New Delhi, January 27: Prime Minister Narendra Modi is preparing a perfect recipe to repeat his victory in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections.
Mandal (catering to all sub-castes among the BCs) and Kamandal (catering to the upper castes) is the formula being worked out.
There are 3000 OBC communities as marked by the Mandal Commission. It is found that 90 percent of the reservations benefits are garnered by about a dozen dominant castes among the OBC. These are Yadavs, Jats, Kurmis, Vokkaligas, Sainis, Thevars, Ezhavas etc.
Other small communities among the OBCs are left in the lurch.
This injustice and discrimination of several small communities among the OBCs had to be set right. Modi had set up a four-member Commission Justice (Retd) Rohini in 2017 to examine if the other backward classes need to be sub-categorised to ensure equitable distribution of reservation benefits.
After 13 extensions, the Rohini Commission’s term comes to end on January 31, 2023. The Rohini Commission may submit its report in a day or two to the government.
The government is mulling to categorize the 3000 and odd OBCs into four broad categories with fixed percentage of benefits going to each category from the overall 27 percent OBC reservation.
Empowering the smaller and neglected OBC communities is expected to yield huge electoral dividends, according to BJP calculations. The party has already successfully experimented with this idea in Uttar Pradesh by creating a social coalition of non-Yadav OBC castes.
The biggest pushback to Modi comes from the leaders of the dominant OBC castes. For example, Lalu Prasad Yadav and Nitish Kumar in Bihar, Akhikesh Yadav in UP, H.D. Deve Gowda in Karnataka among the non-Congress parties.
From the Congress, the BJP faces challenge from OBC leaders such as Bhupesh Baghel in Chattisgarh, Ashok Gehlot and Sachin Pilot in Rajasthan, Siddaramaiah and D. K. Shiva Kumar in Karnataka and Bhoopinder Singh Hooda in Haryana.
It is being calculated that Rohini Commission report may prove to be the much-needed weapon for the BJP to build a nation-wide new social coalition excluding the dominant castes among the OBCs and including the neglected smaller communities for reservations benefits.
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