If there ever was a tradition of voting as a caste bloc, it's over. In the last decade, voters have increasingly voted on class rather than caste considerations. So why do our politicians and pundits refuse to acknowledge this?
YahooNews, 2 April, 2014
No single caste decisively dominates any of India's Lok Sabha constituencies. Yet political parties, more often than not, field candidates belonging to the dominant castes in the region. As parties target the respective dominant caste vote, they further split up vote banks that are anyway less than 25 percent of the total electorate in most parliamentary segments. (All caste figures below are accepted estimations given that India has not conducted caste census since 1931.)
Despite these numbers, a number of political pundits believe that caste politics has benefitted our parties in the past. These so-called successes have been possible under two circumstances.
First, the dominance of a caste is not determined merely by its numerical supremacy over other castes. For example, nowhere in western Uttar Pradesh do the Jats count for more than 15 percent of the population. But affluent and educated, with presence in or easy access to administration, they have been powerful enough to influence local electoral outcomes in ways not strictly democratic. But then, misuse of money and muscle power is commonplace in Indian polls.
Secondly, identity politics also worked when it broke such strangleholds of dominant castes. In Bihar, Lalu Prasad Yadav ensured in the early 1990s that the lower castes could vote freely under police protection. He also offered a string of incentives - from cheap housing to exemption of excise on toddy - to win over all backward castes, including Dalits. But the honeymoon proved short. A large section of Yadavs, who valued Lalu's patronage in their fight against Bhumihar and Rajput landlords, still backed him as a jaat bhai. So did Muslims for his secular credentials. But Lalu eventually lost his larger support base because economic development was not part of his politics of social empowerment. Simply put, he failed to graduate from caste to class politics.
Historically, mass mobilization in the name of caste has been driven by power games of economy big and small. Chanakya the Brahmin masterminded Chandragupta's battle against King Dhana Nanda, ostensibly to end the latter's Shudra (lower caste) dynasty. The inspiration for the All-India Kurmi Mahasabha was a circular in 1894 by the government that barred the Kurmis as a "depressed community" from police jobs.
In the 1970s, it was Charan Singh who cobbled together a coalition in Uttar Pradesh of largely well-to-do peasantry - Ahir, Jat, Gujjar and Rajput (AJGAR) - to counter the Congress's hold over the Dalit vote. When he roped in Muslims, the front expanded to MAJGAR. This traditional Jat-Muslim alignment was the reason why Muzaffarnagar, Singh's base, never saw a riot while neighborhoods such as Meerut remained on a short fuse. Since that tradition gave way to bloodshed last year in Muzaffarnagar, the Jats have apparently abandoned Singh's son Ajit (of the Rashtriya Lok Dal) for the BJP. The Muslims, meanwhile, are likely to rally behind Mayawati this time.
In the 1980s, the first non-upper class chief minister of Gujarat Madhavsinh Solanki brought together Kshatriyas, Harijans, Adivasis and Muslims (KHAM), who together formed more than 60 percent of the state's population. The lure was reservation as per the 1976 recommendations of the Bakshi Commission. But faced with vociferous protests by the BJP-led upper castes, Solanki backtracked and the alliance fell through.
While Charan Singh could convince the Jats and Gujjars of the numerical advantage of strategic unity in Uttar Pradesh, the two castes have played out very differently in Rajasthan. While both produced Congress stalwarts such as Parasram Maderna, Sis Ram Ola, both Jats, and Rajesh Pilot, a Gujjar, the communities were never natural socio-political allies in the state. The Other Backward Caste (OBC) status for Jats in 1999 alarmed the Gujjars, who demanded to be downgraded from OBC to Scheduled Tribe (ST) to retain their competitive edge. As the Gujjar agitation turned violent in 2007, the Meenas, a dominant tribe in Rajasthan, also hit the road to oppose any move to dilute their share of the ST pie.
