Mandal hasn’t collapsed with the BJP’s rise; it has nuanced itself

Updated : February 16, 2021 01:44 PM IST

Seeing the OBCs as homogenous is a conceptual error. So is the tendency to see in their opposition to Hindutva their “natural” politics.

The rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) among large sections of the OBCs and also some sections of Dalits in north, western and central India is puzzling many observers.

Academic Christophe Jaffrelot wrote recently that the present rise of the party is primarily a reaction to Mandal or the extension of reservations to the Other Backward Classes in the early 1990s after VP Singh as Prime Minister decided to implement the Mandal Commission recommendations. He pointed out that the increased vote percentage of the BJP among the OBCs—from 22-percent in 2009 to 44-percent in 2019—has, paradoxically, brought the upper castes back into the game, with their representation in Parliament increasing.

The argument suffers from a serious flaw: while it cites statistics, it presumes the gullibility of OBCs. It is as if they were led into the BJP by a smart ploy and knew not what they were doing. The same OBCs in north India who were smart enough to align with the socialists around Ram Manohar Lohia’s pitch for representation for the OBCs against a predominantly upper caste Congress—as Jaffrelot brought out in painstaking detail in his book India’s Silent Revolution—and countered Hindutva in the early 1990s in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar suddenly, and rather ironically, lost all agency since 2014. They walked into a trap that was neatly laid by Narendra Modi, an OBC politician, and became passive agents of the return of the upper castes to political power and heft.

The argument somehow does not add up.

What, then, has changed and why are the OBCs, the most influential bulwark of secularism in UP and Bihar through the 1990s and 2000s, now with the BJP, making it win these two states accounting for 120 seats, thus catapulting it to unprecedented electoral successes and clean majorities?

Flawed paradigms

What has changed has to be understood by unraveling some fundamental errors in scholarship that produced paradigms that draw neat compartments which fail to explain Indian politics over the last century in its nuances.

Several scholars saw the rise of the OBCs in north India—through farmer and socialist politics and later through the SP and the RJD—as a deepening of democracy, with the heft of the upper castes falling in north India and that of the OBCs rising. Upper caste heft had fallen long ago in south and western India, but it had survived till the early 1990s in north India, largely because of higher upper caste populations (as much as 20-percent in UP, of which the lion’s share is of Brahmins and Rajputs).

The academic misreading owed itself to a belief that Hinduism was essentially, and exclusively, hierarchical and that there was a fundamental contradiction between it and the interests and aspirations of the “low castes”. Hinduism—as also Hindutva, a variant of it that is wary of minorities, particularly Muslims—actually sharpened in the late 19^th century on the back of social reform. The Arya Samaj made the first attempt at enrolling Dalits in large numbers via Swami Shraddhanand’s Shuddhi campaigns. There were shades of orthodox opinion within Hindutva but these weren’t in the driver’s seat. VD Savarkar, too, tried to reach out to Dalits, for all his dislike for Islam. And the RSS, while its worldview draws from the Brahmanical insistence on the celibate renouncer, as seen in the figure of the pracharak, also replaced caste with the Sangh itself —as John Zavos has brought out—as a principle for the organisation of Hindus.

On the more inclusive side of modern Hinduism—which tried to foster cordial ties with Indian Islam—Mahatma Gandhi tried to reach out to Dalits through his Harijan campaigns. His taking the freedom struggle to villages of north India in any case brought his movements OBC support.

Hinduism and ‘Brahmanism’

In other words, modern Hinduism is not Brahmanism—a modern academic coinage—but an attempt at outreach beyond caste. Of course, the agency for this outreach came from upper caste leaders, across the secular-Hindutva divide. It is also true that the threat of conversions propelled the Dalit outreach. And it can be regarded as paternalistic, as many observers have pointed out. However, it cannot be gainsaid that outreach across caste has been one of the building blocks of modern Hinduism and, therefore, no fundamental contradiction between it and “low caste” politics of the OBCs and SCs may be cast in stone.

Many commentators put dominant peasant castes like the Jats—and even the Marathas, who took out marches to be included in the OBC category—into the category Shudra, largely conforming to a Brahmanical view of society as the authentic one and unmindful of the fact that they have emerged as dominant castes. On the ground, many of these groups have unequivocally enjoyed Kshatriya status in their localities.

The misreading by observers resulted in an error: any rise of the middle castes, which were sometimes also dominant castes, was seen as a challenge to Brahmanical Hinduism. The theme was simplistic: there is a Brahmanical Hinduism of Manu and there are potential challengers to it, who were hoodwinked for long and may now come into their own.

So, when these groups ally with Hindutva, they are being hoodwinked and when they oppose it, they acquire agency. They are gullible in the first instance and very perceptive in the second.

Such a flawed framework also demolishes for all practical purposes the communal-secular dichotomy. So, from colonial times to about 1990 the Congress became Brahmanical in north India, only to pass on the baton of Brahmanism to a rising BJP soon after.

The argument is replete with contradictions of all sorts. Let us frame them one by one.

