In the backdrop of the Bengal elections, there is much discussion on the support of subaltern sections among Hindus for the BJP, which, coupled with strong anti-incumbency, is making the party a claimant for power in the state.
This follows from political scientist Sajjan Kumar’s report on the Bengal elections for People’s Pulse, with some agreeing with him and some others strongly disagreeing with the report.
Whichever way Bengal votes, it is necessary to clear the air on the seminal role backward caste groups have played till now in the rise of Hindutva to power. This analysis proposes to do precisely that.
How does one make sense of the rise of Hindutva as a political force?
It should not have been very difficult, but for flawed frameworks that ended up internalising their own attacks on Hindutva as its objective reality.
Liberal and left voices attacked Hindutva as “casteist” for decades on end and ended up getting seduced by their own characterisation of it.
Hindutva is deeply wary of Islam, but this wariness made it reach out far beyond the upper castes in the interest of Hindu consolidation, which it saw as the best defence against Islam. In other words, reaching out to Hindus beyond the upper caste was a central concern for Hindutva over the last century.
However, seeing the RSS, the organisational fountainhead of Hindutva today, dominated by Brahmins—particularly Maharashtrian Brahmins—at the top levels, critics mistook Hindutva to be a Brahmanical ideology. This was despite the fact that the scholar John Zavos suggested decades back that in making the Sangh rather than caste the central principle of organisation, the RSS dilutes the impact of caste in some ways.
Backward castes brought Hindutva to power
Little intellectual investment was made by critics in understanding that there could have been no rise of Hindutva without getting the ‘lower castes’—largely OBCs but also sections of SCs and STs—on board.
To explain the point, it is necessary to go into the history of Hindutva’s rise to power in India.
The Jana Sangh—the political affiliate of the RSS—did not perform well electorally for the first decade-and-a-half after independence.
It was a part of a small section of urban upper-caste Hindus in north India, the bulk of the upper castes being with the Congress, which had the famous rainbow coalition of upper castes, Muslims and Dalits, which ensured its sway over north Indian politics.
The rise of the backward castes
Hindutva’s first tryst with electoral success came in 1967 when it was part of the Sanyukta Vidhayak Dal (SVD) governments in quite a few north Indian states. Seen from above, the coming together of the Socialists and the Jana Sangh—and of Charan Singh, who quit the Congress in UP with his clique to become the Chief Minister of an SVD government with the support of the Jana Sangh and socialists—was part of a much-discussed “anti-Congressism”.
However, the process has to be seen bottom-up to make better sense of it.
The socialists—whose leader Ram Manohar Lohia had demanded OBC reservations much before the Mandal Commission was set up—and Charan Singh’s Lok Dal signified the rise of the backward castes in UP and Bihar in the 1960s and 1970s.
Anti-Congressism was in one sense an electoral alliance between two social constituencies—the small sections of Jana Sangh-leaning upper castes and the backward castes, which were behind Charan Singh and the socialists. This gave the Jana Sangh its first taste of electoral success and power in the late 1960s. The alliance with the backward castes, in other words, was the key force behind the Jana Sangh having a tryst with government formation, without which it would have remained a marginal opposition party.
The JP movement also followed the same social logic: the socialists, the Lok Dal and the Jana Sangh brought together a social combination of the backward castes and the Jana Sangh, the party of a small section of urban upper castes. The Janata Party was a merger that momentarily brought the upper castes and the backward castes together, as large sections of the upper castes in north India also shifted to it in opposition to the excesses of the Emergency of 1975-77, thus breaking with the Congress for a short while. The enhanced presence of the backward castes in the Janata Party—compared to the Congress days—provided the context for the appointment of the Mandal Commission, the second backward class commission, which had the mandate of determining the criteria for social and educational backwardness.
