Even before Rashtrapati Bhavan’s communique was made public, the prime minister had announced it on X.
It was the Bharat Ratna for L.K. Advani.
Advani had already been awarded the Padma Vibhushan in 2015 and he has not done anything in the past nine years to be upgraded to the country’s highest award. Not that his active political career, which laid the bloody foundations of the rise of the BJP, was deserving of the award. Maybe it was a sop for his forced absence at the Ayodhya temple ceremony.
“Tushtikaran ki rajneeti,” as Advani would have said in the days gone by.
Or “vote bank politics”?
Advani is an Education
We should be grateful for Advani’s award because it serves as an education about the political and social values held dear by this government completing ten years in office.
It helps explain something important to the new Indian demographic, one that this government seeks to hold in its thrall with the illusion of “new India” – namely, the roots of the triumphalism over the Ram temple go down to some very old ideas.
The award to Advani also shows that far from ‘uniting’ the nation, the triumphalism is founded on dark lines drawn deep inside India’s soul, dividing it up so as to keep the fires of hatred burning continuously. What V.D. Savarkar termed, “Hinduize Politics and Militarize Hindudom.”
It was for that reason that a battle against composite Indian nationhood was successfully launched on a Toyota rath by Advani, intending to travel between Somnath and Ayodhya from September 1, 1990. The violence and the deaths (at least 564 across India) that the Rath Yatra led to were horrific in themselves, but more horrifying than that was the fusion of religion into India’s politics that it led to. LK Advani’s stated mission was to create the idea of a country defined by its ‘Hindu-ness’ alone and further, redefining Hinduism politically, as being anti-Muslim.
Narendra Modi with L.K. Advani during Advani’s Rath Yatra. Photo: Twitter
To be fair to Modi, in the run-up to the Ram temple consecration, he did everything he could to constantly remind people of “500 years”, making it clear that it was as much about standing atop a centuries-old destroyed mosque as it was about consecrating Lord Ram’s idol.
He said it clearly, but it is just that the cheerleaders, mostly media masquerading as journalists, kept headlines chirpy and history-free. One went with just, ‘January 22, 2024’. They did their best to chime in tune with the BJP, projecting it as a feel-good, memory-free moment, freed of the mosque that had been brought down to make the temple possible.
Advani’s Bharat Ratna has dealt a blow to that attempt at erasure.
‘Masterstroke’? No. Here’s Why.
As far as the tale of two Bharat Ratna awardees goes, the BJP would want to spin the award to Karpoori Thakur as a consummate ‘Mandal’ (social justice plank) stroke and Advani as a tribute to the ‘Kamandal’ (Hindutva) plank. But it is vital to understand why there is no Mandal-Kamandal combo-pack here.
There are reasons why the two planks, despite all attempts to make it look like a hyphenated single super-stroke, are as far apart as chalk and cheese. The proposition that the BJP has ‘Mandal-Kamandal’ stitched up is lazy and must receive more scrutiny.
It is sweet irony that Advani’s award followed Karpoori Thakur’s, because that was the sequence in which events had played out in 1990 – the Rath Yatra was first thought of in the aftermath of the V.P. Singh government’s acceptance of the Mandal Commission recommendations.
Once Prime Minister Singh announced his decision to accept B.P. Mandal’s report and give a 27% reservation quota in jobs to Other Backward Classes or OBCs, the BJP and Advani – who were so far supporting the National Front government from the outside – quickly embarked on a Rath Yatra to counter the revolutionary move that Mandal was.
It was not only because caste was a faultline that would break the myth of Hindu unity, but more importantly, Mandal was a clutch of ideas, drawing deeply on the awareness of justice and the reality of people kept subjugated, structurally and across religions. The term ‘social justice’ it brought into currency dealt a deathblow to the idea of ‘stability’ of a Hindutva social order. It demanded ‘samta’ or equality when the Hindutva only promised ‘samrasta’ or harmony.
The swiftness with which Advani undertook his journey across large parts of India, just to counter Mandal, clearly showed how far social justice was from Hindutva. In a political thesaurus, they were antonyms.
File photo. B.P. Mandal submitting copies of the Mandal Commission report to Gyani Zail Singh, former President of India.
Silence on Karpoori Thakur Formula
When Karpoori Thakur was honoured with a Bharat Ratna, nothing that he stood for was even mentioned. Thakur stood for a genuine reckoning of backwardness, through what became known as the Karpoori Thakur formula, cutting across faith, religion and gender. The formula spoke explicitly of 26% reservation for socially and economically backward groups, 12% for Extremely Backward Classes, 3% for educated women and 3% for poor women. As in the attempt to cynically appropriate Bhagat Singh and Subhas Chandra Bose, it was important for the BJP to empty the person of his soul. But first, of his politics.
