Rahul Gandhi, while speaking at the Panchkula conclave on Samvidhan Samman Sammelan (Conference in Honour of the Constitution) on May 22, made an unusually bold statement about the Indian political system being aligned against the lower castes.
He gave a call to change that situation through systemic reform. He also promised the nation that the Congress party would work for that systemic reform hereafter.
He said, “Ninety per cent of the population representing Dalits, Adivasis, OBCs and minorities are unrepresented across different fields and there are two different sets of rules although the constitution is a document of equality.” The Congress leader said that the “system is aligned against lower castes”. Mentioning former Congress prime ministers Indira Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi and Manmohan Singh, he said he “understands the system from inside” as he’s been “sitting inside the system since birth”.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi attacked this statement saying that Rahul accepted that his own governments were aligned against the SC/ST/OBCs, and not the BJP government.
Later on, the pro-BJP media went after Rahul Gandhi pointing out how can he now support the SC/ST/OBCs when his own party during his father and grandmother’s time was against the OBCs.
A political leader who changes his opinions and sees the shortcomings of the socio-political system intending to reform it from within is a progressive leader. That is how democracy as a system keeps moving closer to the exploited and oppressed masses. Even if Rahul Gandhi himself had been the prime minister but at some stage realised that the system was aligned against the poor and the exploited and then initiated a new policy framework for changing the system such a realisation must be welcomed.
Look at Rahul’s life in the system. When Indira Gandhi was the prime minister Rahul was a small kid. When Rajiv Gandhi was ruling, he was studying in school. When P.V. Narasimha Rao and Atal Bihari Vajpayee were prime ministers, he was abroad, studying in university. He entered public life only in 2004. As a young man, he has seen through the Congress system till 2014 from the inside.
During the 10 years of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government, he did not take up any ministerial position. In fact, he could have become the prime minister in 2009 if only he wanted to be in power at any cost. He did not do that. During that period, he worked as an opponent of traditional methods of administration. His tearing down of an ordinance at a press conference brought out by the Manmohan Singh government was an example of his unconventional mode of response to public morality and administration. We know that the ordinance that he tore off and got cancelled by the Manmohan Singh government was supposed to become law. If it were to become a law, he himself would have been saved from being disqualified from parliament after the two-year sentence by a court in Gujarat in 2023.
After the BJP formed the government in 2014, Rahul never compromised on the people’s issues. Both in parliament and outside, he fought sitting side by side with the victims of the Modi government. He did not go by the general practice of an opposition leader that he would criticise the government in parliament and rest of the time do normal politics with party meetings and organisational work. He was part of several youth struggles.
Take for example the student struggle of Pune film institute in 2015 against the appointment of an inexperienced director to that institute. The students were on strike for the removal of that unsuitable director. Rahul went to Pune and stood by them. The student leader at that time Payal Kapadia brought laurels to India by winning a Cannes film festival award. Take another example of Rohit Vemula’s systemic murder at Hyderabad University. The students’ struggles at that time shook the entire university campus system of India. Rahul went to Hyderabad and sat on a hunger strike for a day.
Rahul Gandhi did not choose a method of getting political power in the dynastic mode. For the last 10 years, he has been fighting for people’s rights and evolving. This is what the first generation great leaders B.R Ambedkar, Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru and Sardar Vallabhai Patel did during the freedom struggle. While fighting for people’s rights, they organised the Congress and other political forums by gaining experience and knowledge over a period of time. They did not remain stagnant. They changed their views and methods as they gained new experience in people’s struggles.
Certainly, there is a fundamental difference in Rahul Gandhi’s understanding of the Indian socio-political system before his two yatras in 2023-24. He has a habit of listening to others’ opinions and experiences and changing his own opinions. One of the major changes in him after these two yatras was understanding the role of the caste system in India as of now and tracing its roots backwards.
This is where he seems to have realised his great grandfather perhaps was not right in rejecting Kaka Kalelkar’s report about the Shudra/OBC status in India. Indira Gandhi’s assessment of the Mandal Commission Report and his father Rajiv Gandhi’s opposition to the implementation of the Mandal Commission Report in 1990 were not based on the proper understanding of the caste system in India.
At the end of March 2013, when I met him for the first time in Delhi, the election campaign had already started. Rahul was the main campaigner of the Congress, and Narendra Modi the prime ministerial candidate of the BJP started his campaign. By then the RSS/BJP started campaigning across the country that their PM candidate was an OBC. The OBCs started looking up to Modi in many parts of India, particularly in North India. Rahul was a bit confused about this caste identity campaign by the RSS/BJP combine. The Congress by then was not willing to go to the election by raising OBC questions. Historically, the Congress was seen as an anti-OBC ruling party.
In this situation the Congress did not know how to handle the OBC question by then. Most leaders in his own party were not willing to study the new phase of the OBC question seriously, which was likely to play some role in tilting the OBC vote base to the BJP.
I found in Rahul a young man with a deep desire to learn. He was sure that Congress was losing in that election but willing to work to learn and reform his own party and take reformative steps necessary for the nation. But that task, given the collapsing situation of Congress apparatus was daunting.
The new avatar of RSS/BJP political forces by presenting Modi as an OBC made the system more aligned to a handful of Dwija monopolists in the last ten years. In the last ten years, Modi has destroyed the future of OBC/SC/STs by handing over the whole economy of the nation through a huge privatisation process of most government industrial and infrastructural assets. Gautam Adani’s wealth has grown at the cost of the future of OBC/SC/STs. The alienation of OBCs was more rapid under the OBC PM than under other PMs. But in North India, the OBCs hardly realised the future of their unemployed youth. This is when the Congress brought a path-breaking manifesto with a serious push by Rahul Gandhi in the 2024 election that gave new hope for OBC/SC/STs. Rahul could achieve such a path-breaking democratic manifesto, though there was opposition in his own party from traditional Dwija leaders by constantly learning and adapting to new ideas.
Mallikarjun Kharge, as a powerful Dalit president, and Rahul and Priyanka doing a co-ordinated campaign in this election brought new hope for the OBC/SC/STs and women.
Whatever could be the results of the election, Rahul must pursue the socio-political reform standing by the poor, particularly SC/ST/OBCs.