The same social forces came together in 1989 when the Janata Dal of VP Singh mobilised the backward castes in UP and Bihar and the BJP won over an increased chunk of the upper castes. The VP Singh government, predictably, was the one to announce the implementation of the Mandal Commission recommendations, though it was timed by Singh to take the wind out of the sails of the dissent of Devi Lal, a prominent Jat-farmer leader from Haryana who had been his Deputy Prime Minister.
Thus, the rise to power of Hindutva—as distinct from its being merely an idea— was made possible only through alliances with parties like the Bharatiya Lok Dal, the various fragments of the socialists and the Janata Dal, which brought support from the4 backward castes, a constituency that the Congress had ignored in north India.
When Hindutva attracted backward castes
As the BJP rose on the back of the Ram temple movement and the Rath Yatra of LK Advani in the early 1990s, it not only weaned away upper castes from the Congress but took to social engineering in a major way, for which KN Govindacharya, who was to soon become an outsider to the BJP, deserves credit.
Be it Uma Bharti, Kalyan Singh or Vinay Katiyar, a battery of leaders from the smaller OBC castes began to become key Hindutva figures in north India.
Yet, the introduction of OBC reservation in central jobs acted as a temporary speed-breaker for Hindutva. For, the Yadavs in UP and Bihar—8.7-percent and 14-15 percent, respectively, in the population of these states—became a bulwark for autonomous OBC politics, with Muslims as their electoral ally.
This continued for almost two decades.
Be that as it may, the BJP’s lower OBC outreach was successful in some other states. When Atal Bihari Vajpayee, a Brahmin, bowed out post-2004, and Advani failed to step into his shoes, the BJP was kept alive by the contributions to its Lok Sabha tally from Gujarat, MP, Chhattisgarh, Bihar and Rajasthan. In Gujarat, MP and Bihar, the BJP’s faces were leaders from small OBC castes: Narendra Modi, Shivraj Singh Chouhan and Sushil Modi.
It was an OBC state-level leadership—rather than the central leadership—that kept the BJP afloat in the UPA years.
With the catapulting of Modi to the national stage, the lower OBCs became central to the party’s scheme of things.
What is subaltern Hindutva?
This term, coined by Sajjan Kumar, is much used and abused today.
It is empirically demonstrable that the BJP has increased its vote share among the OBCs in North India exponentially in recent years. The Trivedi Centre for Political Data in Ashoka University also captured the fact that the number of non-Yadav MLAs in UP jumped in 2017, without denting upper-caste representation.
Apart from Sajjan Kumar, academic Badri Narayan has documented in painstaking detail the Hindutva outreach among subaltern sections of Hindutva, though Kumar’s distinctive contribution lies in seeing it as a bottom-up process, where the subaltern agency is privileged.
There are also scholars like Christophe Jaffrelot who see the subaltern caste groups as being hoodwinked into being co-opted as agents of an upper-caste resurgence, an argument that does little justice to the subaltern agency as political actors.
Subaltern Hindutva is not the same as the academic subaltern school, where the subaltern supposedly had a world independent of the elite. Kumar, rather, argues that smaller OBC and even Dalit castes have entered into a transactional relationship with Hindutva, particularly after the social justice discourse became Yadav-heavy in UP and Bihar, leaving out other small castes.
These small castes became an instrument of the BJP’s rise in recent years when it began to sweep north India.
In Bengal, again, the BJP has made capital of massive anti-incumbency against the TMC, due to the perception of huge corruption on the ground and political violence in the state, which flows from the party-society model in Bengal, where the ruling party dominates every sphere of society. The earliest converts to the new political force, the BJP, in 2019, were from regions away from Kolkata, particularly in SC/ST-dominated regions.
Yet, this subaltern isn’t ranged openly against the hegemonic Kolkata Bhadralok. It is just indifferent to Kolkata frames of Bengali exceptionalism. This subaltern has been mobilised against the TMC—though Mamata Banerjee is still individually popular—and, as a secondary factor, against Muslims.
The subaltern here is a force multiplier for Hindutva.
