The year was 1998. It was the 12th Lok Sabha, and the first NDA government led by Atal Bihari Vajpayee would be in office for 13 months until 1999. Nitish Kumar having only recently broken away from the Janata Dal led by his erstwhile best friend Lalu Yadav, floated the Samata Party with George Fernandes, Syed Shahabuddin, Abdul Ghafoor and a few others. An OBC showboy, he was a big catch for the BJP, and was rewarded by Vajpayee with the coveted Railways portfolio.Nitish took his newfound status a little too seriously, more so perhaps because his bête noire Ram Vilas Paswan had preceded him as Railway minister in the United Front governments led by HD Deve Gowda and IK Gujral. At the instance of Mandal messiah VP Singh, the UF government (1996-98) had selected and got elected KR Narayanan, a Dalit career diplomat, as the eighth President of India.Ram Vilas Paswan, the sole Janata Dal-United (JD-U) MP in the 12th Lok Sabha, had floated the SC/Dalit MPs’ Forum and held its meetings in Room Number 62 or 54 on the first floor of Parliament House in the 11th Lok Sabha. Attempting to outdo Paswan, Nitish floated the OBC MPs’ forum and even invited Kalyan Singh, then UP chief minister, to attend. Kalyan, a vocal votary of backward empowerment, agreed. Kalyan led the largest number of OBC MPs from UP. The BJP was and remains the party with the most OBC MPs. Add to that OBC MPs from allies like the Samata Party, the AIADMK and others, and the OBCs constituted a very large part of the ruling NDA. Nitish’s move set alarm bells ringing in BJP circles, also partly because Vajpayee seemed to hold the OBCs in some disdain. Incidentally, in the 13th Lok Sabha, which lasted almost a full term, both Paswan and Sharad Yadav, the brain behind Mandal, joined the NDA government and became ministers. Thereafter, the SC MPs’ Forum was not heard of.Also read: BJP’s NDA Allies Sing a Different Tune, Reiterate Demand for Caste CensusThe BJP’s pitch of “Mandir wahin banayenge”, a demand to demolish the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya and construct a bhavya (magnificent) Ram temple at the same spot, resonated well with a large section of the Hindu population in the cow belt, and contributed to undermining VP Singh’s political ace, the empowerment of OBCs through acceptance of the Mandal Commission report in 1990. Since then, the seesaw battle between Mandal and Kamandal has gone on, sometimes covertly but very often overtly, led by the likes of Lalu Prasad Yadav. The BJP, on its part, has been playing a duplicitous game. While it wants to ― and has mostly succeeded ― in attracting prominent OBC vote banks by showcasing first Kalyan and now Modi, it is determined not to allow the ghost of Mandal ghost to rise again to haunt it.So, as soon as the news of Nitish’ invitation to Kalyan Singh reached the BJP top brass, it sent tremors through the party. Satyadeo Singh, a diehard RSS man, BJP MP and close confidant of Vajpayee, told some of us in no uncertain terms that any BJP MP or leader, even Kalyan Singh, who stepped into the room allotted for this meeting, would not come out of it as a member of the party.Also read: Bihar Caste Survey: Why the BJP Is Jittery and INDIA Bloc UpbeatThanks to that clear warning, the meeting never took place and we never again heard of the OBC MPs’ forum. It is important to recall this as the BJP plays a double game yet again. On the one hand, it is still trying hard to scuttle the Bihar caste survey which showed, as most of us expected, that the backwards constitute the largest chunk of the state’s population, over 63%. If the caste census is held nationally, as Rahul Gandhi and the Opposition INDIA bloc is demanding, its result may not be very different from the Bihar survey. Now, the BJP cannot bank only on Modi’s OBC claims.So, on the one hand, Modi said in Raipur the other day that the caste survey is an attempt to divide Hindu society, but he also pretended to be concerned about Muslims, and said that it would go against Muslims, forgetting that the implementation of Mandal already provides for about 8% quota for OBC Muslims within the 27.5% OBC reservations. Moreover, Modi himself is trying to attract Pasmanda Muslims by offering them EBC status. On the other hand, the Bihar BJP is trying its best to push the caste survey back in the box, asserting that Muslims already enjoy quota as EBCs. The long and short of it is that Modi and his party are now at a loss, and do not know how to address the caste issues that the survey has foregrounded.Faraz Ahmad is a senior journalist based in Delhi.