Arjun Singh

New Delhi, Nov. 11: Arjun Singh is being blamed by the Uttar Pradesh unit of the Congress for the BJP’s good showing in the recent civic elections.

“It takes a second to commit a mistake and centuries to repair it,” a Thakur functionary said, in a reference to the HRD minister’s decision to introduce a quota for the other backward classes in higher education.

“The minister announced the policy in a second literally, unmindful of its consequences. Our party could do nothing but wring its hands in despair,” he said.

While Congress general secretaries like Satyavrat Chaturvedi and B.K. Hari Prasad have stressed that the Centre’s policies could not have influenced the way people voted in elections to town-planning bodies and municipal councils, the state unit insists Arjun has done more “damage” than the Delhi brass realise.

“Elections such as these are fought on local issues like water, roads and power supply, not on questions of reservations and the so-called minority appeasement,” said Chaturvedi.

But senior state leaders have started doing the rounds of the Congress headquarters here to catch the attention of Brahmin office-bearers and impress on them the need for the UPA government to “go slow” on matters of reservation and “appeasement”.

The latter was an allusion to the Congress’s perceived failure to take a stand on matters like the death sentence to Mohammad Afzal and the demand for reservation for minorities.

“Policies are not evolved in a whimsy, whatever the apparent motives. Just because an election-bound state wants something doesn’t mean the Centre will give in. The government has to take the big picture into account,” a Delhi office-bearer said.

Congress sources said while the BJP itself was torn by its various caste lobbies and, therefore, unable to take a stand on OBC reservation, another factor rescued it.

“It was the collective projection of its leadership, representing every caste. There were Brahmins like Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Kesri Nath Tripathi and Kalraj Mishra; in Rajnath Singh, they had a powerful Thakur representative while Kalyan Singh and Vinay Katiyar are formidable OBC leaders. We have just nobody,” said a Lok Sabha MP.

“The OBCs are divided into sub-castes and don’t vote in a block. Virtually each sub-caste has its own leadership line-up. We don’t have any such leader. If Arjun Singh thought his reservation policy would compensate, he was mistaken.”