The RSS leaders claimed that these castes had come into existence due to atrocities by foreign invaders and did not exist in Hindu religion earlier. “Three top RSS leaders have sought to attribute the genesis of Dalits, tribals and many other groups to “Muslim invasion” in medieval times.” According to Bhaiyyaji Joshi, a top leader in RSS hierarchy, ‘shudras’ were never untouchables in Hindu scriptures. ‘Islamic atrocities’ during the medieval age resulted in the emergence of untouchables, Dalits. Joshi further elaborated, “To violate Hindu swabhiman (dignity) of Chanwarvanshiya kshatriyas (a caste in Hinduism), foreign invaders from Arab, Muslim rulers and beef-eaters, forced them to do abominable works like killing cows, skinning them and throwing their carcasses in deserted places. Foreign invaders thus created a caste of charma-karma (dealing with skin) by giving such works as punishment to proud Hindu prisoners.”

Now carrying on from here there is a renewed attempt to present the caste system in a positive light and as a saviour of this nation (Hindu). As the demand for caste census is picking up RSS’s mouthpiece Panchjanya in its August 5 (2024) has published an article by Hitesh Shankar (HS), “A Netaji: Kaun jaat ho” (Oh Leader, to which caste you belong). This article argues that the foreign aggressors could not break the caste curtains and so could not do the conversions. The caste has the major basis of Hindu society and has kept the nation in the pink of health despite the foreign aggressors. This article approvingly quotes an earlier ex-Bishop of Bombay, Louis George Milne’s book, ‘Mission to Hindus: A contribution to the study of Missionary methods’. The quote is “…then it (caste, added) is necessarily a part of social structure. Still for all practical purposes it constructs religion for millions…It acts as a link between one’s nature and Religion.” (Translated from Hindi Article).

As per the author what was pinching the Missionaries then is pinching the Indian National Congress (INC) which is the inheritor of East India Company and Lord A O Hume. Further it points out that as the aggressors could not break the caste fortress they (Muslims) forced the uptight castes for manual scavenging; as such there is no mention of this system in earlier society. As per the missionaries they attribute backwardness of society to the caste system. As per the HS, like British, INC also looks at the caste as a thorn in the system.

This article is a compilation of a bundle of the lies. To begin with the caste system was articulated strongly in Manusmriti (2^nd Century AD, much before foreign aggressors came) and many Holy books stated that the low caste should remain away from the upper caste and this was the root of untouchability, and manual scavenging is the expression of the same. This is inherent in purity-pollution practices and also in the theories of rebirth. Earlier references of this are found in Narada Samhita and Vajasaneyi Samhita. In Narada Samhita 15 duties listed for untouchables, one is the removal of human excreta. In Vajasaneyi Samhita, Chandals are referred to as slaves engaged in disposal of Human excreta.

Dr. Ambedkar viewed caste as a Brahminical imposition on society. While the whole article of RSS mouthpiece is singing praise for the caste system. Radical Dalit intellectuals and activists have seen this as a major ill of Hindu society. It is here that Ambedkar in several of his writings calls for ‘annihilation of caste’.

While proportionate representation and caste census is an eyesore for Hindu Nationalists, led by RSS, its beginnings are in Poona Pact between Gandhi and Ambedkar and later it found its place in Indian Constitution. To oppose this in subtle and direct forms there were riots in Ahmedabad in 1980 and then 1985. Ram Temple movement became more aggressive when Mandal Commission recommendations were implemented in 1990.

As far as INC being an inheritor of East India Company and Hume’s legacy is concerned, this is a concoction which only those can formulate who were away from Freedom Movement and now are opposed to the idea of India as a plural; diverse country. INC from Tilak to Gandhi was totally against the British rule of which Hume was a part. Hume conceived of it as a safety valve, it is alleged. Going deeper one will see that emerging India National organizations like, Madras Mahajan Sabha (founder Panapakkam Anandacharlu), Bombay Association (founder Jagannath Shankarshet) and Poona Sarvajanik Sabha  (founder M.G. Ranade) were looking for a political platform to reach their demands for British rule. They responded to this call of INC as they saw and did actualize to make it a national platform to put forward demands of emerging India. This initially called for opening centres of ICS in India, INC called for restrictions of landlords so that the captive labour power is released and demanded more facilities for rising industrialization.

