Beyond the legality of reservations for the Other Backward Classes (OBCs) in urban local body polls provided by the Uttar Pradesh government, the issue has wider ramifications in politics beyond the boundaries of the country's most populous state.
This is reflected by the speed with which the BJP-led state government has moved the Supreme Court for a stay against the Allahabad High Court's verdict of December 27, annulling its notification of December 5 that provided for OBC reservations in the civic body to be held in January.
The High Court held that the impugned notification was issued without following the triple test formula prescribed by the Supreme Court and ordered the state government to hold elections without reservations.
Within two days, the UP government has not only applied for the stay of the HC's order but also appointed a five-member commission to recommend reservation for OBCs.
Whatever the outcome of the legal battle, campaigns for political mobilisation on the issue have already been launched by the political parties in UP.
While UP Chief minster Yogi Adityanath has assured that civic elections would be held only after the SC mandated process is followed, their main opposition, the Samajwadi Party (SP), has accused the BJP of fooling the OBCs and announced a statewide agitation to expose it.
Another former UP Chief Minister, Mayawati, whose Bahujan Samajwadi Party had shared power in the state with both the SP and the BJP in the past, has also jumped into the fray. She has asked her party cadre to fan out and mobilise OBC communities.
At stake for various competitors for political power in the Hindi heartland are the OBC voters, who emerged as a category through the Mandal Commission report and propelled OBC leaders Lalu Prasad Yadav and Mulayam Singh Yadav to power in the late 1980s and early 1990s in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh.
By forging a tactical alliance with the OBCs and the Muslims, these parties, which originated out of the late socialist leader Ram Manohar Lohia's anti-Congressism movement, displaced the Grand Old Party in UP and Bihar. Later, they emerged as a major stumbling block for the ascendance of the BJP in these states after the terminal decline of the Congress.
In the traditional Hindu social organisation, particularly in north India however, the OBC category comprises heterogeneous castes, and therefore, makes for a 'political community'.
As political scientist Sudha Pai argues in one of her papers, the OBCs in the Hindi heartland fall under three categories based on both caste and class criterion, i.e. social status, income and education.
At the top are the numerically small, economically well-off, socially better-placed and politically important 'forward' or upper Backward Classes.
In the middle are the largely land-owning dominant castes in rural areas, who are upwardly mobile and gradually improving their status.
At the bottom are the 'Most Backward Classes' (MBCs) that account for the bulk of the category. Their differential socio-economic status has allowed them to be subsumed by major political parties.
The Congress exploited these inner contradictions during the heydays of one-party dominance through a patron-client relationship between the upper and lower castes.
The BJP has risen to power upending these differentials by unleashing its Hindutva wave, which sought to submerge caste differences within an assumed monolithic religious identity.
In Bihar, it weaned away the non-Yadav OBCs through Nitish Kumar and by sharing power with the JD (U) till recently.
In UP, after the defeat of the BJP state government headed by Kalyan Singh in 1993 by the SP-BSP coalition, it succeeded by sharing power with Mayawati and isolating the SP.
After experimenting with various social engineering experiments to sub-divide the OBC and Dalit categories, which led to the formation of a BSP government in 2007 and a SP government in 2012, it only succeeded in 2017 under the leadership of Narendra Modi by weaning away a chunk of prominent low-caste leaders from the SP and the BSP.
The victory of the BJP-JD(U) coalition in 2020 state elections showed this worked. The sweeping success of the BJP in the 2022 UP state elections corroborated the hypothesis of OBC vote-bank fragmentation to the advantage of the BJP.
The breaking away of Nitish Kumar from the NDA in Bihar and his announcement that he will work for the consolidation of the social justice forces in the Hindi heartland has put a question mark over this.
Unlike in the post-Mandal years, when the political alliance of the OBCs was plagued by the 'problem of plenty', this time the OBC landscape is limited.
There is no possibility of Lalu Prasad Yadav, Akhilesh Yadav and Sharad Yadav – the immediate beneficiaries of the implementation of the Mandal Commission report – pulling each other down as happened the 1990s.
In fact, Nitish Kumar has already projected RJD chief Tejashwi Prasad Yadav as the next CM face of the grand alliance in Bihar. Despite having political clout of his own, former UP chief minister Akhilesh also considers Kumar a father figure.
In the run-up to the 2024 parliament election, there then appears to be no rifts in the OBC ranks of non-BJP parties in north India. This is naturally a cause of worry for the BJP.
(Yogesh Vajpeyi is a freelance journalist and media consultant. These are the writer's views.)