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Aug 24, 2026
YagnaSri

The Politics of Divisiveness: V.P. Singh, the Mandal Commission, and Caste Fragmentation in UP Part 10

In the annals of post-independence Indian political history, few decisions have had consequences as far-reaching, as deeply divisive, or as permanently transformative as V.P. Singh's announcement on August 7, 1990, that his government would implement the recommendations of the Mandal Commission and extend 27 per cent reservations in central government jobs to Other Backward Classes. Made without cabinet consultation, parliamentary debate, or preparatory groundwork, the announcement triggered a political earthquake that reshaped Uttar Pradesh's social landscape more profoundly than any event since independence. To understand contemporary UP, its caste arithmetic, its party formations, its political vocabulary, one must understand the Mandal moment and what it did to the social fabric of the Hindi heartland. The Mandal Commission: Background and Recommendations The Mandal Commission, formally the Second Backward Classes Commission, chaired by Bihar politician B.P. Mandal, submitted its report in 1980 under Morarji Desai’s Janata government. The report identified 3,743 castes as socially and educationally backward. It recommended reserving 27 per cent of central government jobs for them, in addition to the existing 22.5 per cent reservation for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes. The total reservation would thus reach 49.5 per cent, just below the 50 per cent ceiling set by the Supreme Court in the Balaji case. The commission's analytical framework was based on a social survey of caste conditions across India and rested on the premise that OBC communities suffered systematic social and economic disadvantage that class-neutral measures alone could not address. Because Brahmins, Rajputs, Kayasthas, and Banias—the forward castes were dramatically overrepresented in government employment and educational institutions relative to their population share, the commission argued that affirmative action was the appropriate remedy. The report had gathered dust for a decade. Indira Gandhi's Congress governments had found it politically inconvenient: implementing it would antagonise the forward-caste vote bank while mobilising the OBC vote for regional challengers. The Congress preferred to maintain its cross-caste coalition through symbolic gestures, welfare schemes, and cultivating OBC leaders within the party structure, rather than through structural change in the reservation system. V.P. Singh's Calculation: Political Survival over National Interest V.P. Singh's decision to implement Mandal in August 1990 was not, by any serious analysis, primarily motivated by concern for OBC welfare. It was an extraordinary political survival calculation. His government faced mounting pressure from two directions: from the BJP, which had withdrawn parliamentary support over the Ayodhya movement, and from Devi Lal's faction within the Janata Dal, which was running a destabilisation campaign against Singh's leadership. The Mandal announcement was designed to achieve multiple political objectives simultaneously. By mobilising OBC communities around the promise of reservations, Singh hoped to consolidate the OBC vote bank for the Janata Dal and counter the BJP's Hindu nationalist wave. By positioning himself as the champion of social justice against the BJP's alleged upper-caste bias, he hoped to define a new political cleavage between 'social justice' forces and 'communal' forces — that would reshape the political landscape in his favour. The fact that implementing the report would also ignite a social conflagration was apparently of secondary concern. The political calculation was not entirely wrong in its diagnosis of the possibilities. The OBC communities of UP Yadavs, Kurmis, Koiris, Lodhs, Telis, and hundreds of others had genuine grievances about their underrepresentation in government employment and their subordination within the social hierarchy. The Mandal announcement gave political entrepreneurs within these communities a framework to legitimise their social claims. For leaders like Mulayam Singh Yadav, who had been building the Yadav political movement within the Janata Dal, Mandal was a transformative gift: it gave the OBC mobilisation the language of constitutional rights and social justice rather than mere electoral arithmetic. The Forward-Caste Backlash: The Cities Burn The reaction of upper-caste students and youth to the Mandal announcement was immediate, violent, and politically significant. Across northern India's cities, and nowhere more intensely than in UP's major urban centres of Lucknow, Kanpur, Allahabad, and Varanasi, young men from Brahmin, Rajput, Bania, and Kayastha families took to the streets in protest. The demonstrations quickly turned violent, with police clashes, property destruction, and in the most extreme cases, the self-immolation of students who saw the expansion of reservations as the permanent closure of their employment prospects. The self-immolations, beginning with Rajiv Goswami in Delhi and continuing with dozens of young men across UP, were the most visible