If the exit polls for the 2024 assembly election in Haryana are to be believed, the Congress is set to return to power in the state after a decade. A Congress victory would, in large part, be the result of the consolidation of the dominant Jat community behind the party after the collapse, in recent years, of both the Indian National Lok Dal and the Jananayak Janata Party, run by rival factions of the Chautala clan, whose patriarch, Devi Lal, was instrumental in organising the community as the state’s most powerful force.
The dominance of the Jats, who make up around a quarter of the state’s population, has often led to resentment among other communities. The Bharatiya Janata Party has won the last two assembly elections in large part by capitalising on this resentment and seeking to polarise the electorate between Jats and non-Jats. Since 2014, the BJP has expanded its upper-caste base to include large sections of the state’s Backward Classes, and its hopes of remaining in power rest on having retained these voters in the election, which was held on 5 October.
In Haryana, the Backward Classes are divided into two sections: BC-A and BC-B. The bifurcation was the recommendation of a commission set up, in 1993, by Bhajan Lal, the last non-Jat chief minister before the BJP’s Manohar Lal Khattar and Nayab Singh Saini. In addition to the castes already considered backward in the state, the commission recommended a separate category for Ahirs (also known as Yadavs), Gujjars, Lodhs and Sainis, landowning agrarian communities that had been included in the list of Other Backward Classes prepared by the Mandal commission. These four castes and, later, Meos and Gosais, came to be known as the BC-B category, while the existing backward castes were called BC-A. The 27-percent quota for BCs, who collectively make up about thirty percent of the population, was divided among the two segments, with the 72 BC-A castes receiving 16 percent and the six BC-B ones receiving 11 percent. “The BC-B gets the bulk of the political representation for the Backward Classes, while BC-A communities do not get as much space,” RD Kalyan, a resident of Panipat, told us. “This is the condition of all the parties of Haryana.”
The BJP replaced Khattar, a Punjabi Khatri, as chief minister, in March, and replaced him with Saini, who belongs to a BC-B community. In the election, it nominated 22 BC candidates, of whom only six came from the BC-A segment. However, it has made a concerted effort, during its decade in power, to reach out to individual BC-A castes. It has organised conferences of most major BC-A communities, such as Kashyaps, Prajapatis, Bairagis, Kambojs, Jangras and Jogis.