Few Indian political leaders have been as reviled as V.P. Singh. Few have made as lasting a contribution to Indian nation building. I refer, of course, to his decision in August 1990 to implement the Mandal Commission's recommendations and reserve 27 per cent of the jobs in Central government for the backward classes. I was privileged to witness the paradox at close quarters. This is how it happened.

Contrary to the impression that was assiduously spread by the media, his decision was no last minute, knee-jerk attempt to shore up his shaky minority government. VP had implemented the recommendations in Uttar Pradesh when he was its chief minister in 1980. In 1989, when the National Front obtained only seven seats in the south, 81 of its 144 MPs were backward-caste members of the Janata Dal. As a result the question of not implementing Mandal simply did not arise. What was knee-jerk was VP's decision to announce the implementation of the Mandal award without any warning on August 7. For this the coming confrontation with the BJP over the Ram Janmabhoomi temple issue was mainly to blame. In the beginning of July, I was asked to join a meeting between VP and the cabinet secretary, Vinod Pande. Apparently (this was when I was not present) the government had come to know that the BJP was going to break its pre-election promise not to allow the Ram temple to become an issue in its continued support of the government.

VP had called the meeting to work out a strategy for countering the threat to the government that this would pose. By then he had held around a dozen meetings with members of the Ram Janmabhoomi Nyas and the Babri Masjid Action Committee (BMAC) and had got nowhere. It had become apparent to him that the roadblock was no longer technical, but the determination by the Sangh Parivar and the BMAC to piggyback on the issue to build their bases among Hindus and Muslims.

To avoid a confrontation with the BJP, VP first pinned his hopes on squeezing a decision out of the Allahabad High Court on the cases that had been before it for 41 years. Any decision from it would have given him moral and legal foundation for forcing his ruling upon the contending parties. It would have given the BJP a fig leaf it needed to not bring down the National Front government. But the court, which had slept over the issue for years, continued to slumber.

Pande must have reported to him sometime in July that the court was not willing to oblige. That was when VP decided to bring forward the Mandal decision. He knew the chances of his government surviving beyond October 30 were slight. He wanted to implement this part of the programme before it fell, partly because it was covered by his 61-point action programme, and partly because it would help consolidate a base for the Janata Dal. Where he went wrong was in the way he announced his decision. Instead of listening to Pande, and his principal secretary B.G. Deshmukh, and leaving open the proportion of reservation and other contentious issues to be decided after a national debate, he announced the figure of 27 per cent, and stuck to it till forced by more than a hundred deaths to refer the issue to the Supreme Court in October.

Hindsight also suggests that had he taken the BJP challenge head on, accused it of breaking faith when it announced the decision to support the temple agitation on September 14, and dissolved Parliament he would have come back with his strength enhanced. But he chose to present the people with a fait accompli and fell right into the BJP's trap.

The blame for this lies to a great extent on VP's tendency to seek reassurance from close advisers. This made him vulnerable to sycophants. Two of his ministers, Sharad Yadav and Ram Vilas Paswan, prevailed on him to go for broke on Mandal. As Yadav told a crowd in Patna on October 8, 1990, the "Mandal rath" would crush the "Ram rath". Ironically Yadav and Paswan are now ministers in a BJP-led government.

In the end, however much VP may have erred in the way he implemented Mandal, he will go down in history as a key architect of a new, egalitarian and vibrant India. Far from having started a rebellion that he could not control, he stopped a revolution that would have plunged India into anarchy and threatened its disintegration. What Mandal did was to stop the gap between power and entitlement from widening to the point where those who wielded the former would smash the political system that made possible the latter. That was the democratic Indian state.

Ever since the '60s the middle castes had been accumulating economic power by virtue of the green revolution. But they had been shut out of the power elite because they lacked access to modern, English-based education. This was available only in the cities and therefore by default to an affluent, upper caste, bureaucratic elite. Mandal is giving access to the cities and therefore to the elite to the newly empowered backward classes. What is more it has started a chain reaction in which the Scheduled Castes and Tribes have joined. A grossly iniquitous system of stratification that made some humans inferior to others by birth is breaking down at a dazzling speed. And although a billion people are involved, it is happening almost without violence.

Prem Shankar Jha is a columnist and former media adviser to prime minister V.P. Singh.

B.P. MANDAL (1917-1982)
Former Bihar chief minister whose report on reservation redefined class-caste stratification in India.