THE dominant common sense view is that caste is as central to Indian politics as the superstar is to the Bollywood film. But there is one important difference – the megastar who commands the ‘in-and-as’ billing is invariably the hero, whereas caste is always the villain in the common sense view of politics. It is as though ‘Mr. India’ was remade as ‘Mr. Mogambo’, and the Amrish Puri character (rather than Anil Kapoor’s) was the one endowed with magical superpowers.

As usual, common sense is partly right; but, as is often the case, it is only partially right – it presents half-truths in biased ways that mislead. Here, it distorts the story of when and why caste came to ‘contaminate’ politics, and is silent about what the salience of caste might mean to the concrete content of politics. Although the electoral impact of caste was noticed as early as the second general election of 1957, the popular perception that it was central to regional politics gathered steam only in the 1970s. The current commonplace, that caste matters even at the national level, is a product of the Mandal moment of the 1990s. What remains unsaid here is that the story can be told in this manner only from an upper caste viewpoint, one that amputates the notion of caste to make it mean ‘lower caste’.

How has caste influenced politics, and shaped the accounts of its own influence? What is the distinctive contribution of the backward castes to the caste-politics relationship? Which questions and issues is this relationship likely to foreground in the immediate future?

Caste has always been relevant in Indian politics – how could it be otherwise, given that caste continues to shape social life?¹ It was also relevant before the 1970s, except that the dominant castes then were the upper castes, and their dominance was taken as axiomatic. Indeed, it is arguable that the very notion of ‘politics’ – in the modern sense of a legitimate arena of contestation where multiple interest groups compete for power – enters the Indian popular imagination only in the late 1960s. The 1967 general election, when the Congress for the first time registered significant losses, is a convenient threshold. Prior to this, notions like ‘nation building’ and seva (public service)² occupied the ground that (in other times and places) politics would have claimed.

This is why common sense today treats the ‘good politician’ as an oxymoron, because the older orthodoxy visualized such a person as an altruistic do-gooder serving the interests of people, not just other than but unlike himself (or, rarely, herself). Such a person could only engage in pure pursuits like nation building or seva, not the grabbing for power and pelf typical of the polluted world of politics. This may also be the reason why the English word ‘politics’, which has entered the everyday vocabulary of most Indian languages, almost always carries a pejorative sense.³

 

Only if we recognize its upper caste bias can we understand why common sense images of politics have been so consistently cynical ever since the intermediate castes gained influence in the 1970s. The nation building model of politics was a carryover from the nationalist movement which had an entirely upper caste leadership, with only rare exceptions. The typical ‘leader’ of that time was invariably an upper caste person, usually independently wealthy, whose entry into politics invoked notions of service, sacrifice and a this-worldly form of renunciation. Such a leader was clearly not of the people, but was their faithful representative. Caste (and class) differences established a continuity with the pre-modern idea that raja (ruler) and praja (subjects) were made of different substances.

Nationalism was the banner under which this brand of politics was pursued. Nationalist fervour allowed the projection of this politics as sacred in the sense of being above politics of the usual profane kind. The monopoly that the Indian National Congress (INC) established over this brand of politics also shaped its modalities and the way it was perceived. Its two main competitors at the time were Hindu chauvinist nationalism and communism-socialism. The former was discredited by the murder of Mahatma Gandhi and could not recover until the mid-sixties, while the latter was electorally too weak to be a threat.⁴ However, despite their ideological rivalry, all three types of politics were indistinguishable in terms of caste. The leadership of all three was exclusively upper caste, and none had a strong political position on caste beyond the obligatory opposition to untouchability.

 

The vestiges of ‘Harijan uplift’ that survived in the Congress after Gandhi spoke in the explicitly apolitical idiom of paternalistic welfare. In any case, the arrangement worked out by the Ambedkar-Gandhi Poona Pact of 1932 based on reservation had effectively extinguished the political challenge of the lowest castes. After its brief misadventure with the First Backward Classes Commission in the mid-1950s, the Nehruvian state settled into the complacence of its caste blindness. The ‘Congress system’ allowed emerging intermediate caste aspirations to be accommodated at the regional level and within the party structure, so that the dominant idiom of politics did not change. Even though the seva brand of paternalistic politics was toppled from its high moral perch rather early, its discrediting only fuelled cynicism about hypocrisy; it did not elicit an alternative politics. More important, the moratorium on public discussion of caste in the Nehru era ensured that the ostensibly caste-neutral processes of ‘nation building’ and ‘development’ reserved the bulk of their benefits for the upper castes, while forcing the lower castes and adivasis to bear most of the costs.

