Dalit organisation decides to take part in elections.

Hyderabad: In a clear indication that caste is going to play a bigger role than ever before in next month's elections in southern state Andhra Pradesh, powerful Dalit organisation Madiga Reservation Porata Samiti (MRPS) has decided to enter the electoral fray.

The MRPS, which claims to represent seven million Dalits belonging to the Madiga sub-caste in the state, has announced that it will join the Grand Alliance led by the Telugu Desam party and contest 30 of the 294 assembly seats and four of the 42 Lok Sabha seats in the state.

The MRPS is headed by fiery Manda Krishna Madiga, who has been waging a two-decade long struggle for the categorisation of 12.5 million Dalits in Andhra Pradesh into four groups to divide the reservation benefits among different sub-castes in accordance with their share in the population.

The MRPS' decision to fight the elections directly has come as a shock to the mainstream political parties that had expected to court the Dalit organisation and secure its support in the polls. Until 2004, the MRPS was aligned with the then ruling Telugu Desam party because Chandrababu Naidu's TDP regime had fulfilled its promise and implemented categorisation. Under the rule of categorisation, seven per cent of the total 16 per cent reservations were earmarked for the Madigas, as they were the majority among Dalits. The Madigas complaint is that while they were the bigger sub-caste, the major benefit of reservations in jobs and education was secured by the Mala sub-caste. This created a lot of bitterness among the Dalits and left them divided.

After the rival Mala sub-caste took the fight to the Supreme Court, challenging categorisation, and the apex court quashed the state government's order on categorisation as "unconstitutional", the MRPS turned against the TDP and aligned itself with the Congress in the last elections.

The Congress had promised that it would propose a constitutional amendment for the categorisation of the Dalits. But during the last five years, the frustration of the MRPS with the Congress and the UPA grew as they failed to amend the Constitution.

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