Socio-Cultural Movements and the Rise of SP, BKD/BLD, and JD(U)

The political maps of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar were redrawn not in air-conditioned party offices but in villages, on farmland, and in the assertion of communities long pushed to the margins. The Samajwadi Party, the Rashtriya Janata Dal, and the Janata Dal (United) are not merely electoral outfits. They are the political expression of a deeper churn rooted in caste, agrarian interests, and the demand for social justice. To understand them, we have to trace a story that begins decades before any of them existed, with a peasant leader’s plough and a socialist’s idea of equality.

The socialist and agrarian roots 🔗

These parties did not appear out of nowhere. They are branches of a single tree planted in the 1960s and 1970s. Two intellectual currents fed that tree: the socialism of Ram Manohar Lohia and the peasant politics of Chaudhary Charan Singh. Both men challenged the dominance of the Congress and both spoke for groups that felt locked out of power, namely the backward castes and the farming communities of north India.

Lohia and the case for backward-class politics 🔗

Ram Manohar Lohia was among the first leaders to argue that real democracy required political power for the lower castes. He demanded sweeping reservations for backward castes, Dalits, and tribals in jobs and education, and he actively encouraged backward-caste leaders to enter politics. This was radical for its time. Lohia’s ideas directly shaped the careers of the men who would later build these parties. Mulayam Singh Yadav, for instance, encountered Lohia’s writing as a teenager and built his political identity around the equality of peoples and the rights of lower-caste Hindus and Muslims.

Charan Singh and the rise of the BKD 🔗

If Lohia supplied the ideology, Charan Singh supplied the agrarian base. In 1967, after defecting from the Congress, he founded the Bharatiya Kranti Dal (BKD) at a meeting in Lucknow. The BKD did something genuinely new in Indian politics. It positioned itself as a party of the peasantry and built a political identity around the “kisan”, choosing a plough on a peasant’s shoulder as its symbol. Scholars studying rural north India have described the formation of the BKD as one of the most important examples of the shift toward parties drawing strength from the prosperous peasantry.

From BKD to BLD 🔗

The BKD soon broadened its appeal. As caste tensions and anti-minority violence intensified, the party expanded its mandate to include Scheduled Castes and Muslims, giving it a genuine mass base and presenting it as a real alternative to the Congress. In 1974, Charan Singh fused seven anti-Congress parties into the Bharatiya Lok Dal (BLD). This included the Swatantra Party, the Samyukta Socialist Party, the Utkal Congress, and his own BKD. The BLD then became one of the constituents that merged into the Janata Party in 1977, the coalition that defeated Indira Gandhi after the Emergency. That victory in north India was widely read as more than a defence of democracy. It was seen as an assertion of the backward classes against the older upper-caste and Scheduled-Caste alignment.

The Mandal moment 🔗

The single event that supercharged this entire stream of politics was the implementation of the Mandal Commission report. The commission, chaired by former Bihar chief minister B.P. Mandal, had recommended 27 percent reservation for Other Backward Classes in central government jobs and educational institutions. The report sat largely ignored for a decade until Prime Minister V.P. Singh acted on it.

On 7 August 1990, the V.P. Singh government accepted the Mandal recommendations, taking total reservation to nearly 50 percent. The decision triggered fierce upper-caste protests, but it permanently changed the language of Indian politics. Caste-based social justice moved to the centre of the debate. Political scientists have called this the “Second Democratic Upsurge,” a moment when the OBCs entered the heart of electoral power. The leaders who benefited most were precisely the Lohiaite socialists, men like Mulayam Singh Yadav and Lalu Prasad Yadav, who could now claim to represent a numerically vast and newly mobilised constituency.

The Samajwadi Party in Uttar Pradesh 🔗

By 1992 the Janata Dal, the big umbrella party formed in 1988, was fragmenting. Out of this breakup, Mulayam Singh Yadav founded the Samajwadi Party in October 1992, declaring its goal to be a socialist society built on the principle of equality. The timing mattered enormously. The party was created just months before the demolition of the Babri Masjid.

The OBC and Muslim coalition 🔗

The SP built its base on a powerful combination of two groups. It sought to mobilise the Muslim population and lower castes, especially the Other Backward Classes, into a single political force. When the Babri Masjid was destroyed in December 1992, Mulayam and his new party emerged as advocates for Muslims, who credited him with standing by them. This OBC-Muslim coalition, anchored heavily by the Yadav community, became the foundation of SP politics for decades.

Power and dynasty 🔗

The strategy worked. The SP formed governments in Uttar Pradesh in 1993, 2003, and 2012, and Mulayam served multiple terms as chief minister. In 2012 he handed the chief ministership to his son Akhilesh Yadav, marking the party’s shift toward a family-centred leadership. After Mulayam’s death in 2022, Akhilesh became the unquestioned face of the party. The SP also showed it could still mobilise its base, winning 37 of Uttar Pradesh’s 80 seats in the 2024 Lok Sabha election and emerging as a key part of the national opposition.