Karpoori Thakur’s son, Janata Dal (United) MP Ramnath Thakur recounted to me over a year ago, that Diwali afternoon 46 years ago, on November 26, 1978, in Patna’s Gandhi Maidan. He noticed his father, then Janata Party chief minister in Bihar take a hard look at PM Morarji Desai who was on stage railing against the idea of reservations.
“Jannayak (as Thakur was to be known later) duly escorted PM Desai back to the airport for Delhi, and drove back straight to Sachivalaya, issued a notification at 8.30 pm” to put in place the famous Karpoori Thakur formula – a 26% reservation in government jobs for the marginalised classes.
In April 1979, over 100 lives were lost in communal rioting in Jamshedpur, around Ram Navami. India Today wrote in May, 1979 that “accusing fingers” were “now being pointed at the Hindu extremists, the RSS, for provoking the riots.” The magazine contemptuously spoke of how “a bleary-eyed Karpoori Thakur (nursing a three-day old shave, as usual, for special effect) clucked around in the Circuit House trying to gloss over the outspoken claims of his old friend Raj Narain (who, as usual, accused the RSS with no effect at all)”.
A commission of enquiry headed by Justice Jitendra Narain, a retired judge of the Patna high court “found the RSS and then Jan Sangh MLA Dinanath Pandey primarily responsible.”
Karpoori Thakur’s government in Patna, barely months into its term, was swiftly brought down due to the machinations of Jan Sangh elements in the Janta Party that were deeply uncomfortable with a meaningful project for upliftment being put into place. The Sangh’s long-term goals of taming the population and defeating the idea of social democracy were hampered by the Karpoori Thakur formula.
Also read: When Karpoori Thakur’s Government Fell and He Faced Sangh Abuse
That there is no combo-pack of Mandal and Kamandal is also evidenced in clear terms in the recent argument by the BJP leaders in Bihar that the caste census conducted by the previous Mahagathbandhan government of RJD-JD(U) was unfairly accommodating Muslims. Bihar has taken in Pasmanda or backward Muslims for job reservations. The Shershabadi and Duniya community Muslims (31.99% and 31.42% of whom are Below Poverty Line) will be beneficiaries of the expanded 43% reservation in jobs for OBCs and EBCs. Hindutva forces have constantly attempted to keep backward Muslims out of reservations for backwards.
Mandal and Kamandal: chalk and cheese
To oppose backward Muslims getting the same benefits that their counterparts, backwards from other faiths should get, violates an important tenet of the principle underlined in the Karnataka reservation scheme or the Telangana case. Tamil Nadu and Kerala too recognise backwardness across religions, and have done so, well before Mandal stirred up a storm in North India.
BJP’s Basavaraj Bommai government in Karnataka, before losing to the Congress in May last year, scrapped the reservation scheme that accorded 4% reservation to backward Muslim groups, among others.
In 1972, Karnataka’s legendary chief minister, Devaraj Urs, had accepted the recommendations of the Karnataka Backward Classes Commission headed by L.G. Havanur. This had changed the dynamics of how communities and castes enjoyed a share in power and representation. It pre-dated Mandal and is seen as the seminal method of evaluating backwardness.
In Telangana in November last year, Union home minister Amit Shah campaigned against ‘reservation for Muslims’ in the state, pledging that the BJP would nix it, if voted to power. The truth is that it isn’t reservation for Muslims, but reservation for Muslims who suffer social, economic and educational backwardness. There are similar provisions for other backward groups who may be observers of other faiths.
The BJP calling for backward Muslims to be taken out of the scheme of reservations, is an admission that it is against the core spirit of Mandal. The politics of Kamandal is about trying to draw a line dividing Hindus and minorities, mostly Muslim. It’s quite simple: If you genuinely value Mandal, i.e. empowerment and representation, social, economic and educational, you will find yourself ranged against the idea of Kamandal. When it comes to Mandal or Karpoori Thakur, the BJP wants to own their label, but eviscerate them of their real meaning.
Sub-categorisation amongst backwards
Moreover, there is no talk of the Union government implementing the Rohini Commission report which submitted its report after 14 extensions last year. It reportedly recommends a four-fold categorisation amongst OBCs and apportioning quotas accordingly. In UP, a report along similar lines formed to study the slicing of the 27% OBC reservation has been on ice ever since the Justice Raghvendra Kumar commission submitted its report in 2018.