While the dominant castes (that is, castes other than the twice born, whose dominance was not considered ‘natural’ and, therefore, attracted attention) like Reddys, Lingayats, or Marathas had already tasted power in Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Maharashtra (not to speak of the unique history of Tamil Nadu), an explicitly backward caste politics emerged only in the 1970s. Innovative backward caste politicians like Karpoori Thakur, Devaraj Urs or Madhavsinh Solanki fashioned a new politics that rejected paternalist representation by supposed social superiors. Their start-up political capital was the fact that, after two decades of independence, power and privilege were still mostly monopolized by the upper castes. Though they remained regional figures, their politics resonated nationally and created the preconditions for the Mandal moment and the arrival of the backward castes on the national stage in the 1990s.

 

In retrospect, it is evident that the advent of the Other Backward Classes (OBCs) brought a new and enabling legibility to the political field. The OBCs decisively altered the frame of the caste-politics relation, and proved to be an useful category to think with.

The OBC-led 1990s ended the ‘exception’ mode in which the state had dealt with caste since independence. This involved the assertion that the new Constitution had abolished caste distinctions, making castelessness the new norm, with the special provisions for the Scheduled Castes and Tribes as the sole unavoidable exception. With the recognition of the OBCs, the tables were turned as caste and not castelessness was revealed to be the norm. Earlier, the 22.5% share of the Scheduled Castes and Tribes was the caste-marked exception, and the remaining 77.5% of the population was lumped together in a huge residual category of supposedly casteless ‘Others’. Now the upper castes became the sole unmarked exception, which effectively marked them as well. Statistically the most elusive group in society, and also its most powerful and pampered minority, the upper castes were ‘outed’ by the OBCs.

 

As a gigantic aggregative category notionally including half a billion people (who could be the third largest country in the world after China and India), the OBCs focus attention on the complex processes of political aggregation and disaggregation. They highlight the fact that politics today is based on a dice-and-splice model, and involves creating new constituencies by carving up old ones and re-articulating them in an electorally effective coalition. As the largest single group in the polity (roughly 42% of the population), the category forms the natural centre, the unavoidable node through which every effort at coalition building must pass. On the other hand, its singularity is largely illusory, and it shows how such aggregations must inevitably yield to the disparity that they strive to contain.

Created by caste, the OBC category highlights the potential as well as the limits of caste as a form of political identity. It is a site where answers to difficult questions about the changing role and weight of caste in relation to other dimensions of identity (such as class, region or religion) are most likely to emerge. The splintering of this category into different segments (done differently in different states) shows that caste loyalty is not an irrational or involuntary reflex, but a rational and changeable response to circumstances and perceptions. Because of its intermediate location, the OBCs showcase the oppressor as well as the victim aspects of the caste question (albeit unevenly), and this makes them useful for tracking the evolving dynamics of caste.

The OBCs have also played an important role in resuscitating the federal structure of our polity by (re)articulating regional and national politics. Power at the national level can be won only by winning elections in the states, but the ‘Congress system’ tended to devalue and isolate both regional and caste politics by absorbing their oscillations within the party structure, thus masking their national impact. Since it was itself more coalition than party, it is no accident that the emergence of an explicitly coalitional politics follows the receding of the Congress and the arrival of the intermediate castes on to the national stage in the 1990s.

 

The Mandal upsurge represented an epiphanic moment for both the practice and the analysis of Indian politics. But while the players – voters, politicians and parties – were quick to adapt to the changed game, the commentators have so far continued to lag behind. For almost a quarter century after 1990, backward caste politicians loomed large on the national stage, revelling in their novel role of kingmaker-insiders, and the media delighted in portraying them as stand-up comics. It did seem as though national politics was ‘full’ of caste in a way it had never been earlier. But Mandal should have taught us that this was as illusory as the castelessness of the earlier era, and that caste (or class or religion) ‘does’ nothing by the sheer fact of its existence. Recruiting caste (or other existents) to ‘do’ something is the work of politics, which in turn is no more than the aggregated will of people living in the thick of society, open to persuasion by the facts, feelings, persons – and politicians – in their lives.

