After Vinay Katiyar took over as Uttar Pradesh BJP president, the party is witnessing an interesting tussle between the goras and kalas. The goras (Whites) are those belonging to the upper castes and they include Kalraj Mishra, a Brahmin, Rajnath Singh, a Rajput, and Lalji Tandon, a Khatri. The kalas (Blacks) belong to the backward castes-Om Prakash Singh,Vinay Katiyar and Prem Lata Katiyar.

The Blacks are angry that the party leadership uses them in crisis and discards them afterwards. When the BJP failed to break its image as the "Bania" party (owing to the dominance of the trader classes), it used Kalyan Singh (an OBC) and successfully expanded its base from the urban to the rural belts. Later, the upper caste lobby ganged up against him, engineered his dismissal and grabbed power in the party and government. But when the Whites led the party to the polls and lost miserably, Blacks like Vinay were roped in to set the party in order.

The Blacks also feel the Whites are rarely punished. The BJP contested the last assembly elections projecting Rajnath as chief minister.The party strength hurtled down a third, but Rajnath was given key posts after the elections, first as the leader of the Legislature Party, then as in-charge of the party affairs in Uttar Pradesh and Uttaranchal and now as national general secretary. Tandon, despite being a one-constituency wonder, is deputy leader of the House. Mishra has been holding one post or the other for the past 34 years. Now he is in the queue to become a Union minister.

The Blacks, on the other hand, are punished for no fault of theirs. For instance, when Om Prakash Singh launched a campaign to weed out the corrupt and criminal elements in the party, he was asked to step down from the post of state president within six months to pave way for Mishra. If this apartheid continues, the coming Lok Sabha polls is bound to show that this is no mere black-and-white issue.

-Subhash Mishra

Best in the Business

The third biennial business today-Cosmode survey of India's best business schools is out. The 2002 survey scores B-schools on two parameters: market performance and internal capability. The first looks at campus salaries and recruiter profile and the second, at the quality of faculty and infrastructure. Some top B-schools, however, did not participate in the survey.

Top 10 B-Schools

1) IIM Bangalore

2) IIM Kolkata

3) IIM Lucknow

4) National Institute of Engineering, Mumbai

5) IIM Kozhikode

6) Management Development Institute, Gurgaon

7) IIM Indore

8) Shailesh J. Mehta School of Management, IIT Bombay

9) S.P. Jain Institute of Management and Research, Mumbai

10) IIFT, New Delhi