As Rahul Gandhi says Congress OBC outreach ‘fell short', a recall of the party's history with these communities

Indian Express

2 days ago

Leader of Opposition Rahul Gandhi said on Thursday (July 24) that the Congress had 'fallen short' in its relationship with Other Backward Classes (OBCs), which had allowed the BJP to build political support among them.
'I would like to say one thing. It is a personal thing… I do feel that when it came to OBCs, the Congress party's understanding of their issues, the challenges they were facing and the type of actions that the party should have and could have taken, we fell short,' Rahul said at a gathering of his party MPs and Telangana leadership.
'…This is a feeling I have that we allowed, we opened the space for the BJP because we were not responsive to the aspirations, to the desires of the OBCs,' he said.
In March-April 2023, the BJP had accused the Congress of insulting the 'entire OBC community' after Rahul was convicted of defamation over remarks that he made on the 'Modi' surname during an election rally in 2019.
The Congress had rejected the allegation at the time. However, the political history of India shows that the party has indeed missed several opportunities to reach out to these castes. Perhaps more importantly, it has failed to claim credit for policy changes with regard to OBCs that were, in fact, initiated by Congress governments.
Consider this short history.
The clamour for greater political representation for the backward classes, as well as demands for reservation for these communities on the lines of the quotas in government jobs for the Scheduled Castes (SCs) and Scheduled Tribes (STs), began soon after Independence.
KAKA KALELKAR COMMISSION: In 1953, the government of Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru set up the first Backward Classes Commission (the expression 'OBC' was not in wide use at the time) under Article 340 of the Constitution, which empowers the President to 'appoint a Commission…to investigate the conditions of socially and educationally backward classes…and the difficulties under which they labour and to make recommendations as to the steps that should be taken by the Union or any State to remove such difficulties and to improve their condition…'.
The Gandhian social reformer Dattatreya Balkrishna Kalelkar, popularly known as Kaka Kalelkar, who was a member of Rajya Sabha at the time, was appointed chairman of the commission.
The Kalelkar Commission submitted its report to the government on March 30, 1955. It formulated a set of criteria for identifying socially and educationally backward classes, and made several recommendations for their uplift. According to a summary in the report of the Mandal Commission (see below), these included a caste census in 1961 (which will finally happen in the coming Census), treating all women as a class as 'backward', and reserving 70% seats in technical and professional institutions for qualified students from backward classes.
The recommendations were, however, not unanimous, and three of the members were opposed to the acceptance of caste as a criterion for social backwardness and reservation in government jobs. The Mandal report noted that Kalelkar himself wrote a long letter to the President expressing his disagreement on a number of issues.
Nehru's government considered the Kalelkar report and ultimately rejected it. Meanwhile, OBCs in the Hindi heartland had already begun to move away towards the socialist leader Ram Manohar Lohia. Until Lohia's untimely demise in 1967 at age 57, his anti-Congress politics was powered by these communities. After Lohia's death, Chaudhary Charan Singh, the Jat leader from Western UP, emerged as the leader of OBCs.
THE FIRST QUOTA FOR OBCs: In October 1975, Hemwati Nandan Bahuguna, who was the Congress Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh between November 1973 and November 1975, appointed the Most Backward Classes Commission under the chairmanship of Chhedi Lal Sathi. This was the first push for an OBC quota in Uttar Pradesh.
Subsequently, in April 1977, the government of another Congress titan, N D Tiwari, who succeeded Bahuguna after a phase of President's Rule, announced a 15 per cent quota in government jobs for OBCs in UP, perhaps the first such move anywhere in the country.
Within a week, however, Tiwari's government was dismissed by the Janata Party government led by Prime Minister Morarji Desai, which had come to power at the Centre following the post-Emergency elections of March 1977.
Consequently, it was the Janata government in UP led by Ram Naresh Yadav (1977-79) which implemented the quota — and also took the credit for it.
In August 1990, the central government led by Congress rebel V P Singh announced its intention to implement the report of the Socially and Educationally Backward Classes Commission, popularly known as the Mandal Commission.
The Mandal Commission had been constituted by the Morarji government in 1978, and its report — recommending 27% reservation for OBCs — had been submitted in 1980, but the governments of Indira and Rajiv Gandhi had chosen not to act on it.
The implementation of the report of the Mandal Commission unleashed a wave of OBC assertion and fundamentally altered the politics of North India. It catapulted leaders like Mulayam Singh Yadav, Lalu Prasad, Nitish Kumar, and Sharad Yadav to national prominence, and sealed the fate of the Congress in UP and Bihar.
BJP and Congress in the Mandal decades
In his 2006 biography of V P Singh, Manzil Se Zyada Safar, Ram Bahadur Rai quoted the former PM as having said: 'Congress leaders were obsessed with power equations. They were least concerned with the social equations and changes taking place… It was unable to read the Mandal phenomenon. It took a lot of time to understand the importance of coalition power… The BJP has shown more flexibility than the Congress on (striking alliances).'
Indeed, the BJP — at that time still considered a largely Brahmin-Bania party — showed the political flexibility to project 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 smaller OBC communities behind the BJP, eventually forging a non-Yadav OBC vote bank. After OBC leaders like Kalyan and Uma Bharti became rebels within the party, the BJP revamped its leadership at every level to accommodate these communities politically.
Kalyan's successor Ram Prakash Gupta (Nov 1999-Oct 2000) granted Jats OBC status in UP. In a bid to weaken both Mulayam and BSP chief Mayawati, the government of Chief Minister Rajnath Singh (Oct 2000-Mar 2002) devised a 'reservation within reservation' to divide OBCs and Dalits.
In 2006, Arjun Singh, the Union Human Resource Development Minister in the UPA-1 government, fought back pressures to push through 27% reservation for OBCs in admissions to central educational institutions, which had been pending since the implementation of the Mandal report.
It was one of the biggest decisions in favour of OBCs, and a defining moment in OBC politics — but hardly any political gains accrued to the Congress.
In 2010, the UPA-2 government initiated a move for a caste census. Then Law Minister Veerappa Moily wrote to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh about collecting caste/ community data in Census 2011. But on March 1, 2011, Home Minister P Chidambaram opposed the decision in Lok Sabha. Singh's government ultimately decided to conduct a full Socio Economic Caste Census (SECC) instead.
The SECC data was published by the Ministries of Rural Development and Housing & Urban Poverty Alleviation, which conducted the census in rural and urban areas respectively, in 2016. However, the data remain unavailable. The Narendra Modi government has said it is 'not reliable'.
There is so far no precise estimate of India's OBC population. The National Commission for Backward Classes lists over 2,600 castes in the central list of OBCs for 27% reservation. The Mandal Commission said OBCs were 52% of the population. A report based on the National Sample Survey Organisation's 61st round, released in October 2006, put this figure at 41%.
All of this data will now be available after the delayed Census of 2021 announced by the Modi government.
This is a revised and updated version of an explainer that was first published on March 29, 2023.
Shyamlal Yadav is one of the pioneers of the effective use of RTI for investigative reporting. He is a member of the Investigative Team. His reporting on polluted rivers, foreign travel of public servants, MPs appointing relatives as assistants, fake journals, LIC's lapsed policies, Honorary doctorates conferred to politicians and officials, Bank officials putting their own money into Jan Dhan accounts and more has made a huge impact. He is member of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ). He has been part of global investigations like Paradise Papers, Fincen Files, Pandora Papers, Uber Files and Hidden Treasures. After his investigation in March 2023 the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York returned 16 antiquities to India. Besides investigative work, he keeps writing on social and political issues. ... Read More