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In February this year, Prime Minister Narendra Modi conducted a post-Budget webinar titled 'Reaching the last mile,' in which he highlighted the plight of lower caste Muslims. As quoted in The Hindu, he said,
However, just a few months later, Bharatiya Janata Party leaders have shifted their attention towards Pasmanda Muslims in West Bengal, claiming that many of the Muslim castes added to the state's Other Backward Classes list have been wrongly added and need to be removed.
BJP leader Hansraj Ahir, who is currently serving as the chief of National Commission for Backward Classes, claimed on 8 June that as many as 118 castes in the state's OBC list of 179, were Muslim.
He also stated that when the Left Front government under Jyoti Basu introduced reservations for the OBCs in 1993, the first list of 66 communities had 12 Muslim and 54 Hindu castes. He claimed that the disproportionate number of Muslim castes in the current list, when their population is less than the Hindus, shows the list hasn't been prepared objectively.
BJP president JP Nadda, a few days later, concurred with Ahir saying that the Mamata Banerjee-led Trinamool Congress government was favouring Muslims. He also went on to allege that the Banerjee government was giving OBC certificates to Bangladeshi infiltrators and Rohigyas.
The OBC list has been amended multiple times in the last decade and a half and the new additions by the Left Front and later TMC government have primarily been Muslim castes.
Political commentators pointed out that the BJP's rhetoric is not new. Adil Hossain, assistant professor at Azim Premji University, told The Quint that the BJP tried to communalise OBC politics in West Bengal just before the 2021 assembly elections as well but massively failed.
"This happened due to the fact that historically after the partition, the politicisation of identities happened more around class instead of caste which basically means that caste groups rarely acted as a single vote bank," he explained.
Hossain also asserted that without robust data, the BJP cannot successfully challenge the TMC on caste issues. "In the absence of a caste census, which happened last time in 1931 in Bengal, most of the communalisation attempt will remain rhetorical claims. The BJP should demand a caste census in West Bengal to have a clear picture on this."
The demand for caste census has become a focal point of Opposition parties' agenda. Rahul Gandhi made it an election issue in the recent assembly elections in Karnataka. Other parties like Samajwadi Party, Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, Rashtriya Janata Dal, and Janata Dal (United) too have tried to corner the BJP on this issue.
As the Opposition's electoral campaign coalesces around 'social justice' ahead of the Lok Sabha elections next year, with OBC category at its centre, the BJP will have to find a strategy to counter it.
The BJP has so far tried to disaggregate the OBC category and reach out to the more marginalised among them. As the Yadavs are the core voters of the Samajwadi Party in Uttar Pradesh, it devised campaigns to attract Nishads and other numerically smaller castes to its fold. It is trying the same strategy in Bihar against RJD's Yadav and JD(U)'s Kurmi voter base.
In West Bengal, it is pitting Hindu OBCs against Muslim OBCs, however, its main goal seems to be attracting the Hindu intermediary castes like Mahisya and Tili that are not part of the OBC category but are demanding inclusion in it.
Ayan Guha, author of the recent book The Curious Trajectory of Caste in West Bengal Politics: Chronicling Continuity and Change, told The Quint,
In the 2021 assembly election campaign, Mamata Banerjee had promised inclusion of Mahisya, Tili and other similarly placed castes in the OBC category.
"We shall appoint a Special Task Force to examine and propose OBC status to all the communities which are not recognised as OBCs like Mahisya, Tili, Tamul and Sahas," she had said.
At that time, JP Nadda too had promised in his campaign speech that if the BJP government came to power, it would set up a commission and add castes like Mahisya, Tili and others mentioned in the Mandal Commission report to West Bengal's OBC list.
The central government's OBC list contains only 99 castes for West Bengal, which seems like a massive undercount for a state with estimated population of over 10 crore.
The reason for this may be found in the state's particular history as far as caste mobilisation is concerned. The initial Congress governments and later the Left Front, which ruled for 34 years from 1977 to 2011, were hostile towards caste-based reservations. The communist leaders refused to acknowledge that caste had any significance in the Bengali society.
While southern states and Maharashtra had quotas for the OBCs since before independence and other states joined them in the first three decades after independence, West Bengal introduced OBC quota only in 1993 after the Mandal churn of the early 1990s. And even then, the Left Front government stipulated a miserly 7% quota for them in government jobs. It refused to sanction quota in the higher educational institutions.
Adil Hossain told The Quint,
Ayan Guha elaborates that we need to pay attention to factors like demography and political economy while explaining the lack of caste mobilisation in West Bengal.
As was the case in 2019 Lok Sabha elections and 2021 assembly elections, caste issues will dominate the election campaign in the upcoming Lok Sabha elections and the assembly elections a year later. This points to a significant change in the state's politics.
However, in the face of growing literature, lower caste movements like Matua Mahasangh, and the politicisation of the OBC category, that claim is facing intense scrutiny. The BJP, unsurprisingly, is trying to direct this energy towards its communal agenda, claiming Bangladeshis and Rohingyas are getting OBC certificates. Hossain says that the BJP's manoeuver will result in consolidation of Bengali Muslims towards the TMC.
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