 

That these lessons have not been learnt is evident from the reception accorded to the Modi landslide in the 2014 general election. The euphoric reaction of the (largely upper caste) urban middle classes was expected, given their conviction that Mandal had reduced Indian democracy to the stoking and stroking of lower caste (and minority) identities to win gigantic numbers games called elections. The ‘tsu-NaMo’ verdict even had excited media pundits wondering if the demon of caste politics – meaning, of course, lower caste politics – had finally been vanquished. Visions were in the air of a return to the (upper caste) golden age of Nehruvian caste-blindness, but without loser doctrines like socialism, secularism or non-alignment.

But while the Bihar assembly election has proved that reports of the demise of caste politics were greatly exaggerated, it has also resurrected the Mogambo avatar of caste as an evil magical force. That evil is attributed to only one end of the caste spectrum is the minor problem with this perspective. The major problem is that it essentializes caste and robs it of reason. Despite its deep cultural temptations, the ‘they are like that only’ school of thought should be the last resort of reasonable people.

To read reason back into the caste-politics relationship, we could begin by unpacking the dice-and-splice precept. If momentum in politics is generated by splitting existing groupings and articulating them into new or renewed alliances, then two things are necessary. First, existing groups need to have real fault lines or folds along which an incision or tear can be made to achieve the split. It does not matter if these fault lines are subjective or objective as long as they are socially meaningful. Second, there has to be an agency (a party, leader or movement) that identifies these fault lines and their political potential, and is able to apply the mobilizational energy necessary to activate them. This involves boosting both the push factors that sever existing connections as well as the pull factors that secure new ones.

 

At the national level there seem to be only two candidate agendas available today as possible destinations for disgruntled sub-groups looking for a new home. The first is neo-liberal economic growth, known by its expedient alias of ‘development’; and the second is the compendium of beliefs, causes and complaints called ‘hindutva’. A key but underemphasized lesson of Mandal is that caste itself cannot be a candidate agenda of this kind. This is for two reasons: First, politicized caste identities derive too large a proportion of their vitality from active contrasts with other caste identities, which makes caste coalitions inherently unstable in today’s world. Second, there is no single caste or caste cluster that is either large enough or homogenous enough to go it alone, or be the stable dominant partner in a national coalition. Thus the influence of caste on Indian politics is not exclusive – other factors can be equally or more important; and it is exerted at one remove, because most building blocks available to nationally viable agendas like hindutva or development are shaped by caste.

The Patidars of Gujarat offer an example of how fault lines internal to a caste group create pressure for changing its political stance. The Patidars were instrumental in bringing the BJP to power in Gujarat by abandoning the Congress. They were also enthusiastic converts to the Narendra Modi strategy of riding hindutva and development simultaneously, and invested heavily in both agendas. Like other caste groups, they are differentiated economically, with a large non-rich segment coexisting with a smaller, more visible wealthy segment, but these divisions did not seem to matter earlier.

However, when the ‘Gujarat model’ reneged on its promises, non-affluent Patidars faced an unbearable gap between aspiration and reality, and the intra-Patidar fold along class lines became creased enough to start to tear. In the Modi era (2002–2012), Patels increased their share of MLAs from 19 to 24%, but the BJP’s share of Patel MLAs fell from 83 to 72% – political signs that read ‘diversion ahead’.⁵ We can pretend caste is an electoral ATM offering automatic vote withdrawals only by ignoring the political labour of making regular deposits, and the plight of defaulters.

 

When it comes to caste coalitions, contingency is king. This is well illustrated in Bihar. When backward caste reservation was first introduced in 1978 by Karpoori Thakur, the pioneer of backward caste politics in Bihar, the slogan against it was: ‘Forward-Harijan bhai-bhai, Pichhadi jati kahan se ayee?’⁶ History seemed to repeat itself in 2015, but too much had happened in the interim. The tenacious grip of the forwards on power was decisively broken only in 1990 when the Laloo era began with the consolidation of backward castes backed by Muslims. The Laloo-Rabri reign ended with Nitish Kumar’s dice-and-splice master class of 2005, when he pried loose the Kurmis, Koeris, Extremely Backward Castes (EBCs), and Mahadalits (the last two being freshly minted categories) from the backward parivar and allied with the forwards to create a winning coalition that lasted a decade. And as we know, the Laloo-Nitish jugalbandi of 2015 has been a virtuosi performance hard to improve upon.

