BJP to woo heartland with Narendra Modi as OBC icon

Is the Bharatiya Janata Party planning to project Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi as an OBC (Other Backward Class) icon in the Hindi heartland to pocket a major chunk of seats in the region?

Is the Bharatiya Janata Party planning to project Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi as an OBC (Other Backward Class) icon in the Hindi heartland to pocket a major chunk of seats in the region? This is what a senior BJP functionary hinted at when he said the feedback he was getting about Modi from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar was positive, and that people from towns and villages look at him as an acceptable OBC face.

The BJP leader argued that there is a sense of empowerment among the OBC sections and that after Deve Gowda, there has not been an OBC prime minister and the people are looking forward to one.

The party will have to win a big chunk of the 80 Lok Sabha seats from Uttar Pradesh to reach a respectable figure of 170 to 180 seats. This will then help the BJP command the consent of existing and potential allies to form a government at the Centre.  So, the BJP hopes to capitalise on Modi’s OBC credentials because of his enormous success in Gujarat and his approval ratings in an influential section of the urban middle class.

However, there is an interesting Congress counter-point to projecting Modi as an OBC icon. A Congress functionary from the central party office who had handled Gujarat for many years argued that Modi, who belongs to an OBC social segment — he is of the ‘teli’ or oil-miller caste — did not build his base in the state among fellow OBCs like his counterparts in Hindi heartland, Mulayam Singh Yadav and Lalu Prasad Yadav and Nitish Kumar, but he aligned himself with the upper-castes and the upper-class business circles in the state.

If the BJP does adopt the strategy, it will be an interesting turn-around in the party’s ideological stance. It was the boast of senior party leader LK Advani in the 1990s that he saved the Hindu society from division on the basis of the Mandal commission recommendations by taking up the ‘rath yatra’ from Somnath to Ayodhya. It seems that 20 years later, the BJP wants to redefine Hindutva in terms of Mandal rather than in terms of Ram mandir.