The same organization (INC) in due course called for ‘Total Independence’ and ‘British Quit India’! The same Congress whom Panchjanya is targeting led the national movement, taking along the issue of social justice, which was strongly put forward by Ambedkar.

As such the contrast between Ambedkar, who represents the values of Indian Constitution, and RSS, which represents Hindu Nationalism, are stark. Ambedkar burnt Manusmriti; RSS upholds the values of caste inequality given in this holy book. Ambedkar drafted the Indian Constitution and RSS opposed it directly for a long time and indirectly at present!

Ram Puniyani is president of the Centre for Study of Society and Secularism.

The post Caste Imbroglio: Changing Narrative of Hindu Right appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Ayodhya, Lucknow (Uttar Pradesh): Ram Tirath, 55, and his wife Mithilesh Kumari, 50, were squabbling over whom to vote for on May 6, 2019. The couple grow sugarcane and mustard on their 2.5-acre farm in the largely upper-caste village of Palia Pratap Shah in the central Uttar Pradesh (UP) district of Faizabad.

Paintings depicting events in the Ramayana line the streets of Ayodhya, the seat of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s temple politics that began in 1991. Nearly three decades later, in the place where it all started, rural distress and stray cattle are making farmers angry.

The husband said there was no question of voting for anyone besides the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Prime Minister Narendra Modi. “Modi gave us Rs 12,000 to build a toilet,” he said, pointing to the toilet labelled izzat ghar (place of pride) in keeping with Modi’s campaign.

It was unused, he admitted soon enough, because there is no water supply to the village. So, it does not make sense to carry buckets of water on one’s head a great distance to flush down a cement toilet far away, he said, when it’s much more sanitary to squat in a field and wash that off with much less water.

Ram Tirath, 55, stands next to the toilet he built with the assistance of the government’s Swachh Bharat scheme, at his home in Palia Pratap Shah in the western Uttar Pradesh district of Faizabad. There is no question of voting for anyone besides the Bharatiya Janata Party and Prime Minister Narendra Modi, he says.

He went on to list Modi’s insurance schemes and the money transfers to poor farmers–Rs 6,000 a year or Rs 500 a month. “At least he’s done that,” he said, before admitting that the main problem in the village were the stray cattle that had eaten up all his sugarcane and sarson (mustard), which he could have sold for about Rs 100,000.

How does the math add up then, to have received Rs 6,000 in cash and lost Rs 100,000, he was asked. Ram Tirath exclaimed that he saw no alternative to Modi. Caste and religion, he admitted later, were overriding factors.

Kumari, the domineering wife, interrupted her husband’s hard-sell of the BJP with a one-liner that silenced him: “Hum nangey hain, aapke paas das kapde hain, hamarey paas ek nahi, be pardey khadey hain, ab aap hamarey upar pardah nahi daal saktey hum aapke peechey kyun marein? (If I am naked and you have 10 pieces of clothing and you can’t even give me one to cover my body with, then why should I run after you?)”

She continued. “Vote barabar dete hain, pichli baar diye they, teli ko. Kuch nahi kiya. (I voted for the man from the Teli caste the last time and he did nothing),” she said, referring pejoratively to Modi’s caste. By now, a few people had gathered to watch her take on her husband.

The question of whom to vote for in the election turned into a squabble between Mithilesh Kumari, 50, and her husband Ram Tirath. Kumari is disillusioned with the Narendra Modi government, she says, adding that she will not vote for anyone.

She ended with a critique of the BJP’s Ram mandir campaign. “Masjid toota woh sahi hua. Lekin mandir bana nahi na banega (It was right for the Babri masjid to have been brought down. But the Ram temple has still not been built in its place, nor will it be built),” she said, referring to the December 6, 1992, demolition of the Babri Masjid. “Modi ji bhi kehtey they ki baneyga, hoo haa hoo haa… uske baad khatam ho gaya. Ab phir Modi khadey hain toh ab kya karenge, kuch nahi. Dekhiye (Modiji had made a big hoo-haa about it the last election and nothing happened. And nothing will get done this time either, wait and watch),” she added.

She said she will not vote for anyone this time.

