Rahul Gandhi’s new caste calculus

NEW DELHI: In a radical departure from his party’s reliance on upper castes, Rahul Gandhi is gambling with the Mandal card in UP with a huge increase in tickets to OBC (Other Backward Caste) and MBC (Most Backward Caste) nominees.
Out of 325 candidates declared by Congress so far, around 90 are from these groups. Congress leaders say it is double what the party gave OBCs and MBCs in the 2007 Assembly elections.
The race for OBC-MBC votes has resulted in some surprise choices, creating a storm in the party’s Brahmin-dominated state unit. Nominee for the Jamania seat in east UP’s Gazipur district, for instance, is an MBC woman Kalawati Bind, currently in jail on a murder charge and suspected Naxalite links.
Her Congress backers, like Amaresh Misra, say she is a political activist wrongfully arrested for protesting against the illegal detention of a Bind boy for theft. In the ensuing violence, a police inspector was shot dead. Kalawati was chosen despite her history because as her village’s ex-pradhan, she is her community’s most prominent face in an area with 2 lakh Bind.
In Bundelkhand, the feisty leader of the dreaded allwoman Gulabi gang, Sampat Pal, has a Congress ticket from Manikpur. Also an MBC from the Garediya (shepherd) caste, she bagged a nomination in the face of stiff opposition from local Congressmen who consider her an “extortionist’’. But in Rahul’s book, she is an important MBC leader of a gang of women who are a force to reckon with for their demonstrations against corrupt and unpopular state officials.
Rahul’s plunge into the caste matrix of UP is because Congress has been left out of UP’s social churning over the last 25 years. While SP and BSP led the charge of lower castes, and BJP briefly reaped benefits by projecting Lodh leaders like Kalyan Singh, Congress remained stuck in the Brahmin-Muslim-Dalit combine Indira Gandhi crafted in the 1970s.
The spearhead of Rahul’s strategy is Beni Prasad Verma, a Kurmi leader who left the SP before the 2009 LS polls to join Congress. He is credited with the party’s electoral gains in central UP’s Kurmi belt. Rahul ‘s team has done homework on the demographics of each Assembly segment, breaking social groupings down to the smallest castes. Verma’s long years in SP have helped.