The great Indian identity trick
THERE is no point in speculating about which exit pollster is more incorrect when the results are just a day away. But the important lesson from these five Assembly elections is that the Congress is still the biggest non-BJP party in the Hindi heartland. Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh are states that traditionally have a bipolar contest between the Congress and the BJP. However, in Telangana, the revival of the Congress has spectacularly proved that despite its eclipse by a regional party, its roots are intact.
The Congress leadership may try to build a nationwide platform over backward-caste identity politics in the hope of driving a wedge into the Hindutva platform.
This is vintage Congress; green shoots grow out of a shrunken organisation during the election season only to grab power from a discredited incumbent. The Congress is a party whose sole logic is power. Its agenda is implemented when in government and hence it is in no need of a cadre that actively campaigns for social change. The party waits for the election time to see whether the weather has changed and the mood has swung from appreciation to anger against the government. Then, all it has to do is to accrue benefits of the people’s rage against the ruling party. All it needs is to be the only alternative in sight.
Instead, it should not consider that this change in mood is ideological. The Congress ideology is power, not caste. It did try combinations like Brahmin-Dalit-Muslim in Uttar Pradesh, Reddy-Dalit-Muslim in Andhra Pradesh, AHINDA (an acronym in Kannada, which means a coalition of minorities, backwards and Dalits) in Karnataka, KHAM (Kshatriya, Harijan, Adivasi and Muslim) in Gujarat, an alliance with Muslim and Christian parties in Kerala and similar combinations elsewhere. Despite all these attempts, the party shrank because this identity politics was triggering and legitimising a counter-consolidation. It was indeed politically expedient, but naïve, to believe that Muslim identity politics would not strengthen the Hindutva grouping. It did — and how!
Now, while simply reaping a rich harvest of anti-incumbency politics, the Congress leadership is playing the caste card. And it will soon attribute the possible victories in Chhattisgarh and Telangana (and maybe even Rajasthan) to the promise of a caste census and may try to build a nationwide platform over backward-caste identity politics in the hope of driving a wedge into the Hindutva platform. Well, just as the Muslim card legitimised the Hindu card and created a Hindu vote bank, which was inconceivable as late as the 1990s, the caste agenda can also have a validating impact on the religious agenda — both are pre-modern group markers.
For instance, the Reddy dominance of the Andhra Pradesh politics only legitimised a Kamma upsurge, just as the non-Yadav OBC empowerment upset the Yadav applecart in the form of Kalyan Singh’s leadership in Uttar Pradesh or like the Lingayat consolidation upstaged other social alliances in Karnataka. The promise of increasing the backward quota from 27 per cent to 42 per cent or 50 per cent or reserving up to 90 per cent of the government jobs for backwards and Dalits can work as a slogan for one election. That’s it. But even this slogan needs to be raised by a credible OBC leader. Yet, the response to the slogan depends on the pro- or anti-incumbency mood of the people. But the catch in raising the slogan is that it can only be done by an untried, credible backward-caste leader.
The so-called Mandal messiah VP Singh did not defeat Rajiv Gandhi by playing the caste card — he brought down a mighty government having over 400 seats in the Lok Sabha with allegations of Bofors kickbacks. The slogan “Raja nahin fakir hain, desh ki takdir hain” was about probity, about a ruling-caste person donning sackcloth to cleanse the system. It was pure anti-incumbency politics. His Mandal trick of creating a caste platform to hang on to power only legitimised the Sangh Parivar’s religious platform. Caste can be countered by religion. The BJP rose from 85 Lok Sabha seats in 1989 to 120 in 1991. Meanwhile, the so-far untried and untainted leaders of dominant backward castes, Lalu Prasad Yadav and Mulayam Singh Yadav, emerged as practitioners and champions of a new political idiom.
Can the clock be set back by talking about a caste census, that too by a dynast whose family symbolised the old, discredited upper-caste leadership? Can Rahul Gandhi’s prime ministerial bid become a metaphor for a backward-caste surge? It is difficult because the identity agenda is inherently politics of confrontation that needs an enemy — the hated ‘other’. The upper castes were the other of the 1990s who had ruled and ruined the Gangetic plains since Independence. The potency of the upper-caste other got diluted as the backward castes, particularly the Mulayam and Lalu clans, too, have had an opportunity to misgovern the Gangetic plains since 1989-90.
Also, electorally, Sangh Parivar has succeeded in bringing in a medieval oppressor group (Muslims) as the dominant other in Indian politics and no amount of academic or ideological sophistry will be able to explain why one kind of hatred is better than another. Then, privilege in an Indian village is relative. An old oppressor may suddenly look benign. In most Indian constituencies, all the other castes taken together will always be a larger bloc than the dominant social group. Hence, blindly playing dominant OBC politics can boomerang if everyone else gets together to defeat their new oppressor. After all, there is nothing called backward caste; it is always caste X versus the rest.
The BJP, meanwhile, has been subtly introducing a new other — the corrupt politician. Its trump card for the Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan elections was the allegations of corruption against Chief Minister Bhupesh Baghel and CM Ashok Gehlot’s son Vaibhav Gehlot. None of the Enforcement Directorate’s last-minute shenanigans works when the pro-incumbency mood is stronger than the Opposition campaign. And therein lies the strength of Indian democracy.
Then, the great Indian rope trick was always about the magician, the fakir, not the rope or the boy. The great Indian identity trick also needs a trickster without whom the rope will not go all the way up the South Block.