Hitting the caste ceiling
Today, almost every caste enjoys state reservation in some form or the other. This means that there remains no immediate room or incentive for caste competition anymore. Over time, this has also broken the monopoly of a few 'advanced backward castes' such as Yadavs, Kurmis, Jatavs or Pasis in government jobs, and partially restored the balance of power.
At the same time, by virtue of their sheer population and the burden of historical exploitation, the majority of the lower caste population still remains among India's poorest. Yet an alignment on economic lines has been slow going in our politics.
Consider the classic caste cauldron of Uttar Pradesh. As the Congress waned drastically in the state in the 1980s, Kanshi Ram eyed the entire bahujan samaj but managed to occupy principally the 'upper Dalit' space. The ati-Dalits or maha-Dalits - Bhangis, Valmikis or Doms - either remained with the Congress or sought strength in the BJP. The OBCs, particularly the dominant backward castes such as the Yadavs, sided with Mulayam Singh Yadav (then Janata Dal).
A Mulayam-Kanshi Ram alliance would have brought the majority of OBCs and Dalits together, but their 1993 alliance collapsed in less than two years. Numerically, a combination of Dalits, Yadavs, other OBCs and Muslims still commands more than 40 percent of votes in the state and can prove decisive in more than two thirds of the seats. But the distrust between Mayawati and Mulayam - and between the Dalits and the dominant OBCs - has stood in the way of a grand alliance.
Instead, between 1991 and 2002, both the Samajwadi Party (SP) and Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) grew in their respective core constituencies of OBCs and Dalits. In that period, the SP increased its vote share from 12.5 percent to 25.4 percent and the BSP from 9.3 percent to 23.2 percent. That was the limit of their respective caste base, and so neither came anywhere close to forming a government singlehandedly.
This caste politics reached its 'saturation', so to say, by the turn of the century. Having hit their respective caste ceilings, both Mulayam and Mayawati began to warm up to other castes to make up for the deficit. Mulayam banked on Raja Bhaiya and Amarmani Tripathi to woo Thakurs and Brahmins respectively. Surprisingly, Mulayam's SP even managed to attract some support from Dalits. But these overtures to 'outsiders' cost the party some OBC votes. On her part, Mayawati moved from bahujan samaj to sarvajan samaj, offered tickets to Brahmins and wooed OBCs. Again, her party's core Jatav (Dalit) vote bank eroded in the bargain.
Since 2002, according to the National Election Studies (NES) by CSDS, the SP lost 6 percent of the Yadav vote but gained 13 percent of the Jatav vote, causing a 17 percent dip in the BSP's Jatav vote bank. In the same period, the BJP lost 12 percent of the Brahmin vote to the SP and BSP. If there was ever a tradition of voting as a caste bloc, it is over.
Figures from other states also bear out this new reality. In Punjab, Jats traditionally voted for the Akalis and Dalits for the Congress. Since 1997, the Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) has lost 13 percent of its Jat vote but gained 3 percent of the Dalit vote from the Congress, thanks to its sundry pro-poor schemes.
In Tamil Nadu, apart from the Pattali Makkal Katchi (PMK) that has built a sound foundation among the dominant backward caste Vanniyars who make up more than one-fifth of the state population, other caste outfits have lost ground. Parties such as Puthiya Tamizhagam (Dalits), Makkal Tamil Desam (Yadavas) and Thamizhar Bhoomi (Mutharaiyars) have either merged with the DMK or AIADMK, or have become marginal partners in alliances.
A new identity politics?
A baseline survey by the Lucknow-based Giri Institute of Development Studies for the Election Commission during UP's 2012 Assembly elections threw up a few startling facts. While merely 11 percent of respondents said they voted for candidates of their caste, nearly 33 percent claimed they chose politically more experienced candidates and 32 percent opted for candidates who delivered what they had promised during previous elections.
While these numbers show that caste may not be the principal voting motivation anymore, the days of en bloc voting are not over yet. Many local strongmen still control constituencies to serve the highest political bidders. This explains the bulk of previous election results that show a vote swing in excess of 30 percent. For example, when Mamata Banerjee's Trinamool Congress (TMC) ended the prolonged Left rule in 2011, a bunch of erstwhile red fortresses in south Bengal elected TMC candidates with mammoth margins.