—Vikas Pathak is a media educator and political journalist. The views expressed are personal
This follows from political scientist Sajjan Kumar’s report on the Bengal elections for People’s Pulse, with some agreeing with him and some others strongly disagreeing with the report.
Whichever way Bengal votes, it is necessary to clear the air on the seminal role backward caste groups have played till now in the rise of Hindutva to power. This analysis proposes to do precisely that.
How does one make sense of the rise of Hindutva as a political force?
It should not have been very difficult, but for flawed frameworks that ended up internalising their own attacks on Hindutva as its objective reality.
Liberal and left voices attacked Hindutva as “casteist” for decades on end and ended up getting seduced by their own characterisation of it.
Hindutva is deeply wary of Islam, but this wariness made it reach out far beyond the upper castes in the interest of Hindu consolidation, which it saw as the best defence against Islam. In other words, reaching out to Hindus beyond the upper caste was a central concern for Hindutva over the last century.
However, seeing the RSS, the organisational fountainhead of Hindutva today, dominated by Brahmins—particularly Maharashtrian Brahmins—at the top levels, critics mistook Hindutva to be a Brahmanical ideology. This was despite the fact that the scholar John Zavos suggested decades back that in making the Sangh rather than caste the central principle of organisation, the RSS dilutes the impact of caste in some ways.
Backward castes brought Hindutva to power
Little intellectual investment was made by critics in understanding that there could have been no rise of Hindutva without getting the ‘lower castes’—largely OBCs but also sections of SCs and STs—on board.
To explain the point, it is necessary to go into the history of Hindutva’s rise to power in India.
The Jana Sangh—the political affiliate of the RSS—did not perform well electorally for the first decade-and-a-half after independence.
It was a part of a small section of urban upper-caste Hindus in north India, the bulk of the upper castes being with the Congress, which had the famous rainbow coalition of upper castes, Muslims and Dalits, which ensured its sway over north Indian politics.
The rise of the backward castes
Hindutva’s first tryst with electoral success came in 1967 when it was part of the Sanyukta Vidhayak Dal (SVD) governments in quite a few north Indian states. Seen from above, the coming together of the Socialists and the Jana Sangh—and of Charan Singh, who quit the Congress in UP with his clique to become the Chief Minister of an SVD government with the support of the Jana Sangh and socialists—was part of a much-discussed “anti-Congressism”.
However, the process has to be seen bottom-up to make better sense of it.
The socialists—whose leader Ram Manohar Lohia had demanded OBC reservations much before the Mandal Commission was set up—and Charan Singh’s Lok Dal signified the rise of the backward castes in UP and Bihar in the 1960s and 1970s.
Anti-Congressism was in one sense an electoral alliance between two social constituencies—the small sections of Jana Sangh-leaning upper castes and the backward castes, which were behind Charan Singh and the socialists. This gave the Jana Sangh its first taste of electoral success and power in the late 1960s. The alliance with the backward castes, in other words, was the key force behind the Jana Sangh having a tryst with government formation, without which it would have remained a marginal opposition party.
The JP movement also followed the same social logic: the socialists, the Lok Dal and the Jana Sangh brought together a social combination of the backward castes and the Jana Sangh, the party of a small section of urban upper castes. The Janata Party was a merger that momentarily brought the upper castes and the backward castes together, as large sections of the upper castes in north India also shifted to it in opposition to the excesses of the Emergency of 1975-77, thus breaking with the Congress for a short while. The enhanced presence of the backward castes in the Janata Party—compared to the Congress days—provided the context for the appointment of the Mandal Commission, the second backward class commission, which had the mandate of determining the criteria for social and educational backwardness.
The same social forces came together in 1989 when the Janata Dal of VP Singh mobilised the backward castes in UP and Bihar and the BJP won over an increased chunk of the upper castes. The VP Singh government, predictably, was the one to announce the implementation of the Mandal Commission recommendations, though it was timed by Singh to take the wind out of the sails of the dissent of Devi Lal, a prominent Jat-farmer leader from Haryana who had been his Deputy Prime Minister.
