Senior Bharatiya Janata Party leader Atal Behari Vajpayees stress on taking caste into consideration while formulating strategies for elections has made the partys backward caste lobby optimistic.
The latter are hopeful that now the party would give more representation to their ranks in the party fora as well as in fielding candidates for Lok Sabha and Assembly elections.
Vajpayee publicly admitted at the partys training camp for its MPs at Jhinjhouli recently that the time has come for the party to take into account caste considerations while selecting candidates. Vajpayee was speaking on the electoral strategies of other political parties.
This is the first time that the partys top leadership has accepted caste as a determining factor for elections. Till recently, the party had maintained that it would not follow other political parties in allocating tickets on the basis of caste.
The BJPs new policy is contrary to the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sanghs philosophy, which seeks to downplay caste while identitifying Hindus as a united group.
Asked whether the RSS had objected to the BJPs new thinking, senior party leader KR Malkani yesterday said: Not that I am aware of. Though the BJP is a part of the Sangh Parivar, it is a political party, he added.
Some BJP leaders belonging to the other backward castes (OBCs) argued that this was a reflection of the partys effort to try to adjust to the political reality. You cannot suppress the backward caste resurgence for long, and the party which ignores this will be doomed, one of them said.
Vajpayees statement has emboldened some others too to say openly what they used to admit privately. Caste is one of the major determinig factors in politics. But not all. Every party, including the Communists and the BJP, have to take into account this important factor, Malkani said. The difference was that we are slightly more aware of it now.
Malkani added that caste had acquired a new political respectability after the implementation of the Mandal Commission report. Though the BJP has to take note of the caste factor, our approach is not casteist, he claimed.
The need to provide greater representation to the OBCs was articulated by party general secretary KN Govindacharya through his concept of social engineering in 1996. This raised some leaders hackles and former party president Murli Manohar Joshi publicly criticised the social engineering theory.
Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Kalyan Singh, who belongs to the Lodh Rajput backward community, had argued for greater representation to the OBCs in the last Assembly elections in the state. When the party failed to get a majority, he pointed out that most of the losing candidates belonged to the upper castes.
Govindacharyas concept originated from his analysis of the BJPs electoral debacle in Uttar Pradesh. He initiated a debate by saying that the party would have to change its chaal, chintan and chehra (pace, thinking and face) to become more acceptable.
