Can Caste-Based Reservations Deliver Victory For Rahul Gandhi In 2024? Here's What History Suggests

Before one reads further, it is important to note as to what this article is not going to help you with.

It is not going to tell you as to whether reservation on the basis of caste be it for the Scheduled Castes (SC), Scheduled Tribes (ST) or Other Backward Classes (OBC) communities is desirable or constitutionally tenable.

It  is also not going to tell you as to whether there is a constitutional justification for revisiting the Indira Sawhney judgement by way of a constitutional amendment and decreeing that henceforth reservation for the SC, ST and backward communities would be 100 per cent for instance. 

The narrow purpose of writing this piece is to examine as to whether there is any political dividend to be realised out of increasing the ceiling of caste-based reservations, based on the experience of the last 30 years. 

It is important to explore this inasmuch as Rahul Gandhi who is the de facto leader of the Congress party has very expressly stated that his party, if returned to power, is going to conduct a nationwide caste census to figure out the exact percentage of the OBC community. 

What is left unstated or unsaid is that perhaps the number of seats that are already reserved for the community would be increased further. 

There has also been a caste census in Bihar recently. Although the exercise was stayed by the Patna High Court, its constitutional validity was later upheld and the issue is now pending before the Supreme Court of India. 

Without getting into a philosophical discussion on whether equality of outcome across groups is less or more desirable than equality of opportunity, it would be instructive to examine the political-career trajectory of the man who took the decision to implement the Mandal Commission recommendations — Vishwanath Pratap Singh. 

He had a remarkably short tenure of less than a year as prime minister of India and went on to lose power first to Chandrashekhar who successfully sought the support of the Congress party to assume the post of prime minister.

Subsequently, his Jan Morcha did badly in the 1991 Lok Sabha polls wherein Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) for the first time in its history won more than 100 Lok Sabha seats even as it finished far behind the Congress party which won 232. 

The next time the politics of 'OBC' reservation played itself out was in 2006 when the Mandal Commission recommendations were extended to another set of state-run educational institutions.

The minister who steered the proposals towards implementation was a certain Arjun Singh. At the time of writing, his political legacy such as it ever was is such that his grandson Arunoday Singh has decided to forge a career in Bollywood instead. 

We are also told that Mandal always trumps mandir and that caste-based entitlement politics are collectively the one silver bullet that is needed to defeat the BJP. 

The fact is that this is exactly what is being done for the past nine years now, and yet the BJP has won many more elections than it has lost. Even where it loses elections, it loses them so narrowly that 'Operation Kamal' and other such machinations are enough to get it back in power.

Even if one looks at the trajectory of the so called 'Mandal' parties, it is clear that the success that they have had is limited compared to what the BJP is managing now or what the Congress managed in its salad days when it was not an NGO. 

In Uttar Pradesh, the best vote percentage tally of the Samajwadi Party is 29.7 per cent which it notched up in 2012. The corresponding number for the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) is slightly higher at 30 per cent which it managed to notch up in 2007.

Neither party has been able to build a base in neighbouring and ethnically similar states like Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Uttarakhand or Chhattisgarh where politics continues to be played along the BJP-Congress binary or even in Jharkhand for that matter. 

The biggest success of Mandal politics is touted to be the 1993 Uttar Pradesh election and even then both SP and BSP combined won what was very much a victory on points and the BJPs tally during what was supposedly a great defeat was about 33 per cent of all seats in the house in what was back then a more fragmented electorate with the Congress a fading but far from minor player. 

In neighbouring Bihar, it seems that the other champion of social justice Lalu Yadav has had better luck and indeed it can be said that the BJP which is supposedly the big tent Hindu party has historically done worse than it has in Uttar Pradesh.

Nonetheless, it needs to be said that the only election that Lalu Prasad Yadav won fair and square was in 1995 and his party, which is supposed to rely upon a seemingly unbeatable combination of Dalits, backward castes and Muslims has frequently lost Vidhan Sabha as well as Lok Sabha polls to the BJP as well as the minor players in its coalition like Nitish Kumar. 