Thus, the rise to power of Hindutva—as distinct from its being merely an idea— was made possible only through alliances with parties like the Bharatiya Lok Dal, the various fragments of the socialists and the Janata Dal, which brought support from the4 backward castes, a constituency that the Congress had ignored in north India.
When Hindutva attracted backward castes
As the BJP rose on the back of the Ram temple movement and the Rath Yatra of LK Advani in the early 1990s, it not only weaned away upper castes from the Congress but took to social engineering in a major way, for which KN Govindacharya, who was to soon become an outsider to the BJP, deserves credit.
Be it Uma Bharti, Kalyan Singh or Vinay Katiyar, a battery of leaders from the smaller OBC castes began to become key Hindutva figures in north India.
Yet, the introduction of OBC reservation in central jobs acted as a temporary speed-breaker for Hindutva. For, the Yadavs in UP and Bihar—8.7-percent and 14-15 percent, respectively, in the population of these states—became a bulwark for autonomous OBC politics, with Muslims as their electoral ally.
This continued for almost two decades.
Be that as it may, the BJP’s lower OBC outreach was successful in some other states. When Atal Bihari Vajpayee, a Brahmin, bowed out post-2004, and Advani failed to step into his shoes, the BJP was kept alive by the contributions to its Lok Sabha tally from Gujarat, MP, Chhattisgarh, Bihar and Rajasthan. In Gujarat, MP and Bihar, the BJP’s faces were leaders from small OBC castes: Narendra Modi, Shivraj Singh Chouhan and Sushil Modi.
It was an OBC state-level leadership—rather than the central leadership—that kept the BJP afloat in the UPA years.
With the catapulting of Modi to the national stage, the lower OBCs became central to the party’s scheme of things.
What is subaltern Hindutva?
This term, coined by Sajjan Kumar, is much used and abused today.
It is empirically demonstrable that the BJP has increased its vote share among the OBCs in North India exponentially in recent years. The Trivedi Centre for Political Data in Ashoka University also captured the fact that the number of non-Yadav MLAs in UP jumped in 2017, without denting upper-caste representation.
Apart from Sajjan Kumar, academic Badri Narayan has documented in painstaking detail the Hindutva outreach among subaltern sections of Hindutva, though Kumar’s distinctive contribution lies in seeing it as a bottom-up process, where the subaltern agency is privileged.
There are also scholars like Christophe Jaffrelot who see the subaltern caste groups as being hoodwinked into being co-opted as agents of an upper-caste resurgence, an argument that does little justice to the subaltern agency as political actors.
Subaltern Hindutva is not the same as the academic subaltern school, where the subaltern supposedly had a world independent of the elite. Kumar, rather, argues that smaller OBC and even Dalit castes have entered into a transactional relationship with Hindutva, particularly after the social justice discourse became Yadav-heavy in UP and Bihar, leaving out other small castes.
These small castes became an instrument of the BJP’s rise in recent years when it began to sweep north India.
In Bengal, again, the BJP has made capital of massive anti-incumbency against the TMC, due to the perception of huge corruption on the ground and political violence in the state, which flows from the party-society model in Bengal, where the ruling party dominates every sphere of society. The earliest converts to the new political force, the BJP, in 2019, were from regions away from Kolkata, particularly in SC/ST-dominated regions.
Yet, this subaltern isn’t ranged openly against the hegemonic Kolkata Bhadralok. It is just indifferent to Kolkata frames of Bengali exceptionalism. This subaltern has been mobilised against the TMC—though Mamata Banerjee is still individually popular—and, as a secondary factor, against Muslims.
The subaltern here is a force multiplier for Hindutva.
—Vikas Pathak is a media educator and political journalist. The views expressed are personal
First Published: Apr 8, 2021 6:02 PM IST
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