Reservation as an issue is an issue that is here to stay in Nagaland as is in mainland India. How, where, when and why it is so is open for debate, but when we talk of reservation, the name, B.P. Mandal, immediately comes to mind, and thereby, the mouth. In fact B.P. Mandal is a man more maligned than celebrated. Also, mostly forgotten, B.P. Mandal led the controversial commission looking at demands of the Other Backward Classes (OBCs). He submitted his report in 1980, just as Indira Gandhi returned to power. She buried the Mandal Commission Report and it remained buried for another decade until 1990 when Prime Minister V.P. Singh announced its implementation. Prime Minister V.P. Singh’s independence speech in 1990 talking about this became a turning point. It set India literally ablaze, resulting in many unfortunate self-immolations by upper caste students who feared loss of opportunity.
It is now 26 years since V.P. Singh announced the implementation of the Mandal Commission Report. According to B.P. Mandal, there wasn’t, and isn’t, a more important problem needing resolution than social, economic and political inequality. This is what Mandal was explaining in his report, and he did so with a prescience, in that Lallu versus Mohan question.
What if, he asked, a boy called Lallu lives in a village, cannot get English-medium education, does not have TV in his home, and has none of the exposure that, say, one called Mohan, who lives in a city, has? Lallu is likely to be less articulate in English, less confident in social interactions, and won’t be able to compete with Mohan even if he happens to be brighter than him. Mohan will be pronounced more meritorious even if Lallu is more deserving.
One may not be wrong in concluding that Mandal did succeed in turning the old merit argument inside out, and which was his intention. Until 1989, the Congress was literally the all in all in India. There was no alternative. In spite of brief interruptions, it continued ruling at the Centre and in most of the states. In the heartland, it had ruled with a Muslim-Brahmin combination that attracted a significant enough number of the rest. With the Congress the only party likely to defeat the BJP, Muslims had no other choice.
Mandal broke that embankment. Muslims now had a choice. The Congress got decimated and never got a national majority again. Also unlike the BJP, the Congress did not accept the new reality. V.P. Singh’s government may have lasted less than a year, but his revenge on the Congress is total. In fact, if politics were a game of cricket, the case of the Congress would have been, caught V.P. Singh, bowled Mandal. It was widely feared that implementation of the Mandal Commission recommendations would destroy the economy and destabilize the society, but instead, twenty six years hence, it has only made the society more cohesive, and by destroying ossified Congress vote banks created space for genuine competitive politics and economics.
Reservation in our Naga society too is a necessity as it brings in cohesiveness, stabilizes the society and thereby justice. However, the onus is on the government of the day to ensure that there is no injustice done in its endeavor to bring forth justice. The stipulated criteria and guidelines that it formulates should be overboard with no room for any misinterpretations, misgivings and misunderstandings between the different sections of our society. By not doing so, and in trying to please everybody, the government is doing justice to nobody, and unnecessarily creating misgivings in the society.