This is the fourth in a six-part series on the Hindu vote in Uttar Pradesh, India’s most hotly contested electoral battleground, which accounts for 80 of a total of 543 Lok Sabha seats (you can read the first part here, the second here and the third here). Awadh has 17 Lok Sabha constituencies, including Faizabad and Lucknow and the Congress party’s bastions of Amethi and Rae Bareli. About 32 million voters in the region will vote on May 6, 2019.

Source: District Census Handbook, 2011 census

Ayodhya, the seat of the BJP’s temple politics

A little distance away in the same village, 64-year-old Lallu Singh, member of parliament (MP) from Faizabad constituency, and seeking re-election, had arrived. It was 45 degrees outside. Singh heaved himself out of his SUV. He needed help with getting out, and a party worker rushed to the rescue, bending over so Singh could place his leg on his back to climb out.

Singh spoke with his eyes shut, avoiding the heat and eye contact, feeding the crowd with a dose of the BJP’s main intoxicant–religion and the protection of Hindus.

Lallu Singh, 64, is seeking re-election to the Lok Sabha from Faizabad constituency. Speaking at a gathering in Palia Pratap Shah village, he feeds the crowd with a dose of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s main intoxicant–religion and the protection of Hindus.

He spoke of the campaign to turn Ayodhya into a world-class tourist spot and the BJP’s plans to turn the perimeter and the various temples and heritage sites–141 of them–into `Bada Ayodhya’ or the Greater Ayodhya circuit. More roads, more highways.

In the audience was a sadhu (priest) in saffron robes and shiny, gold reflector glasses. A man peering at him, who did not want to be identified, made a caustic remark: “This guy is the local mafia man here.”
 

Faizabad, recently renamed Ayodhya, is the centre of the BJP’s temple politics that began in 1991, led by then prime ministerial candidate Atal Bihari Vajpayee and party president L K Advani. In the campaign, Advani embarked on a rath yatra in a Toyota bus made to look like a mythical chariot. With this God-like setting, Advani told crowds that a mosque called the Babri Masjid stood at Lord Ram’s birthplace. And that it needed to be replaced by a temple dedicated to Lord Ram.

A year later, on December 6, 1992, thousands of angry Hindu devotees swamped Ayodhya city and brought down the mosque. The site of the Masjid’s demolition is now a mound of mud on top of which sits an idol of Lord Ram, called the Ram Lalla. It is a site that thousands of devotees visit every day, snaking through a long, heavily-armed set of barricades flanked by the army and police in bunkers, armed with automatic rifles.

Devotees weave through five security checks to pray at the shrine, in the hope that the BJP’s promise–to build the Ram temple–will one day come true.

As they made their way to the shrine, a devotee remarked: “Here lies our beloved Lord Ram, in a hut, while we live in air-conditioned apartments. What kind of world is this?” His sentiment was echoed by many as they filed out, shaking their heads, believing that all other political parties save for the BJP were obstructing the construction of a temple–and only Modi (and the BJP) was their protector.

Outside the shrine, hundreds of shops sell articles of worship and pictures of Gods. The most frequent depictions are stills from the television series on the Ramayana, produced by Ramanand Sagar and aired in 1987-88 on state-run Doordarshan TV–the only television network that existed in the late 1980s.

Articles of worship and pictures of Gods–some of them depicting the stills from the television series on the Ramayana that aired in 1987-88 on state-run Doordarshan TV–on display in stores outside the shrine at Ayodhya.

Three years after this television series became a national sensation, Advani and Vajpayee used the iconography from the series in their Ram Janmabhoomi campaign. Now, posters from that serial, re-runs of which are still telecast, are sold as pictures depicting Lord Ram, Sita and Lakshman, in Ayodhya, pop-culture morphed into the politics that has dominated the Awadh region since.

Now, nearly three decades later, the site is the subject of a court dispute, but it continues to be the front and centre of the BJP’s campaign across 17 districts of central UP or the Awadh region–with Ayodhya its emotional register and Lucknow, at the other end of the region, its political centre.