The Mandal versus kamandal binary seems to be at first blush an attractive proposition but probed further in empirical terms, it seems to be a castle fashioned out of sand.

Now that we have tentatively established that what is termed as 'Mandal' politics has never been a winning proposition, we shall try and examine as to why it is likely to fail for Rahul Gandhi just like it has failed for others who came before him and tried to practise it:

One. There is no homogeneity when it comes to the various castes that are grouped under the OBC category and therefore, there is no unified votebank. 

The various castes grouped under the OBC umbrella can be divided roughly into two categories. The first category comprises agricultural castes like the Kurmis and Ahirs in the context of the Hindi heartland while the other category comprises of occupational castes like goldsmiths, ironsmiths, barbers and shepherds. 

There is no unity when it comes to the experience of these castes and hence, it is extremely difficult to fashion an appeal that would equally resonate with members of all of these castes unless of course it is Hindutva. 

The grouping of all of these castes and communities under one umbrella which is something that the Indian state has done is akin to Julius Caesar standing on the western banks of the Rhine and deciding that all those who lived on the Eastern side were Germanic.

An appeal that is geared to individual castes, which are an endogamous group of clan networks or smaller groupings like Ati-pichhdas is likely to work better. 

Two. Caste-based reservations given the size of the Indian population benefit very small groups within the caste category. 

Consider this, for every successful candidate who writes the civil service exam there are 499 who fail. Let us say that reservation is doubled or even tripled for the OBC class and for the sake of argument we can do a thought-experiment wherein we say that it is a unified homogenous grouping.

Even then a back-of-the-envelope calculation would reveal that for every successful candidate there would be 149 who would be unsuccessful. 

Increasingly, in India, and this is something that my 'Trad' friends do not like, the joint family system is coming under severe strain.

Earlier, it would be easy for one beneficiary of a system to get his entire extended clan network to vote for the perpetuation of the same.

Today with increasing urbanisation, the salience of one's clan network and its elders in one's life has reduced significantly and is likely to reduce further. 

While about 10 per cent of all marriages today are inter-caste, this percentage is likely to increase in the future if we were to go by the trends that are observable.

Caste as a social institution seems to be on its way out although it is likely to retain its salience as a unit of political mobilisation, albeit increasingly less important in times to come. 

It is here that Prime Minister Narendra Modi's schemes that target individual beneficiaries with things like toilets, rural housing facilities and free rations are likely to succeed in a bigger way. 

Simply put, the aforesaid 499 who are definitely not going to become secretaries in Union government ministries are going to vote for the one who gives them things that make a tangible improvement to their lives than someone who makes a distant uncle or country cousin a secretary in the government of India. 

Three. Within the OBC category also, given the limited number of jobs and seats in government colleges and universities and government jobs that are available, there is strong competition between different castes. 

In Uttar Pradesh for example, it is difficult for Kurmis to see eye-to-eye with Yadavs. As mentioned earlier, this is the reason why targeted benefits for smaller subgroups are likely to work. 

Ultimately though the sad but indisputable fact is this. Over the last 75 years since we gained independence we have been unable to generate enough respectable employment and educational opportunities in our country.

The solution is to increase the size of the pie and then distribute the benefits to those who are eligible.

Slicing the pie and then distributing it in increasingly smaller portions to the teeming and toiling masses will always end up creating a situation where most end up with nothing. This is the big problem that our politicians need to solve. 

This is also the big problem that Rahul Gandhi and the Congress need to seek to solve if they are to be taken seriously as contenders to power. 

The promise of a caste census along with the implied promise of an increase in the height of the reservation ceiling is basically as Mahatma Gandhi famously put it in another context a post-dated cheque on a collapsing bank.

The reason why it is likely to fail as a vote-catching device to put it in other words is because it is just not going to touch the life of a critical mass of the population.