Mandal, a visionary with a revolutionary zeal, had an instrumental role in placing India’s marginalised sections in an inclusive picture. The milieu in which he was born was that of colonial India, which was not only undergoing prejudices and subordination under the British rule, but was also facing massive communal, caste and gender biases within its own social fabric.
Mandal was born on this date in 1918 in Varanasi, quite away from his sleepy village, Murho, near Madhepura in Bihar. Born in a Shudra family, Mandal first experienced caste discrimination during his higher secondary school years at the Raj High School, Darbhanga, where he, along with other students belonging to the same social section, were given meal only after the savarna students had finished eating. His young, rebellious temperament refused to keep silent and shook the school and hostel administration by raising the issue and ensuring an end to such practices at a fundamental level.
Mandal was a man of strong sense of self-worth, who stood his ground amidst everything unfavourable and chaotic. His hometown, as several other small pockets of India, was stained with social, educational and economic stigmas. However, due to its location near Calcutta, the reforming drizzles of the Bengal Renaissance percolated in the region and sparked further interest in Mandal in his earnest endeavours towards social development. He worked as an Honorary Magistrate from 1945 to 1951.
He was only 23 when he became an unopposed member of the Bhagalpur district council in 1941. One of the founding members of Indian National Congress, he valiantly worked to eradicate the social ignominies associated with the caste system and estrangement on the bases of low social status from the social and political makeup. It was during the first general elections for the state assembly of Bihar in 1952 that B.P. Mandal won the Madhepura assembly seat on a Congress ticket against Bhupendra Narayan Mandal, who represented the Socialist Party.
Mandal’s political career began with the Indian National Congress but he joined the Janata Party after the Emergency Period. He served as a Chief Minister of Bihar for 30 days in 1968, a period of intense political instability. He was elected as a Member of Parliament in the Lok Sabha for the state of Bihar from 1967 to 1970 and 1977 to 1979.
Mandal was pressurised to remove his plea for immediate government action against the police and compensation for the victims during the session of the Bihar assembly. He instantly left the treasury bench and joined the opposition bench to fight for the cause, which further humiliated the inactive ruling party. This action fetched him the post of president of the state parliamentary board of Ram Manohar Lohia’s Samyukta Socialist Party. He later won the Lok Sabha elections in Bihar on the ticket of the Samyukta Socialist Party and was appointed in-charge of the state government’s Ministry of Health.
He formed his new party named Shoshit Dal in March 1967. He took oath as the seventh chief minister of the state on February 1, 1968, a historic moment in the north Indian political scenario as Mandal became the first ever Shudra chief minister.
Since he was an elected member of the Lower House, in order to take the post of chief minister, he was required to be a member of either house of the Bihar assembly. Satish Singh, an MLA of his party, was made the chief minister for four days before Mandal became a member of the legislative council and took charge as chief minister. Mandal resigned as chief minister protesting Congress’s removal of the enquiry commission named ‘Aiyar Commission’, headed by T.L. Venkatarama Aiyar, to cater to the charges of corruption on several senior Congress leaders and ministers.
Furthermore, in 1968, he contested and won the by-elections from the Madhepura parliamentary constituency without much challenge and became a Lok Sabha member. Again, in 1974, he joined hands with Jayaprakash Narayan and resigned from the assembly protesting a corrupt Congress administration. He became a Lok Sabha member again in 1977 on a Janata Party ticket from the Madhepura constituency.
Mandal’s longstanding anti-dogmatic stance and support for the depressed classes resulted in the formation of the ‘Mandal Commission’ or the ‘Backward Classes Commission’ under Prime Minister Morarji Desai on December 20, 1978. Chaired by Mandal, the Commission intended to acknowledge and emancipate the socially or educationally backward classes of India and redress the issues of reservation for those facing caste-based discrimination.
In 1980, OBCs was recognised to be emancipated on the grounds of caste, economic and social markers, which further formed a majority of 52% of India’s population. A total of 49% reservation for SC, ST and OBC was thus conscripted as per the Supreme Court ruling.
Mandal, who took his final breath at the age of 64 in 1982 due to a heart-stroke, therefore had far-reaching consequences for this young nation. William Dalrymple has rightly observed that this movement in the 1990s in India has brought about a stake in power for the Shudra castes and made them politically conscious: exactly what the civil rights movement did for the American blacks in 1960s.
Although Vishwanath Pratap Singh, the then prime minister heading the United Front government, implemented the recommendations of the Mandal Commission, which B.P. Mandal chaired, on August 7, 1990, it finally came into effect only in 1993 after the Supreme Court gave a green signal for its implementation with a historic judgement, popularly known as the Indra Sawhney judgement in November 1992.
Co-incidentally, on August 2, 2018, the Lok Sabha passed the 123rd constitutional amendment bill providing constitutional status to the National Commission for Backward Classes. In this regard, 2020 also marks the 27th anniversary of the implementation of the Mandal Commission report.
