Indian Politics & Policy Volume 3, Number 1, Spring 2020 | Page 78

Indian Politics & Policy
the proportion of forward caste MLAs
to MLAs elected from general seats
came down from 59.0 percent in 1962
to 48.6 percent in 1977. Further, the
proportion of backward castes ramped
up from 30.5 percent to 38.5 percent. 22
Political mobilization of backward
castes/classes in the Hindi belt,
more so in Bihar and UP, entered a new
phase in the 1980s. Now the mobilization
centered on the demand to implement
Mandal Commission’s recommendations
that included, among other
things, 27 percent reservation for OBCs
in public employments. Violent protests
and agitations by the supporters
and opponents of the new reservation
regime were unleashed in many parts
of the Hindi belt. The agitators again
occupied the streets when the Janata
Dal (JD) led government at the Centre
announced implementation of some of
the Mandal Commission’s recommendations.
The emerging situation placed
political parties, namely Congress and
the BJP, in a real quandary. For the BJP,
it seemed to shatter its attempts at Hindu
unity. But given its core base of support,
the forward castes, the party found
it extremely difficult to openly support
the new reservation regime. Congress’s
approach was also marked by ambiguities
and somersaults, as in the past. 23
To sum up, the Mandalization of
politics, especially since the late 1980s,
created a definite socio-political cleavage
between the backward and forward
castes in greater part of the Hindi belt.
In Bihar and UP, such a cleavage got
deeply entrenched, leading to the rise of
a new set of ruling elites, consisting of
and dominated by the backward castes.
III. Changing Political
Preference
While the political mobilization
of the backward castes
around the issue of social
justice dominated the national political
discourse in the 1990s, an all India
“OBC Vote” with marked proclivity
toward one particular party did not
emerge. In many studies, it has been
shown that OBCs tended to vote differently
in different spatio-political
contexts, 24 implying that the notion of
OBCs as a politically cohesive group is
a myth. Given the uneven and differential
political mobilization of the backward
castes across time and space, as
noted in the preceding section, this line
of argument holds some substance. But
the fact remains that a large subset, if
not a majority, of OBCs—at least in the
Hindi belt—threw weight behind those
parties arising out of the social justice
movement and thereby put national-level
parties, such as Congress and
the BJP, in their place.
Let us, therefore, look at the trajectories
of voting behavior of OBCs in
the Hindi belt. The discussion presented
in this section is based on rich datasets
generated by the Centre for the Study
of Developing Societies under the National
Election Studies (NES) Series
(post-poll surveys). 25 Table 1 presents
the trends and patterns of political preference
among OBCs in the Lok Sabha
(LS) elections. Four points emerge quite
clearly. First, the national parties—Congress
and the BJP—received significant
chunk of votes from the late 1990s
through 2009. During this period, the
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