The Oxford Dictionary defines a fad as “something that people are interested in only for a short period of time”. In the study of politics and economics, cynicism is often the result of blunted intellectual perspective, or worse, sheer dullness of thought. The obsession with politics and politicians of the so-called Lower Other Backward Caste (OBC) – its TRP has once again increased with the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) alliance declaring Mukesh Sahni of the Vikassheel Insaan Party (VIP) as its deputy chief ministerial candidate in the ongoing Bihar elections – is a classic expression of such obsession.
Lest there be any confusion, this article is not intended to be an aggressive attack on Sawhney or his party. What he wants to do is to make a larger political ideological point about the lack of effectiveness of such politics against the Hindu right. This can be best understood in five different arguments.
The weak link between OBC politics and social justice
OBC as a political category is more heterogeneous than Dalit or Scheduled Caste (SC). The latter faced the worst of social discrimination and exploitation. Even before independence, affirmative action was allowed to keep them within the ambit of Hinduism. This was achieved through the Poona Pact between Gandhiji and BR Ambedkar, where the former won over the latter by applying almost moral pressure.
Affirmative action for OBCs – it exists only in the fields of education and employment, unlike legislation for Dalits – came much later. This was first achieved in the states and realized at the national level more than four decades after independence. OBC assertions gained ground first against upper caste dominance and exploitation in the feudal agrarian economy and then against its vestiges in non-agricultural public sector opportunities. This is a politics which, while trying to win over the upper castes, has taken the Dalits to its side, but does not shy away from exploiting them in the same way when it is in a position of power. Such conflicts can be found across countries and time. The infamous Belchhi massacre in Bihar which came into national headlines when Indira Gandhi visited the village on an elephant, the Lucknow guest house scandal where the Samajwadi Party launched an ugly and dangerous attack on the state’s Dalit Chief Minister Mayawati, are some such examples. The big thing is that OBC politics is not necessarily an agent of radical progressive social change all the time.
Militant OBC politics turned into effective OBC politics long ago
The first point should not diminish the importance of the fact that the initial wave of OBC assertion against upper caste dominance was met with the most reactionary form of subsequent resistance. The only reason the OBCs were not destroyed in this battle was their numerical advantage over the upper castes, which now had a universal suffrage-based system. Bihar has had many historical figures like Karpoori Thakur and Jagdev Prasad, who have been leaders in the struggle against upper caste exploitation. RJD’s patron Lalu Yadav still claims to carry forward the legacy of people like Thakur. Nitish Kumar also does the same.
However, to say that the history of militant OBC struggle against feudal dominance will always ensure radical OBC politics is tantamount to saying that today’s Congress should adopt the ideals of India’s anti-colonial struggle. Politics doesn’t work like this, only rhetoric works. The fate of the militant OBC movement is largely similar to that of Congress’ transformation from freedom struggle to bourgeois democracy. With a few respectable exceptions, leaders at every level became selfish and communal, thereby defeating the larger purpose that the movement stood for.
Politics, in a way, has become a shadow boxing match since the late 1960s between these self-serving individuals and the vested interest groups of Congress and OBC politics, with both the ideological Left and Right sometimes fishing in these turbulent waters. The lower OBCs rightly felt that they had been used as cannon fodder in the power struggle between the upper castes and the dominant OBCs.
The rise of the Hindu right is best understood in terms of the mandal, the temple and the bazaar
In the 1980s the right finally began to gain an irreversible edge in the political battle. It was a result of the upper caste reaction against the growing assertiveness of OBC politics, as well as the deft deployment of majoritarian religious populism, that it managed to achieve reservation at the national level. The joining hands of Congress and OBC parties over concerns over the rise of the Hindu right accelerated the rise of political Hindutva as upper castes shifted in large numbers from the Congress to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the new political-electoral front of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh in the country. The BJP was born in 1980 and first gained political influence in the 1989 Lok Sabha elections.
