Read the given passage carefully and select the best answer to each question out of the four given alternatives.

India presents a classic case of proto-politics. Nothing that is institutional has an appeal and the insatiable clamour for quick surprises is a constant. While on Sunday at a Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) event as part of its Dalit outreach, a world record was attempted by cooking 5,000 kg of ‘khichdi’, on Monday the Central government announced 10% reservation for ‘economic backwards’ to reach out to upper castes. The announcement is clearly aimed at the 2019 general election. However, it needs to be seen whether playing the reservation card in its inverted form would be a ‘zero-sum game’ or a ‘win-win’ situation for the BJP?

In the last decade, India has been witnessing the interplay of the agrarian crisis and demands for reservation by dominant peasant castes, Jats in the north, Marathas and Patidars in the west and Kappus in the south. The resultant political crisis leads to absurd complexities whereby reservation is sought and promised as the remedy for agrarian distress. Similarly, the BJP’s recent electoral reverses in three Hindi heartland States signalled that a section of the upper castes, the core support base of the party, had drifted away. This seems to have necessitated the proposed policy-cum-political measure of reserving 10% seats for them to woo them back. However, here too the party may be drawing the wrong inference. A significant section of the Other Backward Classes (OBCs) and Dalits accompanied upper caste voters in moving away from the BJP in Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan. While, anti-reservation forums like SAPAKS or Samanya Picchdaa Evam Alpsankhyak Samaj, had campaigned against the BJP on account of controversies related to the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, in reality, they merely deflected the root cause of the anger due to agrarian and rural distress. The fact that the BJP performed better than the Congress in the Baghelkhand region of Madhya Pradesh, the core region of SAPAKS activity, indicates this.