The Rise of Goliath

by AK Bhattacharya

  But there is little doubt, and less scope for any debate, that they are closely interconnected events and indeed one led to the other. Remember that the BJP had supported the V.P. Singh government from the outside. If the Left had not opposed, the BJP may well have been part of the National Front government. V.P. Singh had to make a compromise of sorts by not including the BJP as an alliance partner since taking that path would have deprived his government the support of the Left.6

  It was under these circumstances that V.P. Singh decided to implement the Mandal Commission’s recommendations on reservation. This hurt the BJP the most, and in response, they had to intensify the mobilization of the Hindu vote bank through the movement for building a Ram temple in Ayodhya. Both were disruptions. The reservation politics, even as it upheld the principles of according social justice, impacted economic opportunities for large sections of Indians. The Mandir movement, on the other hand, was aimed at consolidating as well as exploiting a specific type of vote-bank politics. At one level, they were an outcome of the past four decades of policies; at another, they would leave an enduring impact on the way the economy would fare and politics would be practised in the decades to come.

  The Mandal Commission was set up on 1 January 1979 by the Janata Party government. Its prime minister, Morarji Desai, was acutely conscious of the need for ensuring social justice for those who needed affirmative action from the State to help them realize their potential for growth and development. Headed by Bindhweshari Prasad Mandal, it was called the Socially and Educationally Backward Classes Commission. At the time Mandal was asked to head the Commission, he was a member of the Lok Sabha representing Madhepura in Bihar. Earlier, Mandal had led a short-lived government in Bihar as its chief minister—just for forty-seven days. He belonged to a backward shudra family and had suffered the ignominy of public humiliation when he was a schoolboy. Mandal took just about two years to submit the Commission’s recommendations, but by that time the Janata Party government had fallen and a Congress government with Indira Gandhi as prime minister was in place at New Delhi. On 31 December 1980, Mandal submitted his report to the then President Neelam Sanjiva Reddy, recommending among other things reservation of 27 per cent of jobs under the Union government and public-sector undertakings for backward classes. This in effect would have raised the job reservation level in government undertakings to 49.5 per cent, as already people belonging to scheduled castes and scheduled tribes were given reservation of about 22.5 per cent of the available jobs.7

  For almost about a decade after the Commission’s submission of the report, there was no response from the government. Indira Gandhi from 1980 to 1984 and Rajiv Gandhi from 1985 to 1989 kept the Mandal Commission’s recommendations on hold. Even V.P. Singh showed no signs of looking at this report in the early part of his short tenure that began in November 1989.

  On 7 August 1990, Singh decided to accept the recommendations of the Mandal Commission. It, of course, could be implemented from 1993 after the Supreme Court had given its go-ahead, but the ball was set rolling in 1990. Singh’s decision in 1990 was one of the major disruptive steps that any government had taken in the sphere of social reforms aimed at ensuring social justice for people from underprivileged and backward classes. More than a quarter century later, the movement for expanding the scope for job reservation has seen no respite, let alone the raising of any questions on diluting the existing job quotas for people belonging to scheduled castes, scheduled tribes and specified backward classes. Indeed, in 2018, the Narendra Modi government passed a bill to amend the Constitution to provide constitutional status to the National Commission for Backward Classes.

  If in August 1990, V.P. Singh turned to the Mandal Commission’s report, which had been gathering dust in government cupboards for about ten years, there were many reasons. One, Singh as a politician has always believed in wearing his integrity and honesty on his sleeve. As commerce minister in Indira Gandhi’s government, he believed in holding open-house sessions with industry and trade representatives to resolve their problems related to exports or imports. This was a durbar style of governance. Perhaps knowing it full well that dismantling the highly deleterious and discretionary controls on trade and industry would take a longer time, he tried to liberalize the clearance process through such open consultations, which were held not only in New Delhi but also in important state capitals. Such interventions were largely discretionary, but they certainly improved the ease of doing trade and business at that time. And Singh acquired the halo of one who was open about addressing industry’s problems. It was in the same spirit that Singh would take a tough stance on tax evasion, corruption and fraud, when he became the finance minister in the Rajiv Gandhi-led government. He would launch raids at industrialists’ houses on suspicion of tax evasion and if Singh targeted any industry, it was left with no option other than making peace with the minister or coming clean.

  It was in a similar spirit that Singh wanted to display to all his commitment to social reform and delivering social justice to those who had remained backward for ages and had been denied the basic privileges and equal opportunities because they were born as backwards. And once he decided on extending reservation to backward classes, there was no going back for him, nor any scope for making some concessions here or making some minor adjustments there. In a newspaper interview, months after he had accepted the Mandal Commission’s recommendations leading to social and economic upheaval in the country, Singh stated: ‘Transformational forces are not the same as transactional forces. You cannot do good politics, you cannot transform the country through transaction. Transformation has its own dynamics. It is uncompromising. There is no quid pro quo.’

