Why not give Bharat Ratna to VP Singh for Mandal report?

A bewildering mix of myopia, amnesia and prejudice explains the absence of VP Singh from the names upon whom myriad politicians want the Indian state to bestow the Bharat Ratna. From Atal Bihari Vajpayee to Ram Manohar Lohia to Karpoori Thakur, they all figured on the wish-list of politicians wishing to have their heroes honoured, just as cricketer Sachin Tendulkar and scientist CNR Rao were recently. Yet nobody thought of canvassing for VP Singh, not even those who gained enormously from his decision to implement the Mandal Commission recommendations. For a clutch of OBC and regional leaders straddling the political arena, the floating of his name for the Bharat Ratna would have been a belated token of appreciation befitting the man whose fifth death anniversary falls on 27 November. Belated because even his death had largely gone unnoticed, reeling as the nation had then been under the cowardly and grisly attack of terrorists on Mumbai.[caption id=“attachment_1251763” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] VP Singh. AFP[/caption] It is time to reclaim Singh from the fog of forgetfulness shrouding the collective memory, to credit him for restructuring Indian politics in dramatic ways. In forgetting him the Indian society betrays the prejudices lurking below its veneer of progressivism: for the upper castes, he is a traitor, who can never be forgiven for undermining their hegemony despite belonging to them. For the subaltern caste groups, he can’t be their hero because, well, he was simply not one of them, an OBC or a Dalit. It isn’t difficult to judge who between Singh and Vajpayee has had a greater impact on India. Against Vajpayee’s decision to turn the country nuclear, Singh triggered a tsunami in the socio-political landscape through his decision to implement Mandal. Apart from prising open the Central government services to socially and educationally backward groups, Mandal became a catalyst for the consolidation of OBCs. Their political strength was augmented because of the alienation of Muslims from the Congress, and even sections of Dalits who were alarmed at the depth of upper caste resentment against reservation. It was the OBC-Muslim alliance at the grassroots that ensured North India did not erupt into communal mayhem following the demolition of the Babri Masjid. Much of this OBC consolidation was to ultimately splinter. Yet the emerging OBC leaders resorted to new electoral permutations and combinations to create majorities in their respective states, in the process becoming the ‘little leaders’ who still wield tremendous clout at the Centre. From Nitish Kumar to Lalu Prasad to Mulayam Singh Yadav, they are veritably the children of Mandal who broke the electoral stranglehold of the Congress and prevented the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) from substituting it. The fracturing of the electorate in the Hindi heartland also brought to the fore an array of regional leaders. True, some of these leaders attained prominence before the advent of VP Singh, yet they acquired a more enduring role in governing India post-Mandal. It was he who inaugurated the era of coalition politics at the Centre. Though national parties now lead coalition governments at the Centre, the presence of ‘little leaders’ in governance has, willy-nilly, imparted greater salience to the regional in the national polity. India’s extant political landscape is, to a great extent, a consequence of Singh’s one-year rule. Contemporary political narratives portray Singh as a cynical politician, claiming that he implemented Mandal to rally the OBC members of his party, Janata Dal, to thwart the challenge to his leadership from Devi Lal. Yet a scouring of the archives tells another story – through the months preceding the 1989 general election Singh campaigned on the social justice plank, and explicitly expressed his intention to implement Mandal. Here are two of the many instances on which Singh talked of introducing reservation for the OBCs. On 16 June 1989, Singh said in Delhi that his attempts to prevent a split in the Opposition vote won’t be at the expense of compromising on the policy of the Janata Dal. “Fair share to weaker sections and minorities in the development of the country… there can be no compromise on them,” he said, going on to tell the audience that he planned to implement Mandal. Three months later, in Chennai on 18 September 1989, newspapers quoted him saying, “The (National) Front would also fill up the vacancies of Scheduled Caste quota in government services only through Schedule Caste persons and would implement the recommendations of the Mandal Commission report in toto, to benefit the backward classes." Singh finessed his idea of social justice even better in the years he was no longer in electoral politics. Few are aware of his contribution in the enactment of the Right to Information Act and the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act. In a poignant obituary of Singh, RTI’s principal architects, Aruna Roy and Nikhil Dey, wrote in the Indian Express, “When the history of these two legislations are more comprehensively written, there will be many architects and strategists who will finally get the credit they never sought… VP Singh was one of them. He will always be cited for implementing the Mandal Commission report. But that alone is not his contribution… It will be a grave injustice to him and posterity however, if his role as a statesman politician in establishing the rights of the poor is not acknowledged.” Roy and Dey then went to add, “For those of us who were small fish swimming against the tide of the Indian political discourse, he inspired tenacity, imparted humour, and provided sustained practical support and advice.” Again, in contrast to the dominant political narrative, it does seem Singh was sensitive, even in his youth, to be inclined to the philosophy of social justice. In yet another obituary in The Telegraph, former West Bengal finance minister Ashok Mitra describes the scene from the Uttar Pradesh of 1950s, of talukdars donating their land to Vinoba Bhave’s bhoodan movement. Mitra writes, “On several occasions, the donated land…either happened to be disputed property, with pending court proceedings, or belonged to someone else. One talukdar stood out in this dubious crowd. He was the young Raja of Manda, Vishwanath Pratap Singh, not yet quite out of his twenties. He gifted away most of his land, land that genuinely belonged to him. His compeer would, behind his back, make fun of his naivete.” Obviously, the Congress or the BJP can’t be expected to name Singh for the Bharat Ratna, for it was he who undermined the hegemony of the former and countered the latter’s pet project of turning Hindu society into a homogenous monolith. But what is astounding is that politicians who are the children of Mandal could have forgotten him. You can’t but think it is because Singh did not belong to their caste, underlining the extent to which the idea of social justice has become warped. The author is a Delhi-based journalist. E-mail: ashrafajaz3@gmail.com