There is a view that the BJP may spring a surprise and still accept sub-categorisation – as Modi has said BJP wants to do with the Dalit category in Telangana. To speak of ‘accommodation’ and even recognition of gods and deities of castes which are numerically weaker, such as in the case of the Nishads most visibly, giving space to Nishad raj in the broader pantheon, is nothing but Kamandal. This is because, here too, the dominant operating system remains Hindutva.
Here too, Hindutva has not progressed smoothly – ‘according respect’ to Raja Mihir Bhoj’s statue in Haryana’s Kaithal led to heightened tensions last year between the Gujjar and the Rajput communities. Acknowledging local heroes of communities, to ensure Hindutva can swallow up Mandal creates its own problems. The social and political tensions are inbuilt within the exercise.
In fact, bringing a variety of smaller caste groups under the Hindutva umbrella is the exact opposite of Mandal. It is an act firmly in the Hindutva quarter of things. Appropriation and assimilation with the unstated condition of the groups giving up a battle for their rights in exchange for respect in the Hindu political order – something they have been denied for years – may be a triumph of Hindutva for the time being.
However, it is certainly not about aligning Mandal and Kamandal. The attempt here is to get Kamandal to swallow up the very idea of Mandal.
And this story is yet to fully play out.
Sub-categorisation may in fact prove useful for Hindutva, a point that the more political proponents of Mandal make, as it may pit smaller groups against each other, and against the most numerous groups, with the BJP serving to act as a referee distributing crumbs. In UP, BJP has been openly mobilising OBCs, minus Yadavs, or Dalits, minus Jatavs. To have OBCs as an organic whole, questioning the basic tenets of Hindutva – the ancient social order – poses the strongest challenge to it.
BJP’s micro ‘social engineering’ approach to smaller caste groups may be yielding electoral dividends as of now, but it is aimed at attacking the very basis of Mandal.
BJP’s Electoral Success = OBC Empowerment?
This is to not deny that the BJP has been immensely successful in securing a very significant section of the OBC vote. From around 17% of the OBC vote in 2009 it has managed nearly 47% of the vote share in 2019 (as per CSDS estimates). The Mandal parties have registered serious political losses in the past decade. Their failure to draw in Extremely Backward Classes in the progressive scheme of things has shown how they may also not be fully mindful of what Mandal means.
Therefore, while acknowledging the BJP’s electoral success, it would be a mistake to see it as ticking off both the Mandal and Kamandal boxes.
The political philosophy that is understood by the term ‘Mandal’ predates B.P. Mandal’s commission, but it is now a convenient shorthand for social justice. It is about recognising caste and social backwardness as distinct and unique characteristics of the subcontinent.
Mandal argues for the eventual annihilation of the system of inequities in India across all spheres. ‘Mandal’ is not about ways of securing votes of the socially backward without a genuine shift of social conditions that perpetuate India’s hellish caste system. To reduce it to votes is to undermine the social oppression suffered by a vast majority of Indians for centuries.
South Asian Theme Song
As for Kamandal, or Hindutva or Hindu supremacism has equivalent categories in South Asia. There is Sunni-Muslim supremacism in Pakistan or Buddhist supremacism in Myanmar and Sri Lanka. It was always in the bone, as we know from India’s history since the 1920s. That was the decade when Hindutva and its Muslim counterpart the Muslim League’s idea of “two nations” – separate Hindu and Muslim nations – first took shape.
What we see in 2024, enjoying political power, is the same ‘Hindu nationalism’, which is India’s version of the discredited identity-linked European nationalism of the 1930s, rejected by our Constitution in 1950. Nine years before the Bamiyan Buddhas were blasted by the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2001, the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992 helped supremacism raise its head again in India. This has been on a social upswing since.
Advani’s Bharat Ratna is a timely reminder of the roots of where we are today.
Karpoori Thakur’s Bharat Ratna, and what was unsaid when the award was announced, is an even better refresher course on why there is no Mandal-Kamandal combo-pack.
In fact, what does go together is the very opposite of Mandal – AMandal (if one can term it that, where it signifies a philosophy to keep caste hierarchies intact) – and Kamandal.
Both rest on the fundamental principle of not accepting each Indian or every fellow human as an equal. Mandal is Mandal and Kamandal is Kamandal, and the twain shall never meet.