Convinced of the sanctity of its ideological core, which portrayed both caste and class contradictions in Indian society as manageable, but attempted to overcome contradictions only around religion, the Hindu right was ready to broaden its social base outside the priest-merchant clergy who founded the movement and nurtured it in its infancy. In fact, this approach helped on two important fronts. One, it supplied the foot soldiers of the masses who enforced the militant practice of Hindu authority when it was most needed. Unlike today’s privileged social media warriors, the BJP and its fraternal organizations required a more committed cadre base to set up and carry out tasks like car service on a large scale. Two, broad social alliances became a necessity to counter the electoral strategy, which exploited the first-past-the-post system to keep the BJP out of power through relatively narrow but formidable social alliances. Congress never won an election in Gujarat after Madhav Singh Solanki’s landslide victory in 1985 on the basis of KHAM (Kshatriya, Harijan, Adivasi and Muslim) formula. Leaders like Narendra Modi, who come from a numerically insignificant OBC group, are the product of this lived experience of the BJP. The BJP’s current dominance at the national level is built on this social counter-engineering as well as the solid support of big capital and a deeply embedded and responsible welfare net among the poor.
And Mandal vs Kamandal is a false binary…
Commentators or political actors who seek to attribute the BJP’s current dominance to only one of the three factors listed above are making the classic mistake of missing the wood for the trees. What they don’t appreciate is the following.
Welfare is now a party-agnostic political feature in India, but the incumbent benefits because of its ability to deliver ex-post benefits, not just its ability to fulfill ex-post promises. The BJP did this smartly by introducing cash transfers to farmers before the 2019 elections, made a mistake by presenting a fiscally prudent budget before the 2024 elections and has learned its lesson in the state elections that followed.
The BJP’s ability to include Hindus in its legislature is greater than that of anti-BJP parties because it does not need to include Muslims who form about 15% of the country’s population and have a large share in many major states. Its representation strategy is supported by an organic ideological appeal within the large base of Hindus, high or low caste.
Capital is not necessarily enthusiastic about the BJP, but understands that it is still its best bet in terms of controlling class conflict and pursuing counter-cyclical policies when macroeconomic stability is at risk. The BJP may have suffered a political loss in the 2024 elections, but it has boosted its prestige in the eyes of capital, which was happy with fiscal prudence being given priority. The BJP can manage these contractions most of the time because it has a core support base that is not driven by free will or profit or caste interests, but by a larger worldview that seeks to unite Hindus politically to create a majority state or Hindu Rashtra. The project is now a century old and is at its peak today. For the opposition, this is an ideological enemy that must be fought frontally, not through covert maneuvers. It is the latter that has made the Hindu right the political giant it is today.
The Hindu right is somewhat immune to the political mutation that has degenerated into Congress and OBC politics because its contradictions are more imaginary than real. fathom the fact that despite the number of illegal infiltrators found in the voter list of Bihar not even touching a hundred, the BJP has made it a big issue in the ongoing campaign in Bihar.
Markets have weakened Mandal’s once radical appeal
Last but not least is a more philosophical point about political solidarity, empowerment and markets. The social justice battles of the 20th century, especially in the pre-reform period, were fought by disenfranchised people with radical dreams about the future. The challengers were sons of the soil by biological means and the lower class could see them as one outside their narrow caste boundaries. Karpoori Thakur belonged to a caste group whose share in the population is lower than that of the Sahani caste in Bihar. And yet, the former man became a great personality not only for his caste but for the entire social underclass in both Bihar and India. Sahni, unlike Thakur, is bargaining for the post of deputy chief minister without winning any election in his life. This reflects at the same time the desperation and entitlement to earn political legitimacy from a top-down rather than a bottom-up approach. For Sahni, politics is a second-order challenge which he has accepted after overcoming the first challenge of making money in the capitalist system. Capitalism had no existence for Karpoori Thakur and his comrades. They had no option but to break free from feudal bondage, or as Jagdev Prasad put it “This Sawan is in Bhado, Goi Kalaiyan in Kado” – This time in the monsoon, the fair and slender wrists (of upper caste women) will work in the paddy fields – suggested, thereby forcing the class enemy to suffer the same fate as them.
The lower class escaped this type of feudal exploitation, not through an agricultural revolution but by moving out of the rural economy, which is precarious, though not as socially humiliating as feudalism. There are many serious scholars who have argued that capitalism in post-reform India has done more by providing a space out of the exploitative feudal conditions in Indian villages for the social underclass than by politics. Maybe they are right. They often forget that the same capitalism has also turned caste-based solidarity into a tool for capturing a share of political power rather than bringing about radical change. It would be naive to believe that it can destroy an ideological giant like the RSS-BJP.