manifestation of a depth of anguish and rage among forward-caste youth that the political class had either ignored or deliberately exploited. Whatever the merits of the Mandal Commission's analysis and the analysis of OBC disadvantage were in many ways well-founded, the manner of implementation, without preparation, without consultation, and without any accompanying measures to expand the total supply of government employment, maximised social conflict while minimising developmental benefit. The political consequences of the forward-caste backlash were profound. A generation of upper-caste youth, politicised by the Mandal agitation, was driven toward the BJP and its cultural nationalist alternative. The simultaneous intensification of the Ayodhya movement and L.K. Advani's Rath Yatra, launched in September 1990, just weeks after the Mandal announcement, gave these alienated young men a political cause that transcended caste. The juxtaposition of 'Mandal' and 'Mandir' in the political discourse of 1990 was not coincidental: it reflected a genuine political dynamic in which upper-caste mobilisation against reservations found expression through cultural nationalist channels. The OBC Empowerment Paradox: Real Gains, Political Exploitation It would be intellectually dishonest to deny that the Mandal process, however cynically initiated, produced some genuine social gains. The reservation framework did expand OBC representation in government employment over the following decades. More significantly, the political legitimisation of OBC identity the state's formal recognition that these communities had suffered historical disadvantage and were entitled to remediation had transformative consequences for the self-consciousness of OBC communities across UP. The proliferation of OBC political parties and leaders in the 1990s reflected a genuine social empowerment. Mulayam Singh Yadav, Lalu Prasad Yadav in Bihar, and similar leaders gave the OBC communities political representation that they had never previously enjoyed. This representation was real, even if the governance these leaders delivered was often poor. The sense of political dignity that one's community had, leaders in power who spoke in one's name, was itself a form of social advancement. The problem was that OBC political mobilisation, as it actually developed in UP, did not translate into broad OBC empowerment but into the empowerment of specific dominant OBC communities, primarily the Yadavs in UP, at the expense of other OBC groups. Mulayam Singh Yadav's Samajwadi Party, while nominally representing all OBCs, in practice operated as a Yadav party that used state power to advance Yadav interests. The hundreds of smaller OBC communities the Kurmis, Koiris, Nishads, Bind, and dozens of others found that the Yadav-dominated SP was not their party but another form of dominance, different from Brahmin-Rajput dominance only in its caste identity. The Long Shadow: How Mandal Reshaped UP's Political Landscape The Mandal moment permanently altered UP's political sociology in ways that are still being worked through. It created the OBC political consciousness that would sustain the Samajwadi Party for three decades. It drove upper-caste communities toward the BJP with an intensity that has never fully dissipated. It fragmented the Congress's cross-caste coalition beyond repair in UP. And it created the political cleavages of OBC versus upper caste, 'social justice' versus 'communal' that opposition parties continue to deploy against the BJP to this day. The BJP's response to Mandal evolved. Initially resistant — or at least perceived as representing the forward-caste backlash the party gradually developed its own approach to OBC politics. The strategy Amit Shah and Narendra Modi eventually deployed in UP involved disaggregating the OBC category—reaching out specifically to non-Yadav OBC communities that felt excluded by SP's Yadav dominance and combining this targeted OBC outreach with the BJP's existing upper-caste base and its growing Dalit support. This social coalition, first assembled for the 2014 elections, proved to be the most effective electoral combination in UP's history. The tragedy of Mandal was not that it addressed OBC disadvantage but that it did so in a way that maximised social conflict, created new hierarchies of caste competition, and substituted identity politics for the genuine developmental work that would have benefited all of UP's poor regardless of caste. The political entrepreneurs who exploited Mandal's possibilities got rich and powerful; the vast majority of OBC families in UP remained in poverty, their material conditions largely unchanged by the reservation politics conducted in their name. This gap between the promise of Mandal politics and its actual delivery remains one of the most powerful arguments for the BJP's claim that its governance-focused politics delivers more real benefit to the poor than the identity politics of its opponents. Ideological Rebirth: The Formation of the BJP, Strategic Realignment, and Support to the National Front Part 9 https://myind.net/Home/viewArticle/ideological-rebirth-the-formation-of-the-bjp-strategic-realignment-and-support-to-the-national-front-part-9

