India Briefing by India Briefing

Author:India Briefing
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 4692640
Publisher: Taylor and Francis

The Congress, the BJP, and Mandal

In the late 1990s, for a brief period, three of the four largest states of the Hindi belt were governed by OBC chief ministers: Kalyan Singh in Uttar Pradesh, Rabri Devi in Bihar, and Asok Gehlot in Rajasthan. Madhya Pradesh alone had an upper-caste chief minister, Digvijay Singh. Interestingly, the three OBC chief ministers belonged to three different parties: the Bharatiya Janata Party, the Rashtriya Janata Dal, and the Congress Party. Certainly, this is an indication of the rise to power of the lower castes in North India, but while the RJD is naturally committed to the cause of the OBCs, the other two parties may be more eager to defuse the mobilization of the lower castes than anything else.

The way the Janata Dal and its offshoots—the Samajwadi Party and the RJD—on the one hand and the Bahujan Samaj Party on the other hand consolidated their bases among the OBCs and the SCs, respectively, in the 1990s posed a threat to the Congress and the BJP in North India. Until then, the former had owed most of its success to its catchall party profile, while the latter, like its earlier incarnation, the Jana Sangh, not only had upper-caste members at its helm but primarily represented the urban middle class of North India, which could hardly compete with the OBCs in terms of numbers. Both parties had to adjust to the Mandal challenge.

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