Express View: Bharat Ratna Karpoori Thakur

The Bharat Ratna to Karpoori Thakur is richly deserved and apparently politically timed. The award to the socialist stalwart , described by Prime Minister Narendra Modi as the “ champion for the marginalized ” and “ beacon of social justice”, comes 35 years after his death and less than three months before the next Lok Sabha election. In a storied career that began with the Quit India movement and saw him become chief minister of Bihar twice, Karpoori Thakur’s achievements were several and influential , and they have endured — especially his contribution in shaping the public conversation on caste in the country. For the BJP, having just fulfilled its Mandir promise with the consecration of the Ram temple in Ayodhya, the honouring of Thakur could be read as a significant foray into Mandal territory that lies ostensibly on the other side-of the political fence — ostensibly, because the BJP is no stranger to caste politics, having successfully appropriated pieces of the Mandal vocabulary. In the run-up to the parliamentary election, with the Congress-led Opposition making the demand for a nation-wide caste census a primary plank , the Bharat Ratna to Thakur confirms the BJP government’s inventive use of the award to make a political point — past recipients have included Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Nanaji Deshmukh, Madan Mohan Malviya and Pranab Mukherjee — and to lay claim-to the Karpoori legacy .

Karpoori Thakur laid the ground for the architecture of the affirmative action regime established after the Centre implemented the Mandal Commission Report in 1990. In 1978 in Bihar, the Karpoori government had accepted the Mungeri Lal Commission’s recommendations and instituted a layered quota framework that recognised the cleavage within the backward castes and also acknowledged the need to address the disadvantages faced by women — of the 26 per cent quota, 12 per cent was given to the extremely backward castes or EBCs, 8 per cent to OBCs, 3 per cent to women and 3 per cent to the economically backward upper castes. Over the last several elections in Bihar and elsewhere in the country’s north, the EBCs, for long relegated to the margins by the Backward versus Forward cleavage, have emerged as a critical constituency — the BJP has focused on the mobilisation of these castes as part of its strategy to court non-Jatav Dalits and non-Yadav OBCs. In Bihar, the Nitish Kumar government carried out a caste survey in October last year and an important finding was that the EBCs are the largest social bloc , accounting for 36.1 per cent of the state’s population. To keep the issue alive ahead of Lok Sabha polls, JD(U) workers and leaders have been fanning out to conduct “Karpoori charchas” across the state’s constituencies.

The BJP government’s decision seeks to paper over the fissures between the politics of the Sangh Parivar and that of the stream Karpoori Thakur belonged to. Even as anti-Congressism brought them together — first in the Samyukta Vidhayak Dal and then the Janata Party government in Bihar — it was not enough to keep them together. Now, as a new election draws closer, however, a contest has begun that may draw-upon history but will not be bound by it. In this moment, the Bharat Ratna by the BJP-led government to a socialist icon sends a signal that is bound to be decoded politically