NEW DELHI: By giving 10 per cent quota in jobs and higher education to the upper caste poor months before the next Lok Sabha elections, the Narendra Modi government has played a master move that few among the opposition parties can criticise.Why? Prime Minister Modi has accomplished what several opposition leaders had been asking for but did nothing.When Mayawati of Bhaujan Samaj Party (BSP) rode to power in Uttar Pradesh in 2007, she demanded reservation in jobs for the poor belonging to the upper caste, and the Congress as well as the BJP supported the demand. Mayawati had won with the help of significant support by upper caste voters. Responding to Mayawati's demand, Manmohan Singh had said, “If there are ideas about the problems faced by poor children from ‘other’ sections of the community, they should also be taken on board.”That wasn't the only time Mayawati had demanded quota for the upper caste poor. In 2011, Mayawati wrote a letter to then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, demanding that the provision of reservation on financial grounds should be put in the Ninth Schedule of the Constitution so that it could not be challenged in a court of law. Again in 2015 and 2017 , she made a demand for separate quota in jobs on the basis of economic status.Before 2014 Lok Sabha polls, Samajwadi Party too promised to set up a savarna ayog or upper caste commission to address the issues faced by the community, including reservation for the poor among them.Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu had indicated in 2016 that the Andhra Pradesh government could soon extend reservation for the poor among upper castes. "We will conduct a survey. Based on that we will have no objection to extend reservation benefits to the economically-backward among the upper castes," Naidu had said.Kadakampally Surendran, CPI(M) leader and a minister in the Kerala government, urged for reservation based on economic conditions rather than caste while saying that Brahmins were the victims of land reforms, as reported by news site The News Minute.Some Dalit leaders in the ruling NDA too have demanded such a quota for the upper caste poor. Ram Vilas Paswan, Union minister and the chief of Lok Janshakti Party, an NDA ally, said last year that the upper caste poor should be given 15 per cent reservation. Another Dalit leader, Ramdas Athawale, Union minister and president of the Republican Party of India, an NDA ally, rooted last year for 25 per cent reservation to the poor among the upper castes by enhancing the quota limit to 75 per cent.