Mandal Commission were altogether exceptional. They were read by many, debated by many more, and actually even implemented. They may even be – if only because of the number of people they affected – the two most influential reports ever commissioned by a government anywhere.

The influence exercised by the States Reorganization Commission was direct: it led to the redrawing of the administrative map of India on linguistic lines. The Mandal Commission’s influence, however, was mostly indirect. By its terms only a few thousand government jobs came up for allotment to OBCs. But the debate the Report sparked, and its eventual acceptance, provided a tremendous fillip to OBC pride and solidarity. Among the beneficiaries were the two Yadavs, Lalu and Mulayam. Both left the Janata Dal and setup their own parties, and very successfully too. Lalu’s Rashtriya Janata Dal stayed in power in Bihar for more than a decade (until 2005); Mulayam’s Samajwadi Party was in power in Uttar Pradesh for much of the 1990s, and he is once more chief minister of the state as I write in 2007.

The 1990s also witnessed an upsurge by Dalits, as the former Untouchable castes were now known. This was led by the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), which was founded by a brilliant political entrepreneur named Kanshi Ram.

After the death of Dr B. R. Ambedkar in 1956, the most prominent Untouchable leader was Jagjivan Ram. He was in the Congress, and it was in good part because of him that the lowest castes were regarded as a captive ‘vote bank’ by the party. The claim was challenged only in Maharashtra, first by the Republican Party which Ambedkar had founded, and later by the militant Dalit Panther organization. One consequence was that ‘Dalit’, meaning ‘oppressed’, replaced the official ‘Scheduled Caste or the Gandhian ‘Harijan’ as the preferred self-appellation for the low castes. But, from the 1950s to the 1980s, they mostly voted for the Congress nonetheless.

For decades Jagjivan Ram had ‘carried the banner of the downtrodden and stood for their interests’. His death in 1988, said an obituarist,
‘left a void’ which would be almost impossible to fill. ‘Scattered, unorganised, leaderless and oppressed, the fate of the scheduled castes, who form 15 per cent of the country’s population ... hangs precariously in the balance.’
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As it happened, by this time Kanshi Ram (no relation) had been active for more than a decade. Born in 1932 in the Punjab, he joined government service after university, working in a laboratory in Maharashtra, where he was introduced to the writings of B. R. Ambedkar. Thus radicalized, he quit his job in 1971 and formed an organization to represent government employees from a disadvantaged background. This was called the All-India Backward and Minority Communities Employees Federation (BAMCEF). For the next decade Kanshi Ram travelled across India, building district and state chapters of the organization. By the early 1980s BAMCEF had a membership of 200,000, many of them graduates and postgraduates. This was a trade union of the Scheduled Caste elite, which, in the leader’s words, would form the ‘think tank’, ‘talent bank’ and ‘financial bank’ for the depressed classes as awhole.
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BAMCEF’s growth area was north India, and particularly Uttar Pradesh, where its rallies regularly attracted audiences of 100,000 and more. The organization’s success emboldened Kanshi Ram to start a political party. Several names were considered, but finally it came to be called the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), ‘Bahujan’ being amore inclusive category than ‘Dalit’. Whereas the latter represented the Scheduled Castes or former Untouchables, the former contained within it backward castes and Muslims as well.

Four decades of affirmative action had created a strong and articulate middle class among the Scheduled Castes. In the beginning, the SCs were mainly recruited at the bottom of the state machinery, filling menial jobs; over time, they came to be better represented at the higher levels, working as Class I magistrates and officers in the secretariat. The numbers in Table 26.1 are telling indeed.

A government job provided both economic security and social prestige. By 1995 more than 2 million Dalits were thus advantaged. Of course, the majority of their ilk continued to live lives that were economically impoverished as well as socially degrading – working as agricultural labourers, sweepers and construction workers.
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Still, there was now a sizeable middle class to take their case forward. This was the class which staffed BAMCEF, and which then assumed leading roles in Kanshi Ram’s Bahujan Samaj Party. In this respect, the path they followed was very nearly the reverse of the OBCs. Having tasted political power, the OBCs sought to claim administrative power through the Mandal Report. The SCs, however, first acquired a stake in the administration, before seeking a greater role in party politics.

Table 26.1 – Employment profile of Scheduled Castes in the government of India

S
OURCE
: Niraja Gopal Jayal, (‘Social Inequality and Institutional Remedies: A Study of the National Commission for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes’), paper presented at NETSAPPE Conference, Bangalore, June 2003.

The BSP made its debut in the 1984 general election. It garnered more than a million votes, but won no seats. In subsequent elections it was more successful, winning, for example, eleven seats in 1996 and fourteen in 1999. But where it really made an impression was in state elections in Uttar Pradesh. Here, the party activists successfully wooed the Dalit masses, warning them that the Congress wanted only pliant
chamchas
(sycophants) from their ranks. The BSP, on the other hand, stood for ‘social justice’, even ‘social transformation’. Only a party of their own could enhance the dignity, pride and prospects of the Dalits.
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The message was carried by Dalit lawyers, teachers and officers to their less privileged brethren. Apart from holding meetings and rallies, these intellectuals published a series of tracts providing the lower castes with a heroic history of their own. These were driven by the conviction that ‘till now Indian history is mostly written by Brahmins’. Now, an alternate narrative was constructed, which claimed that it was actually the Dalits who ‘created cultures such as Harappa and Mohenjodaro’. But then the invading Aryans ‘took away their land, alienated them forcibly,
hijacked their culture, and subjected them to a state of slavery’. Throughout history this suppression had been stoutly resisted, by Dalit workers, peasants, singers and poets. Their deeds – real as well as mythical – were commemorated in booklets printed and distributed in the hundreds of thousands in the Uttar Pradesh of the 1990s.
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Political organization and the evolution of social conscience, working hand in hand, enabled the BSP to take impressive strides in Uttar Pradesh. Between 1989 and 2002 five assembly elections were held in the state. The number of seats won in these polls by the BSP was, successively, 13, 12, 69, 67 and 98. By the end it was garnering a steady 20 per cent of the popular vote. The BSP’s gains were mostly at the expense of the Congress. This party powered by Dalits had emerged as one of the three major political groups in the state, the others being Mulayam’s Samajwadi Party and the Hindu-oriented Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).