Congress is overtly playing caste card in Uttar Pradesh where it lost power 27 years ago.

In a bid to attract the votes of the most backward castes (MBCs) in poll-bound Uttar Pradesh, Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi on Saturday said his party will give the community quota within the OBC quota if voted to power.

Party general secretary in charge of UP Ghulam Nabi Azad told journalists that Mr. Gandhi had given an assurance to this effect to MBC party leaders from the State at a meeting here.

Mr. Gandhi, Mr. Azad said, had told these leaders that the Congress would include the promise in its election manifesto and implement it if his party is voted to power in the State.

Mr. Azad also pointed out that the Congress had been instrumental in instituting an MBC quota within the OBC quota in 10-odd States, including Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra in the past.

To a question on how much of the 27 per cent OBC quota would be sliced off for the MBCs, he said that would be left to a high-level panel, which would go into the issue in a time-bound manner to suggest modalities, as had happened in other States.

The Congress lost power in Uttar Pradesh 27 years ago and couldn’t make a comeback: this was largely because it failed to re-invent itself as caste and religion took centre stage.

In this election, however, the party is overtly playing the caste card.

Mr. Gandhi’s promise to his party’s MBC leaders roughly three months ahead of the polls would suggest that the Congress is unspooling its strategy, phase by phase: in the first, was the appeal to the Brahmins by not just projecting a Brahmin chief ministerial candidate in Sheila Dikshit but also holding Brahmin sammelans to draw in members of the community; in the second, it is the appeal to the MBCs, who could be described roughly as those backward caste members who are not Yadavs or Kurmis.

Interestingly, these are the two sections that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) too is looking for support — upper castes that include the Brahmins, and the MBCs.

On Friday, Mr. Azad stressed that only a section of the backward castes had benefited from reservation while the MBCs had remained laggards. Making an indirect reference to Samajwadi Party (SP) supremo Mulayam Singh Yadav, Mr. Azad said the benefits of reservation had gone only to some dominant castes in the State while the MBCs had been neglected. The SP, in the past, has often been accused of ensuring that a bulk of State benefits — not just reservation — goes to the dominant Yadav community.