The Rashtriya Janata Dal in Bihar 🔗

Bihar’s version of this story runs parallel to Uttar Pradesh’s. Lalu Prasad Yadav rose through the Janata Party and the JP movement of the 1970s, and the Mandal wave carried him to the chief ministership of Bihar in 1990. He governed by championing the backward classes and minorities, turning the assertion of dignity for these communities into a potent political message.

The birth of the RJD 🔗

In July 1997, facing corruption allegations linked to the Fodder Scam, Lalu broke away from the Janata Dal and founded the Rashtriya Janata Dal. He was joined by leaders like Raghuvansh Prasad Singh and a large bloc of MPs. The party’s stated objective was to build a society based on social justice and secularism, drawing directly on the socialist beliefs associated with Jayaprakash Narayan.

The MY base and its critics 🔗

The RJD’s support traditionally rests on a coalition often described as “MY,” meaning Other Backward Classes, Dalits, and Muslims, with Yadavs and Muslims at its core. The party is widely seen as a champion of lower-caste politics. Yet the same period drew sharp criticism. The 1990s and early 2000s in Bihar were frequently described by opponents as a time of lawlessness, captured in the contested phrase “Jungle Raj.” Whether one reads this era as empowerment of the marginalised or as a breakdown of governance remains one of the central debates in Bihar’s politics. In recent years, leadership has gradually passed to Lalu’s son Tejashwi Yadav.

The Janata Dal (United) and the politics of governance 🔗

The JD(U) represents a different answer to the same question of social justice. Its lineage also runs through the Janata Parivar, but its founders chose a path that combined backward-class politics with an emphasis on administration and development.

A merger of factions 🔗

The JD(U) was formed on 30 October 2003 through the merger of three groups: the Sharad Yadav faction of the Janata Dal, the Samata Party founded by George Fernandes and Nitish Kumar, and the Lok Shakti party. Nitish Kumar and Fernandes had earlier split from the Janata Dal in 1994 to form the Samata Party. The new JD(U) was created to promote secularism and social justice and to offer an alternative to both the Congress and the RJD-dominated politics of Bihar.

The development pitch 🔗

The JD(U)’s breakthrough came in 2005, when it won a decisive victory and Nitish Kumar became chief minister in alliance with the BJP, ending the long Lalu-Rabri era. What distinguished the JD(U) was its governance brand. Nitish Kumar’s administration focused on restoring law and order, building roads, improving schools and health clinics, and reducing crime. The party also drew its support from a distinct social coalition, leaning on the Extremely Backward Classes, Kurmis, and sections of Dalits and Mahadalits rather than the Yadav-Muslim base of the RJD. This combination of social justice rhetoric and a development record helped it win an even larger mandate in 2010.

The art of alliance 🔗

The JD(U) is also known for its shifting alliances. It has moved repeatedly between opposing coalitions since 2013, allying with the BJP, then breaking away, then partnering with the RJD, and then returning to the BJP. Critics call this opportunism. Nitish Kumar has defended these moves as necessary for Bihar’s stability. Either way, the manoeuvring has kept the party at the centre of state power for nearly two decades.

One movement, different paths 🔗

What ties the SP, the BKD/BLD legacy, the RJD, and the JD(U) together is a shared origin in the Lohiaite-Charan Singh tradition and the Mandal-era assertion of the backward classes. Where they differ is in emphasis. The SP and RJD built durable coalitions of specific castes and minorities and leaned heavily on charismatic, family-centred leadership. The JD(U) tried to fold social justice into a broader promise of clean governance and development, reaching out to the most marginalised backward groups. All three, however, owe their existence to the same fundamental shift: the moment when communities long excluded from power decided that politics belonged to them too.

What do you think? Does the focus on caste-based mobilisation in these parties ultimately empower marginalised communities, or does it risk reducing complex social problems to electoral arithmetic? And as leadership in the SP and RJD passes to a new generation, can these parties retain their original social-justice mission while competing on governance and development?

References

1. https://hubsociology.com/ram-manohar-lohia-and-his-movements-for/
2. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Mulayam-Singh-Yadav
3. https://charansingh.org/archives/bhartiya-kranti-dal
4. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03066158808438382
5. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Janata-Dal-United
6. https://anantamias.com/mandal-commission/
7. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandal_Commission_protests_of_1990
8. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Samajwadi-Party
9. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Rashtriya-Janata-Dal
10. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rashtriya_Janata_Dal
11. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janata_Dal_(United)
12. https://www.business-standard.com/amp/about/what-is-janata-dal-united
13. https://chakravyuha.org/bihar/jdu-history-and-its-current-form/