Breaking the Caste Code in Uttar Pradesh
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[1] Breaking The Caste Code In Uttar Pradesh Rajesh Singh (The writer is a senior political commentator and public affairs analyst) It is election season in Uttar Pradesh. The four major political parties in the fray are seeking to win the people’s affection on the promise of developmental governance. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is promoting Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ‘Sab ka saath, sab ka vikas’ formula; the ruling Samajwadi Party (SP) is pounding the media with publicity material highlighting the Government’s development record; the Congress has bluntly said the State will see progress only under its regime; and the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) has linked socio-economic development with the empowerment of the underprivileged classes. But there is another factor besides development which none of these parties wants to openly acknowledge — and it’s caste. Cracking the caste code holds the key to success in the State. All parties are burning the midnight oil to do so. It can be argued that caste is an over-rated element and that the 2014 Lok Sabha election demonstrated it. The BJP and its allies could not have won the 73 seats they did out of the 80 on offer, had caste divisions played out. The fact is, caste demarcations were diluted but not significantly reduced. Let us remember that the BJP’s alliance with a prominent leader of the Kushwaha community and a popular leader of the Patel community helped the party enormously in its caste calculations. Moreover, contrary to popular belief, people did vote along caste lines. The Yadavs voted largely — significantly more than 50 per cent — for the SP, as they have been doing since the 1990’s. And the Scheduled Castes backed the BSP. The non-Yadav IIFH, NEW DELHI (INDIA) www.iifh.org [2] votes went largely to the BJP — as it has been happening for years now. So did the upper caste votes. The coming Assembly election, in early 2017, will not be any different. It can see a further deepening of caste affiliations. The myth of ‘caste-less voting’ should be discarded at the earliest. But then, if caste considerations are so obvious and fixed, why do we keep getting different results in Uttar Pradesh? Again, there have not been ‘different’ results over the last 25 years in the State. It has been either the SP or the BSP which has won. This is testimony to the fact that voters have stuck to caste preferences. The alternation in Government has had to do with caste/religious alliances, nothing more. In 2007, BSP leader Mayawati secured the Brahmin and Muslim support and romped home. But her Scheduled Caste votes remained intact. In 2012, the SP, projecting the young Akhilesh Yadav as its chief ministerial candidate, won back the Muslim support and also gained a sizeable section of upper caste votes. But the party won eventually on the strength of its Yadav vote-bank. It must, therefore, be understood that a shift in caste groups from one party to another is not the same as ‘crossing caste boundaries’. Such would be the case if a particular caste group itself splits in its allegiance significantly enough and moves to other parties. We now come to an important question. If caste politics is so entrenched in Uttar Pradesh, how is it that we had a near uninterrupted rule of the Congress there since independence right until the eighties? Why did not the opposing caste formations not result in conflicts and deviations from the Congress? After all, caste loyalties have had the strength to spawn the two most powerful regional parties in the State. The underlying belief in the theory is that caste conflicts in the political arena came to dominate in the post-Mandal era. It is true that the post-Mandal period brought in by VP Singh, accentuated caste-based identity and led to political — though not necessarily social — empowerment of what came to be called the ‘Other Backward Classes’ (OBC). Riding on caste sentiments, the BSP too exploited the Scheduled Castes for votes. But it would be wrong to conclude that caste politics did not exist in the State before the Mandal recommendations for reservation for OBCs came into effect. The Congress dominated Uttar Pradesh until the late 1980’s because of the TINA (there is no alternative) factor. But within the party, caste always IIFH, NEW DELHI (INDIA) www.iifh.org [3] played a role. In those years, most local and national leaders belonged to the upper castes. Govind Ballabh Pant, Kamalapati Tripathi, Veer Bahadur Singh, VP Singh, Sripati Mishra, HN Bahuguna, ND Tiwari —they were all upper caste Congress Chief Ministers of the State. Some of them had the reputation of promoting their caste-interests at the cost of others. The other castes and classes seethed at their own neglect