Why this aggressive Congress push for OBCs?

New Delhi: Former Congress presidents Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi strongly advocated a sub-quota for Other Backward Classes (OBCs) in the women's reservation bill during their speeches in the Lok Sabha on Wednesday.

Both also pushed for an immediate caste census, echoing the Mandal brigade's long-standing demand insisting that it is a necessity to ensure social equality. 

A caste survey is already underway in Bihar, where two Mandal parties - Janata Dal (United) and Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) - along with the Congress are in power.  

The last nationwide caste survey was conducted in 1931 and India has from 1951 to 2011 counted and published caste data of only Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes.  

The Mandal parties argue that the available data set is 90 years old and that caste is often being taken as a factor for many government welfare schemes.  

In the Lok Sabha, Rahul Gandhi even went to the extent of saying that only three of the 90 secretaries in the Government of India are OBCs. He called it an insult to the community. 

This aggressive push by the Congress leaders could be attributed to the party's failure to assess the ground situation in the country, especially in the Hindi heartland, and accordingly, fine-tune its strategy in the aftermath of the Mandal commission report that gave 27% reservations to OBCs in government jobs.  

The Mandal politics in the late 1980s also saw the emergence of backward caste leaders such as Lalu Prasad, Nitish Kumar, late Mulayam Singh Yadav and late Sharad Yadav in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh.  

Along with the Mandal politics, the Ram Temple movement further dented the Congress party's support base. The grand old party ceded its political space and its traditional vote base also shifted. While its Dalit vote went to the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), the Muslims sided with the Samajwadi Party (SP) and the upper castes aligned themselves with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).  

Brahmins, Muslims and Dalits were once the traditional vote banks of the grand old party but moved away from it with the emergence of Mandal-Kamandhal politics. Kamandhal refers to an oblong water pot used by the sadhus and the term is often used to describe the BJ's Hindutva politics.  

Over the years, the Congress has been relegated to political margins in crucial states such as Uttar Pradesh and Bihar.  

Initially, the OBCs backed parties like the SP, JD(U) and the RJD but of late they have rallied behind the BJP since 2014 when Narendra Modi, a backward caste leader himself, took over as the Prime Minister. 

The BJP is confident that its move to have only a sub-quota for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes in the women's reservation bill will not antagonise the OBCs due to Modi's popularity and charisma.  

But voices within the BJP in support of the demand have already started coming in with prominent OBC leader Uma Bharti expressing disappointment over the exclusion of the backward caste quota in the proposed legislation. She has written a letter to the Prime Minister on the issue, claiming that if the reservation for the OBC women is not ensured in the bill, then the faith of the community members in the BJP will be broken. 

On the other hand, the Congress wants to seize this opportunity and capitalise on this disillusionment of the OBCs with the BJP and win them over.  

In Karnataka during the assembly elections earlier this year, Rahul Gandhi coined a slogan, “Jitni abaadi utna haq” (the rights of any group should be proportionate to its population share). He also demanded that the 50% cap on reservations should be removed. His argument is that if 70© of Indians belong to the OBC/SC/ST castes, then their representation in various professions and sectors should also roughly be 70%.  

This aggression clearly indicates that the Congress wants to regain the political space it had ceded to other parties in the late 1980s