Lower Castes Hold Power In Bihar Not Progress

  • 05-Nov-2020
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Bihar, the first laboratory of positive discrimination in the Hindi belt. It initiated ambitious reservation policies as early as the 1970s under Karpoori Thakur and others, including B P Mandal who belonged to the same school of thought. Another socialist, Lalu Prasad, who joined politics in the context of the JP movement, governed Bihar for 15 years, directly or indirectly. Nitish Kumar, another OBC leader, continued in the same vein? In fact, in Bihar, political power is with lower castes while economic surplus and bureaucratic rule remain decisively with upper castes. Bihar was certainly the epicentre of the post-1990 “silent revolution” that resulted, across the Hindi belt, in the transfer of power from upper castes to OBCs. In the 1995 elections, OBCs were 44 per cent of the MLAs (including 26 per cent Yadavs), more than twice the proportion of the upper castes, who had always had more MLAs until then. In 2000, in Rabri Devi’s government, OBC ministers represented almost 50 per cent of the total, whereas there were not more than 13 per cent upper castes. Similarly, OBCs have benefited from job quotas. After Brahmins and other upper castes, Yadavs did better than any other caste group in jobs according to the Indian Human Development Survey of 2011-12. Ten per cent of them had salaried jobs and Kurmis were not lagging behind as 9 per cent of them had a salaried job. The achievement was a tad more than that of the Dalits, for whom affirmative action policies have been designed 40 years before: In Bihar, 8.9 per cent of Paswans and 7.7 per cent of Jatavs had salaried jobs. The RJD remains a Yadav party to a great extent as is evident from the number of Yadav candidates — 58 of 144 or 33 per cent of the seats it is contesting. And, of course, both partners can rely on Muslim voters, 17 per cent of the state’s population. After all, 12 Congress candidates and 17 RJD candidates come from this large minority community. Yet, this year, the RJD may primarily appear as an opposition party par excellence and cash in on the people’s anger with the regime. The state is one of the worst affected by the COVID-19 lockdown. Of its 38 districts, 32 suffer from reverse migration to add to its high unemployment rate.

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