TEJASWI'S QUOTA GAMBIT

In politics, timing is everything. On November 26, as the country celebrated its 75th Constitution Day, Tejaswi Yadav, the leader of the Opposition in Bihar, chose a moment of political vulnerability to make a bold demand in the state assembly.

- Amitabh Srivastava

That of bringing in a new bill to raise the reservation limit in government jobs and educational institutions in Bihar to 85 per cent. Just three days before, the news hadn't been kind. In a bruising electoral debacle, Tejaswi's Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) had lost three critical bypolls; the Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance (INDIA), of which his party is a key constituent, failed to secure any of its four Bihar contests. So his policy proposal smelt very much like a political retort.

By invoking a theme central to his father and RJD patriarch Lalu Prasad Yadav's legacy, Tejaswi is attempting a bold reclamation of old political territory that now stands cracked and fragmented: Bihar's teeming Other Backward Class (OBC) and Extremely Backward Class (EBC) groups. Referring to his tenure as deputy chief minister, he reminded the assembly, "You might recall, on November 9, 2023-my birthday-this assembly passed a resolution raising reservations to 65 per cent." This was based on Bihar's pioneering caste survey, which confirmed that the state's backwards spectrum in its entirety accounted for 63 per cent of the population. Emboldened by an old political common sense getting empirical validation, the Nitish Kumar government, of which the RJD was a part, had then raised the combined quota for Scheduled Castes (SCS), Scheduled Tribes (STS) and OBCs to 65 per cent. However, this 2023 legislation was struck down by the Patna High Court in June 2024, and the Supreme Court refused to overturn the ruling a month later. Now, with his demand to raise the quota ceiling even further, Tejaswi has doubled down on a contentious issue that has seen its potency challenged over the decades.