Comment on the emergence of Backward classes in the Indian politics. (UPSC CSE Mains 2016 - Political Science and International Relations, Paper 1)
- When only the SCs and the STs were being counted, the upper castes were able to travel incognito with the OBCs as part of a ‘general category’ accounting for three-quarters of the population. The rise of the Other Backward Classes (OBCs) in the political arena since the mid-1980s has been heralded as India’s “silent revolution”. Indeed, there is no doubt, especially since the 73rd and 74th constitutional amendments2 in the early 1990s, that the so-called lower castes have become an important force in Indian politics at all levels - local, state and national.
- Once the OBCs acquired a distinct national identity after the Mandal moment, the ‘public secret’ of Indian politics stood revealed — namely, that the Hindu upper castes, numbering no more than 15-20 per cent of the population, were undoubtedly our most powerful and pampered minority. In the wake of this revelation, political formations with Hindu upper castes as their core constituency were forced to seek a broader identity, and ‘Hindutva’ emerged (in part) as a response to ‘Mandal’. The Mandal revolution helped impart a new and enabling legibility to Indian politics.
- The OBC category account for roughly 42 per cent of the population and, according to current estimates, are the single largest group in Indian politics from a pan-Indian perspective. Except in the broadest contexts, both practical politics and political analysis require that the OBCs be disaggregated. Since it is by itself an important site for constant fission and subsequent fusion, the OBC category helps highlight these processes.
- Unlike the polar extremes marked by the Dalits and the upper castes, the OBCs inhabit the middle range of the caste hierarchy and are therefore exposed — albeit very unevenly — to the privileges as well as the privations of caste status. Hence, the OBC category becomes the site where productive but difficult questions about the changing role and weight of caste in relation to other dimensions of identity (such as class, region or religion) are most likely to emerge.
- Because the castes that come under the OBC category are not subjected to the intense and unrelenting prejudice that the Dalits face, issues like the impact on caste of changes in class status are given more space. It is here that we can expect to learn more about how caste is reproducing itself in the contemporary world, and how it is changing in the process.
- Political scientists Christophe Jaffrelot and Gilles Verniers have pointed out that the Lok Sabha became more representative of the caste composition of India between the late 1980s and 2004, when the proportion of upper caste parliamentarians declined from nearly half to 34 per cent, while that of OBC members went up from 11 to 26 per cent. This was largely due to the emergence of regional parties with a strong OBC representation.
- The OBC category is good to think about because it represents an active and rapidly evolving section of the polity that no other section can afford to ignore. Because of its size, and the fact that it is itself a conglomeration of disparate elements, the internal dynamics of this category constitute the cutting edge of contemporary politics. By projecting in sharp focus, the good, the bad and the ugly aspects of our polity, the OBC category achieves the status of a grouping that provides a primer on Indian politics.
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