Aug 24, 2026
Major General Harsha Kakar

The Signal Behind Sergio Gor’s Kashmir and Ladakh Visit

The US ambassador to New Delhi, Sergio Gor, who is also Trump’s special envoy for South and Central Asian affairs, visited Kashmir and Ladakh last week. The last visit to Kashmir by a US ambassador was by Ambassador Ken Juster in Jan 2020. He was part of a delegation of 15 envoys taken to Kashmir post-abrogation of Article 370. The aim then was to display to the world efforts being put in place for restoring normalcy. Gor is the fourth US ambassador to have visited Kashmir. In Ladakh, his proposed meeting with the Dalai Lama was cancelled. The reason possibly was not to antagonise China prior to Xi Jinping’s proposed visit to Washington, as well as India hosting the BRICS summit, which Xi is scheduled to attend, both scheduled for next month. During his visit to Kashmir, Gor met J&K Chief Minister Omar Abdullah and discussed US-J&K cooperation on tourism, horticulture and the new economy. Omar mentioned, ‘It was a very good meeting. We are hopeful that the engagement between the US and J&K will both widen and deepen in the years ahead.’ Gor, since his arrival in India, has been attempting to reset ties between Washington and New Delhi. Gor’s comments in Srinagar have set off alarm bells across the LoC, while being welcomed in India. Gor mentioned, ‘pleasure to be here... This is an important part of India. I am here, visiting for the first time.’ He mentioned Kashmir as being an ‘important part of India,’ though ‘integral part’ would have been preferred. It was the US conveying ground reality that the region will always remain a ‘part’ of India, despite Pakistan’s claims. It was the word ‘part’ which caused panic as it signified that Kashmir, in the opinion of the US, was a part of India. Gor chose each word deliberately based on possible suggestions from the US State Department, whom he would have consulted prior to the visit, as US-Pak ties are affected. His comment also conveys that Kashmir is NOT considered disputed. The issue is whether the statement signifies a change in US policy, remains debatable. The second statement equally hurt Pakistan, though they could do nothing about it. Sergio Gor mentioned that the US would reconsider its level 4 travel warning to Kashmir, in which he mentioned, ‘New Delhi, the chief minister here, the government here, we believe have taken some incredible steps to make this area safe.’ While this implies praise for the governments at the centre and state as well as security agencies, it is a statement which will be utilised by Pak to goad its terrorist groups to enhance activities in Kashmir. In contrast, in Oct 2022, US ambassador to Pakistan, Donald Blome, visited POK and termed it as ‘Azad Jammu and Kashmir,’ drawing a fierce response from India. He added fuel to the fire by mentioning, after visiting historical sites in POK, that these are ‘symbols of the cultural and historical richness of Pakistan.’ These comments were seen as the US bending towards Pakistan’s claims over a region considered to belong to India. During Oct 2022, Joe Biden was the US president and Indo-US ties were good. It is possible that Blome’s remarks were meant to assuage Pakistan, with whom US ties were just improving, post the visit of their then army chief, Qamar Bajwa, to the US. It could also have been to cool down tempers after Biden termed Pakistan as ‘one of the most dangerous nations in the world.’ The US had then stepped up support for Pak by offering USD 200 million as aid for floods the same year. Currently, Indo-US ties are sinking, while Pak-US ties are on the rise, especially as Pak was tasked to mediate between the US and Iran and Trump’s fondness for dictators, especially failed Marshal Asim Munir. Is this a reverse action to reset Indo-US ties? Pakistan’s reaction was on expected lines. It summoned the US Chargé d’Affaires, Natalie Baker, and issued a strong demarche on the statements of Sergio Gor. The statement issued by its foreign ministry mentioned, ‘Pakistan strongly condemned and categorically rejected the characterisation of Jammu and Kashmir as a part of India.' Had Islamabad just protested, the meaning would have been different; issuing a strong demarche implied that Gor’s message has hurt where it was intended. Gor has made his statement; complaining now has little impact, except to assuage their own population. Further, Pakistan listed no objection to his visit to Kashmir, unlike China, which objects every time a US ambassador visits Arunachal, only to be debunked by India. On the contrary, India conveyed its displeasure to the US on Bloome’s visit to POK in 2022. What Pakistan thinks is the proposed lifting of the US advisory on visiting Kashmir. This conveys that Kashmir is firmly under Indian control, and that the population is no longer pro-Pakistan, especially since the crackdown in POK. On the contrary, POK is burning with protests continuing alongside killings of innocents. This has added to their defence preparedness as communication with forward posts are impacted. With tourism increasing in J and K, following the US downgrading of the advisory, claiming the region as disputed will have little impact. Pakistan’s demands to include western powers in negotiations over India holding the IWT in abeyance, as well as resolving the dispute over Kashmir, have few takers. Trump made a statement on being willing to do so, but has since maintained silence, aware that India is uninterested. On the contrary, every time Pakistan rakes Kashmir in any global body, the bounce back from India is on its handling of protests in POK as well as the scenario in Baluchistan. It is a catch-22 scenario for Pak presently, which it conveniently sidesteps by claiming Indian involvement. The Pak army would now begin looking at a major terrorist incident in J and K, largely to rekindle its disputed status and prevent the US from reducing its advisory role. This is also no guarantor. The last such attempt in Pahalgam was met with a severe response from India. It cannot risk another, despite having inked the Mecca pact. If neither Pak nor Turkey acted against the Houthis, which continue targeting Saudi, it is unlikely that they would join Pak in support. Further, India arming Greece and Cyprus is a setback to Turkey. Equipment would flow from both Turkey and China, which is already happening, but that alone is insufficient. India has been talking of Operation Sindoor 2.0. It implies that its target lists and weapons to be employed are in readiness and the counter would come faster than it did the last time. The failed marshal cannot risk another failure, especially as he gains complete control over the country.

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