  Two, Singh soon realized that the political equations that he had worked out for running a coalition government was not sustainable for long. Within the Janata Dal, he had to keep in mind that his deputy prime minister, Devi Lal, remained highly ambitious and had not yet forgotten the pain of having come so close to becoming the prime minister but settling for the number two slot in the government. On the other hand, Chandra Shekhar, who had merged his Janata Party with Singh’s newly launched Janata Dal in 1988, was getting increasingly restive as he felt he and his followers were not getting their due under the new dispensation.

  After the 1989 election results were out, it had become clear that V.P. Singh would be the undisputed choice to lead the next government. However, there were other claimants too— Devi Lal of the Bharatiya Lok Dal, who was then the chief minister of Haryana, and Chandra Shekhar. In a secret alliance between Lal and Shekhar, it was agreed that the latter would propose the former’s name as the leader of the National Front to head the new government. However, Lal proved to be even wilier and he entered into an arrangement with Singh that he would be happy with a deputy prime minister’s post provided his name as the prime minister was proposed at the Central Hall, where the National Front was holding its meeting to select the leader of the group. A crestfallen Shekhar was a mute witness to how he was robbed of an opportunity to become the kingmaker and instead, Singh proposed Lal’s name as the prime minister and immediately thereafter Lal declined to lead the Front and requested Singh to take up the job instead.8 At the swearing-in ceremony in Rashtrapati Bhavan, so keen Devi Lal was to declare himself as the deputy prime minister that he took his oath as deputy prime minister. It was a violation of Constitutional propriety as apart from the person who takes oath as the prime minister, all other members of the council of ministers, irrespective of whether they enjoy the Cabinet rank or are simply a minister of state, take oath as a minister for the Union. President R. Venkataraman’s direction that Devi Lal should not insist on taking the oath as deputy prime minister was ignored. The beginning of the National Front was thus fraught with such devious politics and it did not take long for Singh to realize that the coalition could not last for long.

  Indeed, Singh had thought of a snap election within months of taking charge in New Delhi, in the hope that he would be able
to garner more seats for his party and could run the government without any reliance on the fractious members of his own party like Devi Lal and Chandra Shekhar or even the BJP, which were not part of his government but had given it support in Parliament. This support was crucial and helped Singh enjoy a majority in the Lok Sabha and form the government. Lal too had little trust in Singh or his politics. Not surprisingly, on 9 August 1990, Lal had planned a massive farmers’ rally in New Delhi to flex his political muscle and remind Singh how dependent he was on his grassroots support.

  Three, Singh appeared to be getting increasingly uncomfortable with the kind of Hindu mobilization the BJP had embarked on.9 Aware of the Rajiv Gandhi-led Congress’s attempt to woo Hindus in the run-up to the 1989 general elections (Gandhi had allowed the Shilanyas at the Ram Janambhoomi complex near the Babri Masjid and had even launched his party’s poll campaign from Faizabad), the BJP had stepped up efforts to mobilize the temple movement. Singh too appeared to be conscious that he must have a political answer to the BJP’s attempts at wooing a monolithic Hindu vote bank.10 The Hindu vote must be split, without which the BJP can become a bigger and bigger electoral force. The Congress had already sensed the power of the Hindu vote bank and had begun to tap into it. But without a proper strategy, the Congress, with its soft Hindutva campaign and its involvement in Shilanyas, succeeded in upsetting the Muslims, without making any substantial gains from the Hindu vote bank. The Hindus did not come on board because of the lack of an unambiguous approach to this issue. Singh did not want to commit the same mistake.

  On 7 August, just two days before Devi Lal was to hold a massive rally of farmers in New Delhi, Singh announced in Parliament that his government had decided to accept the recommendations of the Mandal Commission. Opponents of Singh within the Janata Dal were taken by surprise and the BJP saw trouble on the horizon. Streets of north Indian cities, particularly in Delhi, were witness to a series of protests and rallies against accepting 27 per cent reservation for backward classes in government jobs and admissions in educational institutions. It was not just the ordinary lives of people in cities that were disrupted, but India’s politics and economics too were disrupted in a fundamental way.

