NEW DELHI: BJP on Friday ramped up its OBC outreach by outfitting itself as the party which gave the country its first “backward” PM as well as the maximum number of CMs belonging to the sprawling social category which accounts for more than half the population and has been politically crucial.

“ We have not been in power for long but it is the BJP which has given the maximum number of OBC chief ministers. And the first prime minister from the community has also come from BJP . Today, the most OBC MLAs and MPs come from BJP. It shows how much importance the party has been given to OBCs,” party chief Amit Shah said.

Shah, who was addressing the inaugural meeting of the just-constituted OBC wing of the party, also took a dig at the avowedly Mandal outfits saying that while they professed to be concerned about the welfare of all OBC castes, in practice, the parties were reduced to being single-caste platforms.

Shah did not name names, but the criticism appeared to be trained at SP, RJD and JD(U) who have been accused of entrenched and institutionalized bias towards the castes their bosses belong to.

The setting up of the OBC Morcha under Shah is considered to be a bold experiment for a party which was for long mocked as a “Brahmin-Bania” outfit. The taunting did not stop even as BJP expanded far beyond its core to make deep inroads among OBC communities, producing a number of important leaders -- Kalayan Singh, Narendra Modi, Uma Bharati, Shivraj Singh Chouhan, Gopinath Munde and Sushil Kumar Modi among others.

Significantly, the party also did not seem keen to play up its support among OBCs for a number of reasons. Its professed aversion to politics of caste, RSS’s priority to weld all Hindus into one political community and apprehension of upper castes who constitute a solid bloc of support and occupy top tier positions.

The last Lok Sabha polls saw the party shedding its inhibition, with PM candidate Modi emphasizing his OBC credentials, though he would integrate it into a larger narrative of poor person from humble background who had made good solely on the strength of his skills.

While the creation of the “backward” morcha is an extension of the same process, the effort to enlist OBC support is unlikely to be allowed to undermine the party’s traditional focus on “samajik samrasta” or social harmony which political circles read as code for the objective of Hindu consolidation.

Shah stressed this while addressing the Morcha. He said unlike other OBC-based parties, the Morcha will not work to divide society but only to bring small backward communities together so that they could get their due. The Morcha is not meant to “cut” the upper castes from society but unite the backwards, the BJP chief said.

Shah said he was not fully aware of the cruciality of OBCs for the country’s overall progress until he was given charge of UP during the Lok Sabha polls and had started touring across the country as part of his new role.

The chief of OBC Morcha, S P S Baghel, said the unit will work for the success of the party in Bihar and UP polls.

