Sharad Yadav: A Mandal hero with a firm ideological spine

Sharad Yadav, the Mandal hero, passed away at the age of 75 in Delhi on January 12. He was the most consistent anti-caste ideological OBC leader in the history of Indian parliamentary democracy after Ambedkar. Though he had grown up in the Lohia socialist movement, Yadav became a long-term parliamentarian to shape an anti-caste ideology from a very young age, with an ideological framework of his own.

He became a member of Parliament at the age of 27 with an ability to fight on behalf of the oppressed castes in Parliament and outside. He used that platform throughout his life to shape OBC policies.

Let me recall the image of Sharad Yadav in 1990 when the pro-and anti-Mandal battles were going on on the streets of India. Those of us who were supporting the Mandal reservation were helpless because the whole media – print and electronic – was against it. The Congress and BJP were against the implementation of the Mandal Commission report. Leaders like Narendra Modi, who is the most benefited man from the Mandal consciousness today, were nowhere to be seen at that time. Arun Shourie kind of hardcore anti-reservation forces were controlling the national media – English and Hindi – and were instigating violence and self-immolation by upper caste youth.

Bold leader

Young Sharad Yadav was the only militant OBC pro-Mandal minister in the VP Singh government. His robust physical appearance and bold statements in defence of OBC reservation made him an outstanding hero of the battle. VP Singh as the PM took a guarded line. Mulayam Singh and Lalu Prasad were chief ministers and were confined to states. Sharad Yadav was the only OBC leader to take on every anti-Mandalite in that historic battle, both inside Parliament and outside.

Also read: Mulayam: Astute politician with a finger on pulse of caste politics

As the Mandal reservation was stabilising by defeating the anti-Mandal forces, the RSS/BJP networks started the Mandir-Masjid Rath Yatra. Sharad Yadav gave a call that the fight would then be between Mandal vs Kamandal. This coinage of his stuck in the post-Mandal discourses. He mobilised forces in Delhi, whereas Mulayam Singh and Lalu Prasad as chief ministers of UP and Bihar, respectively, did it in their respective states. Modi was one of the key organisers of the Mandir movement along with LK Advani then.

The only hope

Sharad Yadav was the only hope to fight the anti-Mandal forces within the central government and an ideological force against the anti-Mandal forces that were humiliating the productive Shudra/Dalit/Adivasi masses in the name of merit. I developed an admiration for him in that national battlefield. But I never met him till 2017.

I met him in his Delhi office in 2017, which had a huge statue of Buddha and impressive portraits of Karl Marx and Dr BR Ambedkar. I asked him to release my Hindi book ‘Hindutva Mukta Bharat’, published by Sage originally in English. He gladly accepted and released it on July 10, 2017, in the JNU auditorium. His speech on that day was quite inspiring to many students and faculty members who attended in a packed auditorium.

My friend, Sunil Sardar, the head of Truth Seekers International, was a good friend of Yadav and along with him I met him several times thereafter. His commitment to social transformation and equality was un-matching in post-Emergency and post-Mandal India.

The speech he delivered in Pune that very same year, when he was given the Dr B R Ambedkar Lifetime Award, showcased his understanding of Ambedkar, Mahatma Phule, Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela. He said that the Western societies, particularly America, saw the writing on the wall that there would be a rebellion and accepted change. The change that America has undergone after the civil rights movement of Martin Luther King has shown that. But look at India. Despite lifetime struggles of Dr Ambedkar, Indian upper castes refuse to change.

From Lohia to Ambedkar

Though he started as a follower of Ram Manohar Lohia and Jayaprakash Narayan, in his latter days he became more of an Ambedkar-Phule follower. But for his anti-caste robustness and skillful handling of a week-day drama in the Prime Minister’s home and office in Delhi in 1990, the Mandal revolution would have missed the bus on the high road of social change. Those fateful days in Indian history were August 6 and 7 on which V P Singh had to get the approval of the cabinet and declare 27 per cent reservation to OBCs in education and employment by spiking Devi Lal’s plan to spoil the game with a massive rally on August 9, 1990.

Also read: Sharad Yadav: Socialist stalwart known for stitching alliances

Indian history took a massive turn because of Sharad Yadav, the Mandal hero, in those fateful days. If V P Singh were not to implement the Mandal report, in that situation Devi Lal would have pulled down his government within days and elections would have taken place. Once P V Narsimha Rao had then become prime minister after the next election, Mandal report would have been buried once for all.

The fateful days

According to Sharad Yadav, “On August 6, 1990, he (V P Singh) called a cabinet meeting at his house at 6 pm (on Sharad Yadav’s insistence as a cabinet minister) with the main agenda of discussing the implementation of the Mandal Commission recommendations. Despite a warning from his (V P Singh) close aides, the very next day, on August 7, 1990, the government accepted the Mandal Commission’s recommendations and announced that it would implement the reservation scheme under which 27 per cent jobs would be earmarked for OBCs”.

That was the beginning of the end of the Brahminic history of India. The Shudra/OBC/Dalit/Adivasi era begins from then on. Though Sharad Yadav has not written much in life, except few things in Hindi, his speeches in Parliament and public meetings leave a legacy of robust and rustic intellectualism with a native idiom and rural common sense.

He was a man with Che Guvera kind of bright facial features and a similar beard, always clad in dhoti and kurta tied in the north Indian way. His personality in Parliament was unique and when he spoke even his enemies heard in rapt attention with great respect.

The Shudra/OBC/Dalit/Adivasis of India cherish his memory as a man who changed the rules of the game in the history of parliamentary democracy. He left the nation ‘a will’ for never-ending struggle for social justice and caste-free constitutional democracy for the future.

(The writer is former Director at the Centre for the Study of Social Exclusion and Inclusive Policy, a political theorist and an author.)

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