  Genesis of Reservation

  The Mandal Commission, set up by the Morarji Desai government on 20 December 1978, was not the first body to look into the question of steps to ameliorate the social and economic conditions of backward classes in the country. A presidential order issued on 29 January 1953, had set up the First Backward Classes Commission, headed by Dattatreya Balkrushna Kalelkar, also known as Kaka Kalelkar, a member of the Rajya Sabha at that time. Its terms of reference were to determine the criteria for considering if any sections of the people in India, in addition to the scheduled castes and scheduled tribes, should be classified as socially and educationally backward, prepare such a list, investigate the conditions of such socially and educationally backward classes and make recommendations. The Kalelkar Commission submitted its report on 30 March 1955. It had finalized a list of 2399 backward castes or communities, of which it opined 837 were the most backward. Its recommendations were quite controversial, and indeed Kalelkar as the chairman had recorded his differences with some of the Commission’s views in his letter, while submitting the report to the President. The Commission had suggested that a caste-wise enumeration of the population should be undertaken in the 1961 Census, all women be treated as backward, 70 per cent of seats in all technical and professional institutions be reserved for qualified students of backward classes and minimum graded reservation of vacancies be kept in all government services and local bodies for other backward classes. Graded reservation implied that the quotas would not be the same for all kinds of jobs—lower the category of service, the higher would be the reservation quota. For instance, the Commission said backward classes should have a reservation of 25 per cent in Class I jobs, 33 per cent in Class II jobs and 40 per cent in Class III and IV jobs. The Nehru government at the time found those too problematic to handle. It decided not to accept the recommendations of the Kalelkar Commission, but advised the states that they could go ahead and prepare their own lists of other backward classes and outline measures to ensure their social and educational advancement.

  It was crystal clear to Nehru that extending reservations for other backward classes, beyond the 22.5 per cent reservations already done for scheduled castes and scheduled tribes, was a political hot potato. That was the Congress view. With the first non-Congress government at the Centre in 1977, its prime minister, Morarji Desai, decided to set up the second commission that could make recommendations for improving the social and economic conditions of backward classes. Chaired by B.P. Mandal, the second commission also submitted its recommendations in just about two years. But by then the Congress was back at the Centre, with Indira Gandhi starting her second stint as India’s prime minister.

  The Mandal Commission had recognized that there were already 22.5 per cent of all government jobs and seats in educational institutions were reserved for scheduled castes and scheduled tribes and the responsibility of identifying the more numerous backward classes was even more complex and onerous. It noted that as much as 52 per cent of India’s population belonged to backward classes, but recommended that an additional 27 per cent of the government jobs and seats in educational institutions should be reserved for the identified backward classes. The Mandal Commission was more pragmatic as it sought to keep the overall reservation below the 50-per-cent-mark, so that it did not fall foul of the Supreme Court directive that such affirmative action could not be enforced on more than half of the available jobs and seats in educational institutions.

  Two Congress governments sat on the recommendations of the Mandal Commission for ten years. This was a telling comment on how disruptive the Congress must have found the recommendations if they were to be implemented. It could also be said that it was not just a question of its concern over administrative difficulties in implementing a highly disruptive move, but also a reflection of their political beliefs where social justice for the backward classes did not enjoy a very high priority in their thinking or political equations. It was V.P. Singh’s National Front, a non-Congress government at the Centre, which decided to implement it. In its election manifesto, the National Front had talked about the Mandal Commission and even the President’s address after the formation of Singh’s government (the President’s address before the start of a new government is the statement of the political executive and is endorsed by the Cabinet) had referred to the need for ensuring social justice through the Mandal Commission. But the manner in which the decision on its implementation was taken raises deeper questions about its political motives.

  The Modus Operandi

  On 6 August 1990, V.P. Singh surprised many of his top secretaries and even a few ministers, when at the usual Cabinet meeting he proposed a discussion on the implementation of the recommendations made by the Mandal Commission. Both his principal secretary, B.G. Deshmukh, and his cabinet secretary, Vinod C. Pande, were taken aback and sought more time before the implications of the Mandal Commission could be studied and a note could be prepared on the basis of which the Cabinet could discuss the issue. Singh shot down that suggestion. Instead, he asked the Social Welfare Minister Ram Vilas Paswan, who himself was born in a Dalit family, to start the discussion. Paswan, who was the minister for labour and employment, argued for the acceptance of the recommendations and he was supported by Sharad Yadav, the minister for textiles, and Ajit Singh, minister for industries, who even suggested that the reservations should be extended to cover Jats as well. Only a few of the ministers seemed to be not very enthusiastic about the idea of implementing the Mandal Commission recommendations in such a hurry. Finance Minister Madhu Dandavate was asked why he was being equivocal. Home Minister Mufti Mohammed Sayeed had some reservations and pleaded for time. The home minister feared that there could be a law and order problem after the announcement and the country should be prepared to ensure
peace and harmony in such a situation. There was also a suggestion by some that apart from social and educational backwardness as criteria for determining reservation quotas, economic backwardness too should be one of the criteria to decide on reservation. But Singh was determined to get the Cabinet to approve his proposal. A day earlier, on 5 August, he had mooted the idea of removing a recalcitrant Devi Lal, the deputy prime minister, from the party and the government. However, a large gathering of backward leaders did not approve of Singh’s proposed action against Lal and instead asked him to implement the National Front’s poll promise of giving effect to the Mandal Commission’s recommendations on reservations. Time was of the essence. Singh immediately convened an informal meeting of the Political Affairs Committee of the Cabinet, where it was decided that the recommendations of the Mandal Commission should be adopted. That explained the full Cabinet meeting on 6 August. The next day, he made an announcement to this effect in Parliament.