At the other end of the spectrum, there still remains perhaps a legitimate context for identity politics. The tribal communities of India have never been mobilized as a vote bank. Scattered across the country, they do not have the numbers to determine poll results anywhere other than a few constituencies in north-east India, where they are anyway dominant. On the so-called mainland, our tribal population remains politically the most inconsequential, unrepresented and disempowered.
Liberalization has only tipped that balance further against tribal communities, even as caste politics has waned for good in these two decades. In the last century, the latter was predominantly a desperate call from the peasantry and allied vocational groups to secure livelihoods by securing reservations in the face of rapid urban-centrism. The benefits of education and job quotas, coupled with the opportunities created by economic reforms, helped the landed elite among the lower castes flourish, along with the neo-rich. But they won't be deciding the polls this summer.
Since the early 1990s, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), "the ratio between the top and the bottom deciles of the wage distribution [in India] has doubled". Those with college degrees gained nearly 15 times, mostly from the services sector, but the wages of those with primary education remained static.
In these two decades, liberalization made many lives. Alongside rags-to-riches fairytales, millions migrated to cities for jobs small and not-so-small. But it also displaced thousands from their land without a choice, impoverished lakhs of small farmers, and left many more at the mercy of an inflationary market when it came to education, healthcare or even mere subsistence.
The upcoming elections are about the aspirations of those who have tasted the trickle-down benefits of liberalization and now demand their rightful share. It is also about the frustration of the rest who have been made to pay the price for the so-called development and are done waiting for the crumbs. These degrees of economic hope and despair are more likely to separate the voters now rather than pre-assigned caste lines.
This is why the BJP will be better off flaunting the mystical Gujarat model than playing Narendra Modi's OBC card. This is why Nitish Kumar will be judged by the quality of his development work rather than the range of sops aimed at maha-Dalits. And this is why the Congress may have its tattered delivery system to account for as much as the corruption charges against its government.
True, there is little to choose from among the contenders, their promises and perceived performances. True, in the absence of any organized class mobilization most will vote as individual class entities. But who is to say collective wisdom can't be intuited by individuals?
Despite these numbers, a number of political pundits believe that caste politics has benefitted our parties in the past. These so-called successes have been possible under two circumstances.
First, the dominance of a caste is not determined merely by its numerical supremacy over other castes. For example, nowhere in western Uttar Pradesh do the Jats count for more than 15 percent of the population. But affluent and educated, with presence in or easy access to administration, they have been powerful enough to influence local electoral outcomes in ways not strictly democratic. But then, misuse of money and muscle power is commonplace in Indian polls.
Secondly, identity politics also worked when it broke such strangleholds of dominant castes. In Bihar, Lalu Prasad Yadav ensured in the early 1990s that the lower castes could vote freely under police protection. He also offered a string of incentives - from cheap housing to exemption of excise on toddy - to win over all backward castes, including Dalits. But the honeymoon proved short. A large section of Yadavs, who valued Lalu's patronage in their fight against Bhumihar and Rajput landlords, still backed him as a jaat bhai. So did Muslims for his secular credentials. But Lalu eventually lost his larger support base because economic development was not part of his politics of social empowerment. Simply put, he failed to graduate from caste to class politics.
Historically, mass mobilization in the name of caste has been driven by power games of economy big and small. Chanakya the Brahmin masterminded Chandragupta's battle against King Dhana Nanda, ostensibly to end the latter's Shudra (lower caste) dynasty. The inspiration for the All-India Kurmi Mahasabha was a circular in 1894 by the government that barred the Kurmis as a "depressed community" from police jobs.
