Chhattisgarh Chief Minister Bhupesh Baghel to double reservation for OBCs

It’s our duty, says Mr. Baghel.

August 16, 2019 10:26 pm | Updated 11:40 pm IST - Bhopal

Bhupesh Baghel

Bhupesh Baghel

With an eye on the coming local body polls, Chhattisgarh Chief Minister Bhupesh Baghel has announced that the government would almost double the reservation for the OBCs, making up close to half the State’s population, in government jobs and educational institutions.

Delivering the Independence Day speech in Raipur, Mr. Baghel said, “In our State, Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and Other Backward Classes have been raising their demands peacefully. It’s our duty to protect their constitutional rights. Therefore, in a major step, I announce 32% reservation for STs, 13% for SCs and 27% for OBCs.”

It became an imperative for the Congress — rattled after losing nine of the 11 Lok Sabha seats this election to the BJP — to secure the OBC flock that had catapulted it to an envious victory in the Assembly election last year. The Congress had breached the seemingly impregnable BJP bastion, to win 60 of the 90 seats.

In the 2013 Assembly election, it failed to see the electoral strength of the OBC block, which tilted towards the BJP fetching it 0.75% more votes. But last year, the double whammy of demonetisation and the GST weaned away the Sahus, a major trader OBC community, around 16% of the State’s population, from the BJP. And the agrarian crisis left the Kurmis, a farming OBC group to which Mr. Baghel belongs, looking for an alternative.

Pouncing on the opportunity, the Congress, which until now banked on the Dalit and the tribal votes (42%), began wooing the OBCs aggressively. Mr. Baghel and Tamradhwaj Sahu became the face of the campaign. They rode the ‘Mool Chhattisgarhi’ (Native Chhattisgarhi) tide to feed the perception that the BJP was an ‘outsider’s party’, for its dominant Marwari and Thakur leaders, and snatched away the OBC votes. In the election, the Congress secured 10% more votes than the BJP.

Tasting power after 15 years, the Congress, however, couldn’t counter Narendra Modi’s popularity garnered over the Balakot air strikes and the narrative of nationalism in the Lok Sabha election, five months later. Merely two of its candidates won, humiliatingly so with the least winning vote shares. Recently, Janta Congress Chhattisgarh president Ajit Jogi had demanded 27% reservation for the OBCs. In the past, the community had shifted en masse to the BJP after Mr. Jogi, Chief Minister from 2000 to 2003, had ignored them.

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