Latest revision as of 16:43, 16 August 2024

[edit] Some alignments

[edit] As in 2024 May

Bharat Hun and Uday Chandra, May 24, 2024: The Times of India

This year’s elections have unveiled new avatars of caste that will baffle both critics of India’s politics and aficionados of its social life. Grievances also vary in each state.


Rajput matrix | In the somnolent, hawafree election, the appearance of Karni Sena alongside Ashok Gehlot, Rajasthan’s former Congress CM, in Amethi sent an intrigued murmur through the crowd. Karni Sena, which demands reservations for Rajputs, has been touring northern India, organising oath ceremonies, whose participants vow not to vote for BJP.


In western UP, controversy rages over the caste identity of the medieval ruler Mihir Bhoj: was he Rajput or Gurjar, as newly-installed statues say? Elsewhere in UP, BJP voters are divided over whether their Rajput neta Yogi Adityanath has been sidelined by those at the helm.

In Gujarat, a Union minister’s statement about Rajput rulers breaking bread with the British has sparked widespread anger. 
In Rajasthan, denial of BJP ticket to a young Rajput politician, Ravindra Singh Bhati, has led to him fighting as an Independent rival to a BJP candidate. Via digital media, these disparate campaigns have crisscrossed and coalesced into snowballing Rajput akrosh against Modi sarkar.


Jat, Maratha, Yadav hybridities | Jats demanding OBC status in Rajasthan and Haryana are bandwagoning as they reject BJP and endorse Congress-led INDIA in surprisingly close contests in Barmer, Jhunjhunu, Sirsa and Bhiwani-Mahendragarh. It remains unclear to what extent Jats in western UP will follow suit.


In Maharashtra, Marathas are holding the state govt responsible for denying them OBC status and mobilising votes for INDIA.

Yadavs of UP and Bihar are voting for regional parties dominated historically by Yadavs, but increasingly for non-Yadav candidates too. Their counterparts in Haryana and MP may also endorse INDIA, having voted for BJP in recent elections. More than antiincumbency, Yadavs, like Rajputs and Jats, are organising across states in new hybrid ways. 
Far from Mandal’s heydays | After a decade of Hindutva, it is tempting to read these developments as the return of good old Mandal caste politics. It is this temptation that frames many analyses of demands for a caste census in states as distant as Karnataka and Bihar. But there are crucial differences between the current moment and the days of Mandal Commission.


● First, BJP is now the governing party in New Delhi. So far, its political strategy has been to disaggregate OBC and SC groups, amalgamating the resulting splinters into a neo-Hindu whole. BJP under Modi negotiates separately with leaders of each group, offering them a share in the spoils of office and access to policymaking. In turn, subgroups in the reserved categories may prefer entry into the corridors of power over political sulking for the next five years. 


● Second, new economic pressures are now driving the politics of dominant agrarian castes like Rajputs and Jats.
Caste reservations have enabled people from OBC, SC and ST backgrounds to make considerable strides relative to dominant groups across rural north India. Agriculture, by contrast, is nowhere near as lucrative or status-enhancing, as it once was. Naukri, abhorred historically by landowners, is now highly sought-after for the security it offers. The EWS category reservation created by Modi sarkar does reckon with the demands of rural elites facing economic ruin.


● Third, the caste survey in Bihar has inspired demands for similar exercises across states, from Karnataka to Maharashtra and Telangana. So far, however, only INDIA has supported these. Congress has proposed a nationwide caste census to guide national welfare policies and a lifting of the reservation cap.


BJP has been sidestepping the issue. At times it has, as in Karnataka, referred to Muslim sub-quotas among OBCs. But BJP has missed out on a major political opportunity, whether in Bengal or Tamil Nadu, to emerge as a voice for the subordinate jatis. A caste census promise based on the jitni abaadi, utna haq approach would have destabilised the regional parties in these states.


Rise of micro-groups | These elections promise to usher in an era of caste’s new democratic reincarnations. On the one hand, within a broad tent of contemporary Hindutva, Brahmins and Rajputs may make common cause with Dalits or Adivasis. On the other hand, cleavages among OBC and SC groups may foment a fresh wave of anti-BJP politics. Both trends may run simultaneously in different states, throwing up a range of unpredictable electoral possibilities.


To make sense of these overlapping yet contradictory trends underway across both north and south India, we need a fresh analytical framework. As India emerges as a society of many different middle classes with various levels of precarity and security, caste pride and anger are becoming key ways to demand welfare and social security benefits.


Shifting political alliances within and across jatis now jockey for power, demanding policies that pit fractals or micro-groups, rather than whole caste blocs, against one another. In this new game of snakes and ladders, social justice for some may spell social doom for others. And so we are left to wonder: whose haqis at stake and whose insaaf? 
Hun is a social anthropologist. Chandra teaches politics and history at Georgetown University, Qatar