In the 1970s, it was Charan Singh who cobbled together a coalition in Uttar Pradesh of largely well-to-do peasantry - Ahir, Jat, Gujjar and Rajput (AJGAR) - to counter the Congress's hold over the Dalit vote. When he roped in Muslims, the front expanded to MAJGAR. This traditional Jat-Muslim alignment was the reason why Muzaffarnagar, Singh's base, never saw a riot while neighborhoods such as Meerut remained on a short fuse. Since that tradition gave way to bloodshed last year in Muzaffarnagar, the Jats have apparently abandoned Singh's son Ajit (of the Rashtriya Lok Dal) for the BJP. The Muslims, meanwhile, are likely to rally behind Mayawati this time.
In the 1980s, the first non-upper class chief minister of Gujarat Madhavsinh Solanki brought together Kshatriyas, Harijans, Adivasis and Muslims (KHAM), who together formed more than 60 percent of the state's population. The lure was reservation as per the 1976 recommendations of the Bakshi Commission. But faced with vociferous protests by the BJP-led upper castes, Solanki backtracked and the alliance fell through.
While Charan Singh could convince the Jats and Gujjars of the numerical advantage of strategic unity in Uttar Pradesh, the two castes have played out very differently in Rajasthan. While both produced Congress stalwarts such as Parasram Maderna, Sis Ram Ola, both Jats, and Rajesh Pilot, a Gujjar, the communities were never natural socio-political allies in the state. The Other Backward Caste (OBC) status for Jats in 1999 alarmed the Gujjars, who demanded to be downgraded from OBC to Scheduled Tribe (ST) to retain their competitive edge. As the Gujjar agitation turned violent in 2007, the Meenas, a dominant tribe in Rajasthan, also hit the road to oppose any move to dilute their share of the ST pie.
Hitting the caste ceiling
Today, almost every caste enjoys state reservation in some form or the other. This means that there remains no immediate room or incentive for caste competition anymore. Over time, this has also broken the monopoly of a few 'advanced backward castes' such as Yadavs, Kurmis, Jatavs or Pasis in government jobs, and partially restored the balance of power.
At the same time, by virtue of their sheer population and the burden of historical exploitation, the majority of the lower caste population still remains among India's poorest. Yet an alignment on economic lines has been slow going in our politics.
Consider the classic caste cauldron of Uttar Pradesh. As the Congress waned drastically in the state in the 1980s, Kanshi Ram eyed the entire bahujan samaj but managed to occupy principally the 'upper Dalit' space. The ati-Dalits or maha-Dalits - Bhangis, Valmikis or Doms - either remained with the Congress or sought strength in the BJP. The OBCs, particularly the dominant backward castes such as the Yadavs, sided with Mulayam Singh Yadav (then Janata Dal).
A Mulayam-Kanshi Ram alliance would have brought the majority of OBCs and Dalits together, but their 1993 alliance collapsed in less than two years. Numerically, a combination of Dalits, Yadavs, other OBCs and Muslims still commands more than 40 percent of votes in the state and can prove decisive in more than two thirds of the seats. But the distrust between Mayawati and Mulayam - and between the Dalits and the dominant OBCs - has stood in the way of a grand alliance.
Instead, between 1991 and 2002, both the Samajwadi Party (SP) and Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) grew in their respective core constituencies of OBCs and Dalits. In that period, the SP increased its vote share from 12.5 percent to 25.4 percent and the BSP from 9.3 percent to 23.2 percent. That was the limit of their respective caste base, and so neither came anywhere close to forming a government singlehandedly.
This caste politics reached its 'saturation', so to say, by the turn of the century. Having hit their respective caste ceilings, both Mulayam and Mayawati began to warm up to other castes to make up for the deficit. Mulayam banked on Raja Bhaiya and Amarmani Tripathi to woo Thakurs and Brahmins respectively. Surprisingly, Mulayam's SP even managed to attract some support from Dalits. But these overtures to 'outsiders' cost the party some OBC votes. On her part, Mayawati moved from bahujan samaj to sarvajan samaj, offered tickets to Brahmins and wooed OBCs. Again, her party's core Jatav (Dalit) vote bank eroded in the bargain.
