Will quota push help the Opposition?

Historically, political weaponisation of caste, especially through reservations, has required a very shrill anti-upper caste rhetoric. Dravidian politics in its formative years and the rise of Mandal politics from the 1970s onwards in states such as Bihar is a testimony to this. The leadership of such polarisation has not been upper caste so far. Can the Congress, with a Brahmin family as its de facto leadership, lead such polemics? Recent efforts to build Opposition unity have also talked about implementing reservations in the private sector. Legality aside, this will be one of the most binding regulations on the operation of private capital in India and is likely to invite a strong backlash. Is the Opposition, especially the Congress, willing to talk the talk and burn its bridges with private capital? Last, but not the least, is the question of how the BJP will respond to it. It will be naïve to assume that it will not, especially if the demand for proportionate and private sector reservations gathers political momentum. Two outcomes are likely: It will either argue for reducing the quota for dominant OBCs — the Justice Rohini Commission has most likely laid the groundwork for this argument — or give a communal tone to the issue by demanding that minority OBC groups be excluded from any such expansion of reservations. Neither of these spins will be easy to handle for the Opposition.

That said, India’s political history tells us that one should never dismiss the electoral appeal of caste-based redistributive policies. But history also tells us that when it does bring political change, this is necessarily accompanied by social unrest.