Lucknow, where political aspirations find a home

Rakesh Pandey’s father had to sell a family plot on the highway to pay for his education. Conscious of his father’s sacrifice, Pandey spent his summer breaks finishing the math and science syllabus even before the semester began. His village did not have electricity, and this meant relocating at the age of five–moving 840 km from Kushinagar in the easternmost part of UP where he was from, to the westernmost district of Bulandshahr. This so he could live with his uncle, whose village had electricity.

When Pandey was midway through his engineering degree, his father lost his job at a sugar mill. Pandey had no money to pay his final semester fee and was being stopped from taking the exam. But Pandey’s resolve to study was so strong that he threatened the director of his college that he would jump off the building if he wasn’t allowed to take the exam. The director–out of fear, guilt and admiration–paid Pandey’s fee.

After turning himself into a teacher and an engineering coach, Pandey wanted more. The year was 2011. Pandey was teaching in the Noida region that abuts the national capital, when the city was overtaken by Anna Hazare and Arvind Kejriwal’s anti-corruption movement.

Pandey was swept by the tide, turning into a young man who wanted to change the world. He also took the civil services exam, but failed to clear it. “So I asked myself what else can I do, and the answer was politics,” he said.

But the party of aspiration and success Pandey found himself eventually gravitating towards was not the party Arvind Kejriwal created–not the Aam Aadmi Party. He saw, instead, in the BJP a much larger vehicle of aspiration and political success.

So, he returned to UP from Delhi and started frequenting the Lucknow office of the BJP until he made his way into the party’s IT cell. Within two years, by the start of 2019, he had impressed enough people in the state to be moved to the election management team.

Rakesh Pandey (in white) participates in a rally in Uttar Pradesh’s Kushinagar taken out to mark his initiation into the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) IT cell. At age five, Pandey moved 840-km to his uncle’s home to be able to study under a lamp. Moved by Anna Hazare’s 2011 anti-corruption movement, he joined politics: He chose not the Aam Aadmi Party, but the BJP. (Photo courtesy: Rakesh Pandey)

Seated in a comfortable air-conditioned room in Lucknow’s prime real estate zone Hazratganj, Pandey squinted over his glasses as he threw a number up in the air like a challenge: That there are over 4 million volunteers and workers on the ground for the BJP this election in Uttar Pradesh alone.

No other party can possibly beat those numbers, the Modi fan suggested as he stirred his coffee. The 37-year-old leaned back in his chair in the sparsely done flat he was allotted by the party in an apartment complex meant for state assembly legislators. As part of the BJP’s UP election team, poring over numbers and working the phone lines to make sure each electoral booth has people on the ground, Pandey has earned the right to a comfortable home for the first time in his life.

Pandey broke down the BJP figure of 4 million: India’s most populous state, which accounts for a fifth of the country’s population sends about a sixth (80 of 543) of all MPs to the Lok Sabha. The state also has 163,000 election booths. The BJP has a team of 21 people per electoral booth, which adds up to 3.4 million people. In addition, there are farmers’ collectives, women’s collectives and a slew of allied groups that take the total to over 4 million.

Every bit of the party’s manifesto is in Pandey’s bloodstream–from the claim that the temple for Lord Ram must be built in Ayodhya, to the personification of the party in Prime Minister Modi.

A screen mounted on a carrier plays campaign videos of the Bharatiya Janata Party in Lucknow. The constituency has unfailing voted for the Bharatiya Janata Party since 1991.

Looking at the election from his perspective and other urban aspirants in the city of Lucknow, it would appear that the story of BJP’s consolidation in the state is a foregone conclusion. Lucknow, the capital of UP, has voted for the BJP continuously and unfailingly since 1991.
 

But step outside the cities, and the Awadh region’s political picture is far more complex than a surface-level reading of Hindutva or Hindu proselytisation suggests.

The caste mathematics

The BJP candidate for Misrikh constituency, adjoining Lucknow, Ashok Rawat went from village to village. He was aware that with the opposition parties–the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) and the Samajwadi Party (SP)–having stitched together an alliance, a lot will depend this time on the caste calculus rather than a saffron one.

The 43-year-old’s politics are also centred on caste. He comes from a scheduled caste called the Pasis. He was with the BSP until the last elections and was invited into the BJP. The party was aware of the political heft of Rawat’s community.