Since 2002, according to the National Election Studies (NES) by CSDS, the SP lost 6 percent of the Yadav vote but gained 13 percent of the Jatav vote, causing a 17 percent dip in the BSP's Jatav vote bank. In the same period, the BJP lost 12 percent of the Brahmin vote to the SP and BSP. If there was ever a tradition of voting as a caste bloc, it is over.
Figures from other states also bear out this new reality. In Punjab, Jats traditionally voted for the Akalis and Dalits for the Congress. Since 1997, the Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) has lost 13 percent of its Jat vote but gained 3 percent of the Dalit vote from the Congress, thanks to its sundry pro-poor schemes.
In Tamil Nadu, apart from the Pattali Makkal Katchi (PMK) that has built a sound foundation among the dominant backward caste Vanniyars who make up more than one-fifth of the state population, other caste outfits have lost ground. Parties such as Puthiya Tamizhagam (Dalits), Makkal Tamil Desam (Yadavas) and Thamizhar Bhoomi (Mutharaiyars) have either merged with the DMK or AIADMK, or have become marginal partners in alliances.
A new identity politics?
A baseline survey by the Lucknow-based Giri Institute of Development Studies for the Election Commission during UP's 2012 Assembly elections threw up a few startling facts. While merely 11 percent of respondents said they voted for candidates of their caste, nearly 33 percent claimed they chose politically more experienced candidates and 32 percent opted for candidates who delivered what they had promised during previous elections.
While these numbers show that caste may not be the principal voting motivation anymore, the days of en bloc voting are not over yet. Many local strongmen still control constituencies to serve the highest political bidders. This explains the bulk of previous election results that show a vote swing in excess of 30 percent. For example, when Mamata Banerjee's Trinamool Congress (TMC) ended the prolonged Left rule in 2011, a bunch of erstwhile red fortresses in south Bengal elected TMC candidates with mammoth margins.
At the other end of the spectrum, there still remains perhaps a legitimate context for identity politics. The tribal communities of India have never been mobilized as a vote bank. Scattered across the country, they do not have the numbers to determine poll results anywhere other than a few constituencies in north-east India, where they are anyway dominant. On the so-called mainland, our tribal population remains politically the most inconsequential, unrepresented and disempowered.
Liberalization has only tipped that balance further against tribal communities, even as caste politics has waned for good in these two decades. In the last century, the latter was predominantly a desperate call from the peasantry and allied vocational groups to secure livelihoods by securing reservations in the face of rapid urban-centrism. The benefits of education and job quotas, coupled with the opportunities created by economic reforms, helped the landed elite among the lower castes flourish, along with the neo-rich. But they won't be deciding the polls this summer.
Since the early 1990s, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), "the ratio between the top and the bottom deciles of the wage distribution [in India] has doubled". Those with college degrees gained nearly 15 times, mostly from the services sector, but the wages of those with primary education remained static.
In these two decades, liberalization made many lives. Alongside rags-to-riches fairytales, millions migrated to cities for jobs small and not-so-small. But it also displaced thousands from their land without a choice, impoverished lakhs of small farmers, and left many more at the mercy of an inflationary market when it came to education, healthcare or even mere subsistence.
The upcoming elections are about the aspirations of those who have tasted the trickle-down benefits of liberalization and now demand their rightful share. It is also about the frustration of the rest who have been made to pay the price for the so-called development and are done waiting for the crumbs. These degrees of economic hope and despair are more likely to separate the voters now rather than pre-assigned caste lines.
This is why the BJP will be better off flaunting the mystical Gujarat model than playing Narendra Modi's OBC card. This is why Nitish Kumar will be judged by the quality of his development work rather than the range of sops aimed at maha-Dalits. And this is why the Congress may have its tattered delivery system to account for as much as the corruption charges against its government.
True, there is little to choose from among the contenders, their promises and perceived performances. True, in the absence of any organized class mobilization most will vote as individual class entities. But who is to say collective wisdom can't be intuited by individuals?
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