Ahead of key polls, BJP’s OBC conundrum

The BJP's attack on Congress leader Rahul Gandhi that he "insulted" not only the Modi surname in his 2019 speech in Kolar but all castes under the OBC classification is with an eye on the Assembly polls in December and the Lok Sabha polls next year in the Hindi heartland states.

Of the three state governments the Congress runs, its chief ministers in two—Rajasthan's Ashok Gehlot and Chhattisgarh's Bhupesh Baghel—are OBCs. In the forthcoming elections, the BJP's principal challenge in its primary catchment area will come from OBC leadership across the Hindi heartland—Baghel, Gehlot, JDU-RJD's Nitish Kumar and Tejashwi Yadav in Bihar, and Samajwadi Party's Akhilesh Yadav in Uttar Pradesh.

But the BJP faces the OBC question even in states outside the cow belt, with Odisha the latest battleground. Naveen Patnaik's Biju Janata Dal government has moved to include 22 castes in the state's OBC list. It will also conduct an OBC census in April. The Odisha Assembly polls are held simultaneously with the Lok Sabha elections.

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Bihar's Mahagathbandhan government will conduct a caste census in May to ascertain the numbers of the OBCs. Nearly all opposition parties, including the Congress, have demanded a caste census. The SP rejigged its national executive earlier this month, with most of its 62 members from among Dalits and OBCs. It was also quick to sack its upper caste spokespersons who questioned party leader Swami Prasad Maurya flagging the casteist couplet of Hindu epic Ramcharitmanas.

However, for the BJP, of the dozen states with its CMs, only two —Madhya Pradesh's Shivraj Singh Chouhan and Karnataka's Basavaraj Bommai—have OBCs at the helm. It tried to address the problem last week by appointing OBC leaders as its state unit chiefs in Bihar and Odisha.

Last year, it appointed Bhupendra Chaudhary as its state unit chief in UP, but its OBC leadership, whether Chaudhary or Keshav Prasad Maurya, lacks the charisma of Kalyan Singh. The Yogi Adityanath government continues to be termed a "Thakur-Brahmin" one.

At crucial junctures, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has spoken of his "pichchada" or OBC status, as he did in the 2014 Lok Sabha campaign in UP and Bihar and again in Gujarat in the 2017 Assembly polls, when his party was nervous about the election outcome.

Congress sources said the BJP's raising of the OBC issue could backfire, especially amid likely agrarian distress because of inclement weather since most OBCs hail from intermediate farming communities and with Bihar and Odisha conducting caste censuses, the results of which would put pressure to increase OBC reservation.

The confusion is apparent in the RSS as well, when Mohan Bhagwat blamed "pandits" for the caste system, only to clarify a day later that he meant "learned men" and not "Brahmins".