The Pasis are the second-largest scheduled caste group in the region, following only the Jatavs–BSP leader Mayawati’s caste. As Rawat hopped from village to village listing the Modi government’s achievements, he also worked the caste math.

“There are 300,000 Jatavs (who will vote for the BSP), 100,000 Yadavs (who will vote for the SP) and 250,000 Muslims (who will also vote for the SP),” said Rawat. “That’s 650,000 votes in all, of a total voting population of 1.76 million voters.”

“Baaki votes hamarey (The rest will vote for us),” he said. “Or at least 60% of them, of which there are 250,000 Pasis, 250,000 Brahmins, 100,000 Thakurs and Kshatriyas, and 450,000 voters from other backward classes.”

These communities are seen as traditional catchment areas for the BJP. Since they view the BSP as pro-dalit and the SP as pro-Muslim, these groups by default stack up with the `Hindu-leaning’ party.

The British annexation of Awadh, and the modern political rhetoric
In an election season, Prime Minister Modi is re-packaging an old political idea from the region, borrowing as it were a leaf out of the British colonisers’ method of decimating the opposition. Lucknow, or the central region of UP, was once Awadh, or Oudh in British lexicon.

It gets its name from the region that was once a kingdom established in the 16th century by the Mughal emperor Akbar. When it was taken over by British colonisers in 1857, they made out a case of misrule by the previous dynast Wajid Ali Shah: Muslim misrule, the British alleged, as they annexed the kingdom and crushed the revolt. The British made sure they caricatured the king as a wastrel and a debauched ruler. Those paintings and their replicas are found all over cities across the region with Wajid Ali Shah’s bare breast hanging out of his coat.

Two-and-a-half centuries later, Prime Minister Modi and an army of many million are making out a case of misrule by all others. As Rawat entered the large maidan in the town of Hardoi, where Prime Minister Modi was campaigning for the region, the message was clear: It’s Modi versus misrule, Hindu dominance seeking to erase a syncretic medieval past, in a region with a history of people not doing their masters’ bidding.

People watch Prime Minister Narendra Modi on a screen as he speaks at a gathering of more than 200,000 people in Uttar Pradesh’s Hardoi town. Two-and-a-half centuries after the British annexed Awadh citing Muslim misrule, Modi makes out a case of opposition misrule in the region.

More than 200,000 gathered to listen to Modi in a large maidan in the town of Hardoi, as the campaign got raised to a fever pitch by party leader Naresh Aggarwal, who started by insulting the SP-BSP alliance. “Jab cycle pe haathi baith jayega toh cycle chaknachoor hoga. (When an elephant sits on a cycle, the cycle gets smashed),” said Aggarwal, referring to the electoral symbols of the BSP (elephant) and the SP (cycle).

Modi took the invective forward. “The same people who once called Ambedkarites ‘the mafia’…” Modi thundered, referring to the followers of BR Ambedkar, the leader of Dalits and lower castes who also wrote the Indian Constitution, “those same people are now talking about the politics of the lower castes”, the Prime Minister said, referring to the SP, once the political enemy of its current alliance partner, the BSP. “It is only the politics of convenience,” said Modi.

Supporters of the Bharatiya Janata Party sport the party’s campaign material at a rally in Hardoi town addressed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the party’s candidate for Misrikh constituency Ashok Rawat.

Cow politics worsens farm crisis

About 50 km away from where Modi and Rawat were campaigning, Raj Rani of the Parshuram caste (another word for the Pasis) twisted coir to make a rope. “Modi kuch nahi kiye hain (Modi has done nothing),” the 55-year-old said flatly, looking up from her rope-making, the sun setting behind her, in the village of Jaraha.

“Modi kuch nahi kiye hain (Modi has done nothing),” says 55-year-old Raj Rani.

Suneeta, aged about 50, also from the same caste, joined in: “There is a huge stray-cattle population in the village which has become a menace.”

“There is a huge stray-cattle population in the village which has become a menace,” says Suneeta in Uttar Pradesh’s Jaraha village. Farmer suffer losses as the stray cattle destroy farms in the region.

Others added in the missing pieces of the story. Ever since the BJP’s gau-raksha (cow protection) campaign began and vigilante groups started to take the law into their own hands, threatening and killing people for killing cows, the economy of villages like Jaraha have suffered.

