Follow-Up Post

This is a follow-up to this post I made yesterday.

Chetan writes in -

Kancha ILiaiah is not a Dalit. He is a shudra (he belongs to a shephard community in Andhra) He champions a unity between Dalit-Bahujans. So this line...

Kancha Illaiah, if you are really interested in progress of the Dalits, stop supporting Mandalisation. Brahmins are victimised by Mandalisation, but the extent of the victimisation is a lot lesser than the Dalits.

...is out of place and is jarring in an otherwise well-written post because Kancha Ilaiah is always targetted by dalit activists for helping BCs and OBCs at the expense of Dalits. So he is doing this knowingly and not because he isn't aware of the marginalisation of SC/STs owing to OBC reservations. Most Dalit writers oppose OBC reservations. The two people who champion Dalit causes and yet support OBC reservations are Kacha Ilaiah and VT Rajshekhar both of whom are OBCs themselves and hence are hated by other Dalit activists who are Dalits themselves.

Thanks for this info, Chetan.

I also wanted to point to this article by Chandra Bhan Prasad in Times of India which clearly spells out the problems with the Mandal report. A few excerpts -

why did L R Naik, the only Dalit member in the Mandal Commission, refuse to sign the Mandal recommendations?
[...]
Cutting across party lines, all are afraid of discussing his observations. Naik said that OBCs were made up of two large social blocks - landowning OBCs whom he describes as intermediate backward classes, and artisan OBCs whom he describes as depressed backward classes.
[...]
In 2006, justice demands that upper OBCs be expelled from the Mandal list, as MBCs are the truest inheritors of Mandal quotas. V P Singh refused to buy Naik's thesis because his eyes were on the powerful upper OBC vote bank.
[...]
The intelligentsia, which harps on social justice, too stood with upper OBCs, leaving MBCs to their fate.
[...]
The anti-Mandal lobby gained in legitimacy simply because Mandal went the wrong way. It is in that sense that Mandal hurts even Dalits.