ONGOLE: The Madiga Reservation Porata Samithi (MRPS), which has been in the forefront of SC sub-classification stir, was formed in Prakasam district.
Manda Krishna Madiga, who is formerly known as Manda Eliya, started the fight in the early 1980s as a village-level anti-caste activist in the suburbs of Warangal.
Following the massacre of Dalits at Karamchedu in 1985 and at Tsunduru in 1991, Manda associated himself with the larger Dalit movements, which started consolidating the SC communities. He felt that the Dalit movements were led by leaders from the Mala community, and they were not extending their wholehearted support to the fight for justice for Madiga and other marginal communities in SCs.
Hence, he formed MRPS in July 1994 at Edumudi village in Prakasam district, along with Krupakar Madiga, Dandu Veeraiah Madiga, Kommuri Kanaka Rao Madiga, Mary Madiga and a few others. Manda and his team took the MRPS movement to its peak, and started negotiations with political parties to get their support to achieve classification of SCs into A, B, C and D categories for reservation. The term Madiga was used as a slur until Manda and the other leaders added it as suffix to their names like forward castes.
The MRPS and its agenda of categorisation spread like wildfire across the erstwhile Andhra Pradesh, uniting the Madigas, which was numerically strong, but economically and socially backward, compared to the other SC communities such as Mala and Adi-Andhra.