Decode Politics: In SC/ST quota debate, Modi now attacks Nehru. What was former PM’s stand?

With his remarks on reservations at a rally in Bihar on Tuesday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has opened up another front on the issue. “The truth is that had there been no Ambedkar, Nehru would not have allowed quota for SC/STs,” he said, while going on to allege that the Opposition INDIA bloc wanted to change the Constitution and extend reservations to religious minorities.

A look at the Constituent Assembly debates over giving Constitutional status to reservations:

The Constitution, when it first came into force, included provisions to provide reservations in political institutions and public employment for people belonging to Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes.

What is now Article 16 of the Constitution – which allows states to reserve appointments to state services for “any backward class of citizens which… are not adequately represented” – was initially known as “draft Article 10”, when the members of the Constituent Assembly debated it on November 30, 1948.

The phrase “any backward class” in the draft version (and eventually the final version) was a hotly contested subject. Many members believed the phrase to be too vague as the term “backward class” was not defined anywhere else in the Constitution.

Members including the Congress’s Chandrika Ram and Dharam Prakash, one of the first Dalit lawyers in the country and a future Rajya Sabha MP from Uttar Pradesh, respectively, advocated to explicitly include the term “Scheduled Caste” in the place of (or in addition to) the term “backward class” to clarify which groups of people could avail the benefits of reservations.

On the other hand, members such as Lokanath Misra and Damodar Swarup Seth, who were also part of the Congress, sought deletion of the reservations