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The Bihar election results were full of lessons. Don’t trust opinion or exit polls is the first one. Not a single one could smell the mood on the ground.The second one – shifting stands of poll pundits and analysts. When early trends on November 8 showed promise for BJP, they were severely critical of Nitish Kumar’s poor political strategy to have an electoral tie-up with Lalu Prasad’s RJD. Grudgingly, they began singing praises of BJP president Amit Shah and PM Narendra Modi for their ability to touch base with rural voters.The trend changed dramatically in favour of the JD(U)-RJD-Congress combine and ended with a complete rout of BJP. So did the tone, tenor and analysis of the pollsters. Swiftly changing the course of arguments, they picked on the intemperate speeches of Shah and Modi during electioneering.One thing was clear. As always, Bihar voted on caste lines. Nitish and Lalu proved to be astute grassroots politicians who read the caste arithmetic far better than the Shah-Modi combine. But the election post-mortem report is staring at seasoned politicians from both the winning and losing sides. In fact, the victory chalked out by manipulation of the caste blocs is staring at all politicians cutting across party lines. Is this what the freedom fighters, Constitution framers and builders of modern India dreamt of?There is a general consensus among historians and anthropologists that caste system has existed in India for the last 2,000 years. After India gained independence, each and every speaker at the Constituent Assembly debates recognized the bane of caste system and argued with vigour for introducing provisions in the Constitution to eradicate this social evil.Chairman of the Constitution drafting committee BR Ambedkar, who himself was a victim of the unkind caste system, led the fight against it.Ambedkar had said, “On 26th January, 1950, we are going to enter into a life of contradictions. In politics, we will have equality and in social and economic life we will have inequality. In politics, we will be recognizing the principle of ‘one man one vote and one vote one value'. If our social and economic structure continues to deny the principle of one man one value, how long shall we continue to live this life of contradictions? How long shall we continue to deny equality in our social and economic life?“If we continue to deny it for long, we will do so only by putting our political democracy in peril. We must remove this contradiction at the earliest possible moment or else those who suffer from inequality will blow up the structure of political democracy which this Assembly has so laboriously built up.”After 65 years, can we say we have achieved the goal of wiping out caste system from our social life? The framers of the Constitution provided for reservation in public employment to backward classes to help them counter years of discrimination and slowly assimilate in the mainstream.But the politicians since independence have played the ‘backward’ card to their advantage and kept the caste system intact to reap benefits during elections. They have worked overtime to ingrain it in minds of the backward classes that if they don’t vote en bloc and protect their caste identity, their right to reservation in jobs and educational institutions would be in danger.Reservation was to become a ladder to reach the platform of social equality. Instead of using it to climb up, there are many in the upper castes who have started using the ladder to climb down and claim ‘backward’ tag to grab a share in the reservation cake.Such has been the blatancy of caste-based political strategy that after 65 years of independence and efforts to bring in equality in every sphere of life as per the constitutional mandate, caste system has emerged stronger and rooted itself firmly in the social structure.In the Ashoka Thakur judgment which upheld 27% quota for OBCs in educational institutions, the SC in 2008 had underlined the recent trend of 'forward' castes seeking 'backward' status. It warned, “When more and more people aspire for 'backwardness' instead of 'forwardness', the country itself stagnates.”The SC had also warned, “While affirmative discrimination is a road to equality, care should be taken that the road does not become a rut in which the vehicle of progress gets entrenched and stuck. Any provision for reservation is a temporary crutch. Such crutch by unnecessary prolonged use should not become a permanent liability.”While striking down quota for Jats in Ram Singh vs Union of India (March 17, 2015), the SC had said the determination of social and educational backwardness to warrant award of reservation benefits to a community must be based on contemporary data and not historical perception.But as the Bihar elections show, there have been no fruitful efforts on the politicians’ part to erase caste system which still divides society.We hope politicians cutting across party lines will soon realize that winning an electoral battle is of miniscule importance compared to the task of making India a vibrant democracy where equality rules and not caste system.