The contours of the delimitation of wards for the municipal elections which will be notified by Thursday will turn out to be a mastery of manipulation which will significantly alter the reservation pattern of Schedueld Castes, Tribes and OBCs. There will be only one winner though, the OBCs, a section the BJP desperately wants to woo back.
Ultimately the elections to the urban bodies will be a battle of reserved seats and not quite the referendum that it is probably pitched to be for MLAs who are expected to field candidates. But the math will be very skewed.
The game has been played this way. BJP MLA from Sanquelim Pramod Samant was fielded to drum up support for enhanced OBC reservation. He announced that reservations had to be increased from 19.5 percent to 27 percent. He even said that the bureaucracy should step up to implement this or face consequences. The government then moved to amend the Municipalities Act to increase reservations taking advantage of 243(T)(6)of the Constitution
It then worked on Section 243(T)(1) of the Constitution to move away from fixed reservations for Scheduled Castes and Tribes and implement reservations for castes in proportion to their representation as a percentage of their population.
243 (T) (1) Seats shall be reserved for the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes in every Municipality and the number of seats so reserved shall bear, as nearly as may be, the same proportion to the total number of seats to be filled by direct election in that Municipality as the population of the Scheduled Castes in the Municipal area or of the Scheduled Tribes in the Municipal area bears to the total population of that area and such seats may be allotted by rotation to different constituencies in a Municipality.
The quatum leap in the reservations for OBCs was justified under 243(T) (6): Nothing in this Part shall prevent the Legislature of a State from making any provision for reservation of seats in any Municipality or offices of Chairpersons in the Municipalities in favour of backward class of citizens
What the altered delimitations will actually do can be best explained through a specific example. Margao and Fatorda constituencies under which all, but 2 wards of the Margao Municipal Council fall, has a scheduled tribe population of approximately 5000 in a voting population of 60,000 which amounts to less than 10 percent. This means that only 1 of the 25 seats will be reserved for Scheduled Tribes. Now let’s look at what the situation was before this delimitation or what it was when the last municipal elections were held. The total number of wards then were 20 and the percentage of reservations was fixed at 12.5 percent (and not according to their population percentage). Thus 12.5% of 20 seats made the number of reserved seats as 2. Thus from 2 reserved out of 20, only 1 will now be reserved out of 25, which is about 4 percent. Thus the ST reservation will effectively slip from 12.5 percent to 4 percent for the Margao Municipal Council elections.
How does this play out politically? In order to woo the OBC vote bank the BJP will alienate the tribal vote bank tremendously. This will assume significance in constituencies like Quepem, Cuncolim and Canacona. The United Tribals Association Alliance, once with the BJP has already moved away and is openly critical of the BJP. UTAA has accused the BJP of targeting its leaders by deliberately opening the cases pertaining to the UTAA agitation, which ironically was against the earlier Congress government. But the leaders of the agitation were charge sheeted during the BJP government. And lest the BJP forget there is a big section of the Scheduled Tribes who belong to the minorities.
The Parsekar government has risked a huge gamble. Only time will tell if this was a risk worth taking.