but had nowhere to go. The Mandal development opened the doors to them and gave a defining twist to politics in the State. It can be said that, today nearly every caste group has a party of its choice. The Mandal agitation threw up leaders such as Mulayam Singh Yadav, who broke ranks from VP Singh and floated the SP. It forced the BJP — which, like the Congress, was viewed as an upper caste party — to reach out to the backward classes. Kalyan Singh became the party’s most prominent and forceful OBC face. Over the years, many more have come to the fore, with the result that the BJP now has a formidable presence among the non- Yadav OBCs in the State. Others have benefitted too, even if in small measures. Ajit Singh is a Jat leader; while in the Congress, his father Charan Singh could never push Jat identity politics because of the stranglehold of powerful upper caste leaders. Likewise, Jagjivan Ram, a tall Scheduled Caste leader in the Congress, never got the due he deserved because of the domination of the upper caste lobby in the party. He eventually quit in the wake of the Emergency, but his daughter Meira Kumar failed to take his legacy forward in his home State of Bihar because she was subsumed in the larger politics of the Congress and remained content with the situation. In any case, at least in Uttar Pradesh, the so-called Dalit space got occupied by Mayawati and her BSP; for the likes of Meira Kuma, it became difficult to exploit her lineage. In sum, the proliferation and the success of caste-based parties in Uttar Pradesh should disabuse anyone of the notion that the State has moved away from identity politics. As has been mentioned before, caste politics did not make a debut in the aftermath of Mandal development. There had been attempts in Uttar Pradesh even from the 1960s to craft such politics, in the little space the Congress had left for the opposition. In his insightful book, India’s Silent Revolution:The Rise of the Low Castes in North Indian Politics, (Permanent Black, 2003), author and socio-political commentator Christophe Jaffrelot writes, “From the late 1960s onwards, the OBCs were to advance through the socialist movements and Charan Singh’s political IIFH, NEW DELHI (INDIA) www.iifh.org [4] parties. The former — especially the parties of Ram Manohar Lohia — were quick to use reservations as a means of politicising the lower castes. While the southern pattern of low caste mobilisation linked ethnicisation and strategies of empowerment, what one can call ‘quota politics’, in the north the latter was the key factor.” Jaffrelot too acknowledges that north Indian politicians who promoted the cause of the low castes were few in number till the late 1960s because “the Congress was dominated at the Centre by progressive leaders who did not regard caste as a relevant category for state-sponsored social change…” He says the senior leadership of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) — Somnath Chatterjee and Bhogendra Jha — received the Mandal Commission recommendations with skepticism. He promptly reminds the readers that the two were Brahmins and adds that other leaders of the party were whole-heartedly supportive of the recommendations. As for the Communist Party of India, the author says that they became “aware of the necessity to take caste seriously into account in 1992, in the post-Mandal context partly under the impetus of Inderjit (sic) Gupta”. Interestingly, Ram Manohar Lohia who was among the first, if not the first, to incorporate caste politics into the socialist ideology, headed the Praja Socialist Party (PSP) which was dominated by upper castes and showed little interest in uplifting the lower castes. Jaffrelot writes, “A survey conducted in 1967-68 showed that its leaders and MPs belonged to the upper caste intelligentsia: 75 per cent of its 40 top leaders were from the upper castes (including 50 per cent of Brahmins) whereas the lower castes accounted for only 12.5 per cent.” Lohia was to dismantle this mindset, though he used the peasant movement to further his goal instead of plunging head-on into crass caste politics. Lohia had a lofty reason. He believed, according to Jaffrelot, that the caste system was “responsible for the recurrent invasions India endured in its long history because ‘it renders nine-tenths of the population into onlookers, in fact listless and completely disinterested spectators of grim national tragedies’.” Thus, for Lohia, caste politics was about nationalism and not so much about identities to be exploited for the sake of votes. The author quotes from the socialist leader to emphasise this point. According to Lohia, “The shudra too has his shortcomings. He has an even narrower outlook.” He believed that, if the Scheduled Castes were pushed to positions of power, they would gain a broader viewpoint and contribute to national development.