Mandal Commission

Rejecting outright the 50 per cent cap on caste-based reservations, Congress leader Rahul Gandhi on Friday vowed that "the barrier will be broken" in whichever part of the country his party came to power. The Leader of the Opposition in Lok Sabha made the promise in Bihar, the state which was a hotbed of the Mandal agitation in the 1990s, and where polls to the assembly are likely in a few months. "I wonder where did this idea of a 50 per cent cap come from? The population of the deprived sections is close to 90 per cent," said the former Congress president at a 'Samvidhan Suraksha Sammelan' (symposium for protecting the Constitution) in Rajgir. Voicing disapproval of the cap that has been placed by the Supreme Court, Gandhi said a caste census would be the first step in doing away with the barrier. "When we conducted a caste survey in Telangana, which showed among other things that Dalits, tribals and other backward classes hardly got any government contracts, the chief minister o

Gehlot further said if PM Modi considers himself as the biggest supporter of the OBC community, then he should have a nationwide caste census conducted at the earliest

The BJP made the OBCs as politically visible and influential as the Mandal offspring, if not more

Union Home Minister Amit Shah on Saturday questioned the Congress' commitment towards upliftment of the Other Backward Classes and said the party had opposed and suppressed the Mandal Commission report for several years. Shah's attack on the Congress comes at a time when the party has promised to carry out a caste census in Madhya Pradesh if it gets elected to power. The Congress, which claims a caste census will give the true number of OBCs, Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes in order to given them more benefits, has accused the Bharatiya Janata Party of opposing the exercise. Addressing an election rally in Betma in Depalpur Assembly seat in Indore, Shah said, "What has the Congress done for OBCs? The Congress suppressed the Mandal Commission report for several years and opposed it." "The Narendra Modi government gave 27 per cent reservation to OBCs in educational institutions. More than 35 per cent ministers in the Modi government are OBCs. It was this government which gave .

The commission, tasked to investigate the conditions of socially and educationally backward classes and propose steps for their improvement in 2017

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The Other Backward Class (OBC) is a collective term used to classify castes which are educationally or socially backward

The Mandal Commission, named after its chairman, B P Mandal, played a vital role in recognising backward classes in India and framing affirmative action policies

As the 2024 Lok Sabha elections approach, the key question is how big the caste issue will be

Mayawati's wooing of Brahmins did not make the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) a 'Manuvadi' party. The 'Mandalisation' of the BJP is an electoral contingency

India has sections of the population that are not just socially but educationally backward