One may call it BJP's response to the proponents of so-called social engineering. Even after winning the national election convincingly, the BJP is not content with its vote share. Like a marketing company that tries a lot of tricks to constantly increase the market share for its salable products, the national party, in its attempt at containing or neutralizing the influence of caste satraps, is on a big experiment to break the current caste arithmetic.

And for this experiment, it has chosen UP which, like its eastern neighbor Bihar, is riven with the politics of caste satraps. Remember the way Upendra Kumar Kushwaha and Om Prakash Rajbhar tried to bully and blackmail the BJP on the eve of the 2019 national elections. Having learned a lesson from the behavior of the two ambitious leaders, the BJP has charted out a course of action to avoid the company of such leaders by winning their claimed caste bases.

Accordingly, acting on its plan, on Friday last week, the UP government added to the SC category 17 OBC castes including Rajbhar, Mallah, Prajapati, and Kumhar. The state government has already initiated the process to give SC caste certificates to the 17 OBC caste members. 

This politics of division, which has been happily resorted to by wannabe politicians aspiring to become nothing less than state CM or national PM ever since Dr. Rammanohar Lohia worked out his famous caste arithmetic to destroy the Congress Party's hegemony in the mid-sixties, has lent itself to BJP's deep thinkers to further tap into the vote shares of the remaining opposition. 

Although every political leader has realized how BJP's knife is slicing through votes shares, they aren't in a position to object very much because the BJP is citing the same ideology for its purpose by which OBC caste leaders have played their politics so far.

However, BSP supremo Mayawati, who is reduced to a mere shade of her earlier national stature, has begun whining. Tomorrow, it will be the turn of Jignesh Mewani, Chandrashekhar Azad, Prakash Ambedkar, and other self-appointed Dalit leaders turn to voice against the move and agitate and rally their rag, tag, and bobtail army.

Mayawati has reportedly called UP's decision to include 17 Other Backward Classes (OBC) into Scheduled Caste (SC) as “unconstitutional”. She believes that the government has deceived these castes as ‘now they are not going to get benefit from either of the two categories’. Her argument is that following the inclusion, these 17 castes are neither OBCs nor SCs as Article 341 of the Constitution bars any government from adding or removing any caste from SC category.

Whether or not her argument may hold, she is immensely nervous as reflected in her statement that "the SC quota should be increased in the same ratio" as the percentage of the included community's strength.

The BSP leader has claimed that during her tenure, she sent a letter to the then Congress government at the Centre to add these castes in the SC list in a constitutional way and also to increase the SC quota. What she didn't say is important: The Congress Party didn't oblige her because they did not wish to add to her popularity and strength.

On the other hand, the BJP has done it because it wants to add to its pro-poor image. And luckily for the party, the cost will be borne by the BSP whose SC vote bank is already shrunk because of the en masse migration of Balmikis and other SC and ST categories to the Hindutva camp.

(By M K Shukla)