We could add Mayawati’s extraordinary sarvajan coup of 2005 effected with a dalit-brahmin pact and a memorable slogan yoking the Bahujan Samaj Party mascot to the brahmanical pantheon: ‘Haathi nahin Ganesh hai, Brahma Vishnu Mahesh hai’. These examples demonstrate that caste alliances are flexible because politics has to be flexible. Caste is only one possible site – though a particularly fertile one – for performing the political labour of cultivating constituencies and building coalitions. It is the work that is done on and with caste that produces results, not caste itself.

 

And yet there are also two crucial constants amidst all this contingency. The first (too complex to discuss briefly here) is the unrelenting hostility between the OBCs and dalits, with the former being the main oppressors of the latter throughout the country. The second is the fact that, from the perspective of all castes including dalits, Muslims are the new political untouchables of India. Stances claimed to be or seen as pro-Muslim turn out upon examination to be anti-anti-Muslim stances – it seems that no party can risk being seen as pro-Muslim today. Therefore, the really important question for caste-politics is that of its interface with hindutva. This is all the more true because the development agenda has become hard to sell since growth within neo-liberal constraints offers virtually nothing to the have-nots.

For the hindutva agenda, caste has been a serious internal question since its very inception in the 1920s. There has been a silent standoff between a radical version of hindutva espoused by none other than Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, and a more conservative version pursued by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). The former advocates aggressively targeting untouchability and caste discrimination (as Savarkar did) in order to recruit the lower castes to hindutva. The conservative school says little but resists anything more than lukewarm opposition to caste.

More troubling is what was seen in Gujarat 2002, Muzzafarnagar 2013-14 and many smaller riots (like Trilokpuri in Delhi) – dalits, adivasis and backward castes being invited to join in or initiate anti-Muslim violence, and this invitation being accepted. If such ‘inclusion’ is coupled with a genuine campaign against caste discrimination, it will transform the dynamics of hindutva. The urgency of this question is amplified by the fact that state elections are due shortly in Assam, Kerala, West Bengal and Uttar Pradesh, which are collectively home to 48% of the Muslim population of India, and are also the states with some of the highest percentage share of Muslims.⁷

All this goes to show that the three letter acronyms that will shape our immediate political future may not be NDA, BJP or even NDM⁸, but OBC and RSS.

 

Footnotes:

1. In Rajni Kothari’s famous words: ‘Those in India who complain of "casteism in politics" are really looking for a sort of politics which has no basis in society.’ In Caste in Indian Politics, Orient Blackswan, Delhi, 1970, p. 4.

2. For a stimulating discussion of this notion, see R. Srivatsan, Seva, Saviour and State, Routledge, 2014.

3. As in the joke about the politician who laments that ‘aajkal ki rajneeti mein poltics ghus aayee hai!’. This is not to say that Indian language terms for politics are always used in a non-pejorative sense, but it is striking that the English word is never used in a positive sense.

4. It is interesting to note that the Communist Party of India (then undivided) was in second position after the INC in each of the first three general elections, with 16, 27 and 29 Lok Sabha seats respectively, compared to the INC’s mammoth 374, 371 and 361 seats.

5. Computed from the ‘List of successful candidates’ in the Vidhan Sabha elections of 2002, 2007 and 2012, available on the Election Commission of India website. Obvious exceptions (like Iqbal or Rashida Patel) have been removed, but errors may remain due to the assumption that everyone named Patel is a Patidar.

6. Quoted in Arvind Narain Das, ‘Class in Itself, Caste for Itself: Social Articulation in Bihar’, Economic and Political Weekly XIX(37), 15 September 1984, p. 1616.

7. The ranking by share of Muslims in state population is: Lakshadweep (97%), Jammu and Kashmir (68%), Assam (34%), West Bengal and Kerala (27% each) and Uttar Pradesh (19%). The national average is 14%. Rounded figures, computed from Census of India 2011 data.

8. Narendra Damodardas Modi.