NDA’s unhappy tryst with reservation stirs continues
NEW DELHI: Gujarat, Bihar, Andhra Pradesh and now Haryana— tension over caste-based quota refuses to leave the BJP-led NDA’s ruling establishment.
Last year, young Patidar leader Hardik Patel suddenly became the rallying point for a section of the Gujarat’s Patidar community that started demanding reservation under the Other Backward Classes (OBC) category.
It was also the first such agitation in Gujarat in the recent past, which had been ruled by Narendra Modi for 11 years before he became the Prime Minister in 2014.
Even before the Gujarat agitations died down, a different controversy over caste-based reservation erupted in the BJP-RSS quarters. During the campaign for the Bihar election, RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat, in an interview to the Sangh’s mouthpiece Organiser, pitched for a review of the current reservation policy.
Bhagwat’s comment was immediately picked up by opponents RJD chief Lalu Prasad and Bihar CM Nitish Kumar who “simplified” it to their voters as a BJP attempt to take away the entitlements of the poor. The BJP eventually lost the elections.
Earlier this month in Andhra Pradesh, the politically powerful Kapu community resorted to aggressive demonstrations to demand their inclusion in the Other Backward Classes category. Roads were blocked, a train was set afire and mobs went on a rampage.
The Haryana Jats campaign, however, has singed both of the country’s biggest political parties. The crisis earlier reached a crescendo during the Congressled UPA government.
To address the quota stir, the UPA government had announced inclusion of Jats from nine states in the central quota of OBC weeks before the 2014 general election. These nine states are Haryana, Gujarat, Delhi, Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Bihar.