 "Bharat Ratna")
Bharat Ratna (Photograph: Wikimedia Commons)
A day after main the ‘Pran Pratishtha’ ceremony on the Ram Temple in Ayodhya, Prime Minister Narendra Modi introduced his authorities’s determination to confer the very best civilian award — the Bharat Ratna — on former Bihar Chief Minister Karpoori Thakur.
Karpoori Thakur launched reservations for essentially the most backward castes (MBCs) within the state throughout the bigger quota for backward castes, or OBCs, in 1978. Known as the ‘Karpoori Thakur components’, it predated the Mandal Fee implementation by 12 years.
Throughout his almost ten years on the helm, Prime Minister Modi tried melding the 2 elements of the ‘Mandal versus Kamandal’ politics of 1990.
Over the previous 48 hours, the Prime Minister embraced the 2 streams, hitherto thought-about adversarial.
In 2017, the Modi authorities instituted the G Rohini Fee for sub-categorizing the OBC quota to make sure extraordinarily backward lessons (EBCs) accrue the advantages of reservation, which dominant OBCs, such because the Yadavs, are perceived to have cornered.
The fee submitted its report final 12 months.
Nevertheless, the choice to confer the Bharat Ratna on Karpoori Thakur, who hailed from a poor nai (barber) caste, additionally strikes on the dominant OBC versus extraordinarily backward lessons’ social dynamics in Bihar.
Karpoori Thakur mentored and formed Lalu Prasad and Nitish Kumar’s engagement with politics, each of whom carried ahead the backward lessons and Dalit assertion in Bihar.
Nevertheless, EBCs noticed Prasad’s rule as one monopolised by the Yadavs, a resentment that Kumar harnessed to win, in alliance with the BJP, in 2005.
Final 12 months’s caste survey in Bihar enumerated the socio-economic standing of OBCs and EBCs as distinct classes.
Final month, the BJP picked Mohan Yadav as its Madhya Pradesh chief minister.
The conferring of Bharat Ratna on Karpoori Thakur additionally counters the demand for a nationwide caste census by the Congress and its INDIA bloc allies, such because the Samajwadi Celebration, JDU, and RJD.
Born on January 24, 1924, Karpoori Thakur participated within the freedom battle and was a member of the Congress Socialist Celebration and later the Praja Socialist Celebration.
He was the legislator of the Bihar meeting from 1952 till his loss of life in February 1988, barring a short stint as a Lok Sabha member in 1977, which he stop to grow to be the Bihar chief minister.
Karpoori Thakur was the Bihar chief minister for 2 stints, from December 1970 to June 1971 and June 1977 to April 1979.
On Tuesday, followers and admirers of Karpoori Thakur concluded their year-long centenary celebrations in Patna when the information that the socialist icon was conferred the Bharat Ratna was introduced.
Arun Srivastava, a socialist activist who had organised conferences to mark Karpoori Thakur’s centenary, instructed Enterprise Normal that he welcomed the choice.
“Modi will find yourself appropriating socialist icons as nicely,” commented an organiser of the centenary celebrations.
Former Union Finance Minister and civil servant Yashwant Sinha, Karpoori Thakur’s principal secretary in 1978-79, remembered him as a real mass chief.
In line with Sinha, Thakur had been handled shabbily as a baby by the upper-caste landlords of his village.
Thakur instructed Sinha that he was good at his research. When he handed his matriculation with good grades, his father took him to the village landlord to tell him about Karpoorji Thakur’s achievement.
“Excellent. I’m glad about your achievement. Now come and press my legs.”
Karpoori Thakur did so and even later stepped in for his barber father to chop individuals’s hair or shave beards.
“Regardless of all of the humiliation he had suffered in his formative years, Karpoori Thakur was remarkably freed from any rancour for the higher castes,” Sinha mentioned.
Other than introducing reservations, Karpoori Thakur was a votary of giving authorities contracts to unemployed youth, equivalent to engineers, arming Dalits in order that they may defend in opposition to assaults by higher caste militias, and advocating using Hindi in training and official work.
First Printed: Jan 23 2024 | 10:16 PM IST