To begin with, the Louis Dumont frame of a ritualised hierarchy in India with the Brahmin at the top and the Dalit at the bottom is problematic. Yes, Dalits have been genuinely at the bottom of the social hierarchy in most cases and have been oppressed. Why is that almost a uniform phenomenon? The answer: the category Scheduled Castes was constructed in colonial times with a view to figuring out which groups suffered from social disabilities like untouchability, not being able to draw water from the public well, etc. Commissioner of the Census EA Gait in 1910 issued a circular suggesting the listing of all “outcastes” in various provinces. These were scheduled together and became the Scheduled Castes in 1936.

The case of the OBCs was far different. This amorphous category has under it an array of caste groups, ranging from some dominant castes, like Jats and Yadavs in some states, to castes that in every lived sense are just above the SCs. There have been repeated demands for OBC sub-quotas to offer lower groups of the OBCs representation and prevent the quotas from going to the more advanced and numerically powerful OBC castes, like the Yadavs in Bihar and large parts of UP. Political analyst Sajjan Kumar has brought out how the OBC-EBC distinction in Bihar was fostered by the Karpuri Thakur brand of politics of the most-backward castes, while Lalu Prasad when he became Chief Minister wanted it replaced by a homogenous OBC quota as recommended by the Mandal Commission, leading to protests and the plan being abandoned.

The analytical error among many commentators lies in reading the OBC assertion in north India as a rejection of Brahmanical Hinduism. It isn’t that there isn’t enough evidence to the contrary: it is that commentators have seen castes now under the OBCs as having been passive when they aligned with a Hindutva cause and as autonomous agents when they did not.

Cow protection riots at the turn of the 20^th century in north India had a considerable Yadav participation. This has been seen by historian Gyan Pandey as an attempt by the “marginally clean” castes to acquire “full cleanliness” by aligning with a Hindutva cause. It was seen as an attempt at upward mobility.

However, it is equally true that in times of the heyday of the Congress in the 1960s and 70s, anti-Congressism in north India grew as an alliance of the socialists—who were the first ones to seriously voice the need for greater representation for the agrarian castes—Lok Dal politics of Chaudhary Charan Singh and the Jana Sangh, a Hindutva party and the BJP’s predecessor. In other words, the politics of anti-Congressism in these decades often saw the present OBCs and the small, Hindutva, a segment of the upper castes making common cause against the Congress, the party of large segments of the upper castes, the Dalits and Muslims.

Later, when Rajiv Gandhi faced the heat at the time of the Bofors scam, large sections of the upper castes and the OBCs came together around VP Singh, who was supported from outside by the BJP and the left. The upper castes in UP and Bihar also abandoned the Congress around this time, shifting to the BJP around the Ram temple issue. The Congress never clawed back, as it had also lost the Muslims, who now preferred Lalu Prasad and Mulayam Singh Yadav.

After this, new social combinations began to surface in UP and Bihar. Large sections of the OBCs and Muslims began to support the SP and RJD, which had the numerically large caste of Yadavs (8.7-percent in UP and about 14-percent in Bihar) as their fulcrum. The parties became the base of Indian secularism in north India and took strident positions against the BJP.

Nuances in OBC politics

But over the next two decades, a new phenomenon was to emerge: the nuancing of Mandal. The BJP began to work on smaller OBC castes that wanted a share of power but did not have the numbers to make their politics ‘autonomous’. Figures like Uma Bharti and Kalyan Singh—both Lodh OBCs— became prominent in the BJP. Around the rise of Narendra Modi, the process intensified and the leadership of the BJP in key states passed into the hands of politicians from smaller OBC castes: Modi in Gujarat, Shivraj Singh Chouhan in MP and Sushil Modi in Bihar. Around the 2014 polls—with Modi at the helm— the process acquired greater mass and the BJP swept UP and Bihar. In Bihar, the rise of Nitish Kumar was part of this process.

Yadavs vs other OBCs

What aided this shift was the fact that the SP and RJD were increasingly identified with the Yadavs and smaller OBC groups were ready to look for greener pastures. When the BJP swept the UP assembly polls in 2017, the upper caste representation in the assembly went up to 44-percent, 12-percent above the last time, Yadav representation dipped to 17-percent of OBC MLAs while Kurmi representation went up from 11-percent to 28-percent of the OBCs.

It is this shift that makes competition with Yadavs more important to smaller OBCs castes than the competition with the upper castes.

Unlike what Jaffrelot argues, this is an internal change in Mandal politics rather than the collapse of it. Seeing the OBCs as homogenous is a conceptual error. So is the tendency to see in their opposition to Hindutva their “natural” politics.

The RJD realised this and tried to field more EBCs in the Bihar assembly polls this time. It did well but not well enough, as EBCs stayed with Nitish Kumar.

As the EBCs flock to the BJP for tactical reasons, they also voice its worldview. Modi’s rise becomes a reassurance for them.

However, if they do not benefit in the medium term—the economy isn’t doing well—the shift can be reversed. And if Hindutva becomes so aggressive, a distinct possibility in UP under Yogi Adityanath, as to make them vulnerable in their villages, they may abandon the ship.

But that day hasn’t arrived yet.

—Vikas Pathak has been a political journalist for a decade-and-a-half and teaches at Asian College of Journalism, Chennai. The views expressed are personal

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