The Politics Of OBC

The OBC vote is critical for every party, which is why the opposition is clamouring for a community census. The ruling BJP fears this will unsettle its social engineering strategy and upset the core upper caste vote base

- Kaushik Deka

ON AUGUST 23, BIHAR CHIEF MINISTER AND JANATA DAL (UNITED) leader Nitish Kumar formed an unlikely alliance with his political rival, the Rashtriya Janata Dal’s Tejashwi Yadav, who also happens to be the leader of the opposition in the state assembly. The two of them, along with the leaders of 10 other parties from Bihar, met Prime Minister Narendra Modi in New Delhi and demanded a caste-based census, even though the Union government had in July stated in Parliament that an enumeration of castes will not be part of the 2021 census “as a matter of policy”.

At the core of this growing clamor for a caste, the census is the desire to pinpoint the strength of the OBCs (Other Backward Classes), who have of late emerged as the most influential voting group in electoral politics. With no official count, there is a perception that the OBCs account for more than 52 per cent of the population (the Mandal Commission estimate from four decades ago, which took as its base the 1931 caste census, the last time it was done), and, therefore, deserve more than 27 per cent reservation. If a caste census substantiates this notion, this may result in much stronger demand for a rejig of the existing reservation structure.