The profundity of Karl Marx's observation about events and personages in history occurring as if twice, first time as a tragedy and second time as a farce - keeps getting reinforced in contemporary India. The HRD Minister's tragic-comic attempt to secure a place in the footnotes of history as a half-formed clone of fellow Thakur, VP Singh has indeed turned the once-powerful wily leader from Madhya Pradesh into an object of derision. In his time, VP Singh headed urban India's demonology chart. He faced black flag protests wherever he went; angry newspaper columnists mercilessly vented their ire on him for years after he promulgated Mandal in 1990; and even though the caste-fractured society he politically legitimised produced successful leaders like Mulayam Singh and Lalu Yadav, even as the Raja of Manda got marginalised, any opinion poll would today rank him as India's worst Prime Minister (as most respondents in such a poll would be drawn from classes that love to hate him). But will anybody even spare a moment to recall Arjun Singh? I can bet that 10 years from now next generation kids will ask "Arjun, Who?" if asked to assess his role in Indian politics.

Arjun Singh set out to be one-up on VP Singh by enforcing OBC quotas in centres of educational excellence such as IIMs, IITs and AIIMS. Sadly for him the adventure has ended in quite a fiasco. The Supreme Court has latched on to the serious flaws in the proposal, thereby stalling its implementation. On the other hand, the intended beneficiaries of his proposed largesse seem unimpressed. It is a measure of the sharp political acumen of Mandal's biggest political gainers - Lalu Yadav and Mulayam Singh - that they are either silent or muted in their endorsement. No angry demonstrations for or against Arjun Singh have been reported from anywhere. Quota opponents led by Youth for Equality have sought to deploy moral and legal force against the move, rather than encourage melodramatic forms of protest such as self-immolation that marked the anti-Mandal agitation. I recall having addressed JNU students against Mandal on a steamy September night in 1990 amid continuous hectoring and noisy sloganeering by rival sides. Last year at a similar YFE meeting on the same campus, the gathering was perfectly orderly; only a few pro-quota students stood on the sidelines and sought to argue their case as I headed towards my car after the function. The change in mood over the last 16 years was palpable even at the micro level.

That is even more apparent on the larger political arena. Who would have thought in the immediate aftermath of Mandal that upper castes would emerge as prize electoral property? For over a decade after OBC quotas were introduced in Government jobs, it was fashionable to extol the virtues of social churning and consequent marginalisation of the upper castes. The brash, young and somewhat crude Mayawati would put this across most scathingly by commencing her public meetings with an order to upper caste members, if any, to leave the venue. Her party's original avatar, DS4 would proudly assert "Brahmin, Bania, Thakur chor/Baqi sab hain DS4", a slogan that got even more direct under BSP: "Tilak, taraju aur talwar/Maaro inko joote char". Lalu Yadav once caused uproar by identifying "Bhu-Ra-Ba-La" (pronounced Bhurabal), meaning Bhumihar, Rajput, Brahmin and Lala/Baniya, as enemies of social change. Although Mulayam Singh never explicitly demarcated his caste affiliations in words, in deed he steadfastly worked to cement the M-Y (Muslim-Yadav) combine.

For a time, it appeared that Kanshi Ram's concept of the Bahujan Samaj, namely, the so-called 85 per cent "oppressed" versus the 15 per cent (upper caste) "oppressors", was working. Mulayam Singh struck a deal to forge a DYM (Dalit, Muslim, Yadav) alliance for the 1993 Uttar Pradesh Assembly poll that not only brought him back to power after the collapse of the Janata Dal, but also catapulted Mayawati centrestage. The upper castes never had it so bad in North India. For a while it seemed their fate would be similar to that of the Tamil Brahmins who are almost an oddity in Tamil Nadu outside Adyar in Chennai and are now usually found in the Silicon Valley or Manhattan boardrooms.

Ironically, the social churning unleashed by Mandal has turned initial electoral equations on their head. The surreal DYM alliance imploded within two years, victim of the traditional conflict between zamindari abolition's biggest beneficiary, the landowning Yadavs, and the landless labourers, mainly Dalit.Uttar Pradesh's politics underwent convulsive multiple fractures; the Congress got decimated, the BJP rose on its ashes, Mayawati gained through a series of deft organisational manoeuvres and coalition experiments, Mulayam Singh consolidated his Muslim-OBC base. Lalu Yadav ruled Bihar unchallenged for 15 years, till non-Yadav OBCs led by Nitish Kumar and a significant chunk of Dalits under Ram Bilas Paswan's tutelage, broke ranks.

Yesteryear's stalwart OBC leaders, Lalu and Mulayam found ground slipping under their feet and turned their attention to upper castes. Mayawati outdid them, drastically altering her electoral strategy after realising Dalit votes alone could not take her past the 70 mark in the 400-plus Uttar Pradesh Assembly. Aggressively wooing upper castes, Brahmins in particular, she has nominated 83 of them as BSP candidates for the ongoing election. Mulayam Singh, who swears by the ideological legacy of anti-casteist Ram Manohar Lohia, is holding Vaishya Samaj meetings to perpetuate the (Baniya) socialist leader's memory. Lalu Yadav, careful not to annoy the Rajputs even in the heyday of Mandalite rhetoric, is a changed man today; he has completely abandoned confrontationist politics and is busy lecturing American students on the virtues of Indian society's inclusiveness.

That's why Arjun Singh is hopelessly behind the times. Caught in a time warp, he believes the Congress can metamorphose into an OBC-oriented party. If that could happen, pigs could fly! Even the OBCs are no longer hankering after quotas. First, many of them have long ceased to be educationally backward.

By virtue of their dominance over politics in most States, they can hardly be deemed socially backward either. Many of them gain entry to prime seats of learning or make it to MNC jobs irrespective of their supposed backwardness. Further, OBCs are no longer a monolith: Non-Yadavs resent the Yadavs for grabbing the lion's share of political, social, economic and educational opportunities that have come their way over the last two decades. But then, Arjun Singh has always been slow to react, probably because he doesn't really have the guts to give up his ministerial privileges. He revolted against Narasimha Rao's alleged failure to save the Babri Masjid not in 1992 when it got demolished, but in 1994, almost at the fag end of the Government's tenure.

It is truly said that those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it. Thus, in Arjun Singh's case, he can only aspire to acquire a place in history's dustbin, not even its footnotes.hosts of the boots not listening to the talks'. This was Javed Jafri's delightfully comic translation of the popular Hindi saying Laathon ke bhoot, baaton se nehi maante. Last Thursday, as I watched one Mohd Aslam alias Bhure wax eloquent before TV cameras denouncing Leader of the Opposition LK Advani out of frustration at the Supreme Court having rejected his review petition, I thought of the two Big B's of Indian politics - Bofors and Babri - that simply refuse to go away.

Courtesy: www.dailypioneer.com, April 29, 2007