Since 2014, 11 people have been lynched in cow-related hate crimes in UP, 73% of them Muslim, the highest number of such attacks in any Indian state, according to a database run by FactChecker.in.

Earlier, when cows were past the lactating age, farmers sold them. Jaraha had two cattle fairs in the year. Selling a male–the bull–or a non-lactating female cow was the farmers’ insurance against distress. This has become even more crucial in a state like UP where more than half the workforce or 55% is entirely dependent on agriculture, which contributes to less than a third of the state’s economic activity.

The picture sharpens when we look closer at how the state’s economy fares region-wise.

To start with, the gap in the average person’s income in UP (the per capita income–income divided by population of the region) has grown less than in the rest of the country (see below). This means economic distress. Farmers can ill afford to lose additional sources of income, such as, cattle.

In central UP, primarily the Awadh region, agriculture forms the smallest slice of the economy. Although it is what half the state leans on for its income, it yields less than 20% of the region’s income.

Source: International Labour Organization Employment report on Uttar Pradesh, 2017

Ram Kisan Maurya showed this reporter the common grazing area in the village now populated with stray cattle. He was also from a scheduled caste community and angry at the BJP government in the state and the Centre for his predicament.

“Pehle hazaaron me biktey they. Aamdani bhi hoti thi (Earlier, cattle sold in these parts in the thousands),” Maurya said, adding, ”Gai bech diye kuch paise bachey kapdey le liye. Bikega nahi toh palega kaun? (We spent the money we got from the sale on buying clothes and other basics. If we can’t sell them, how are we expected to keep them and keep feeding them?)”

Stray cattle graze in a field in Uttar Pradesh’s Jaraha village. Cow vigilante attacks worsen farmer distress, with stray cattle destroying crops in Awadh region.

While anger from within the BJP candidate’s own community may upset his caste calculation, it wasn’t quite clear if this anger would translate into votes of dissent. In a region already faced with rural distress and urban unemployment, some said it was best to vote for whoever the village headman advised them to.

In Jaraha village, the man in charge is upper caste: Amit Kumar Singh. It is actually his wife who is the village pradhan (head), but in a patriarchal set-up, the man controls the village in the name of his wife.

Singh is a local leader from the SP. However, he said, he liked Rawat, the BJP candidate from Misrikh, and has been loyal to him for over a decade. So, he was asking everyone to vote for the BJP, despite being from the opposition.

Singh went with Ashok Rawat to Hardoi, to the Modi rally. At a party office in the region, one of his supporters who did not want to be named bragged about adding essential fuel to the campaign to ensure large crowds for the rally: Whisky.

“Two bottles of Black Dog per house or 5,000 bottles,” the man claimed. Later, this reporter found a drunk man at the head of Jaraha village who claimed to be a beneficiary of this largesse.

If in Misrikh region, abutting Lucknow, a leader from the opposition party is canvassing for the BJP whilst in Ayodhya, the seat of the party’s temple politics, an upper caste woman speaks openly against the party, it is possible that the math on either side may not add up exactly the way the BJP has planned–even with a possible army of 4 million people at work.

This is the fourth in a six-part series on the Hindu vote in Uttar Pradesh. You can read the first part here, the second here and the third here.

(Revati Laul is an independent journalist and film-maker and the author of `The Anatomy of Hate,’ published by Westland/Context in December 2018. She tweets @revatilaul)

We welcome feedback. Please write to respond@indiaspend.org. We reserve the right to edit responses for language and grammar.

Courtesy: India spend

The post Religion, Caste Politics In The Face Of Widespread Distress In Awadh appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Maratha Kranti Morcha, a rallye for Marathi castes demanding respect of their rights in Mumbai last year. Mhidanesh/Wikimedia, CC BY-NC-SA

Yet Narendra Modi’s ruling Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) is making a dramatic effort to woo such lower castes. Three of these are especially important: reviewing social justice schemes, revisiting job reservations, and the sub-categorisation of lower castes.
These measures will eventually deepen India’s caste politics and strengthen the caste system – the world’s oldest surviving social hierarchy.

In India, society is divided among higher castes, lower castes (known as Other Backward Castes or OBCs, among the socially and “educationally backward” sections of Indian society), Scheduled Castes (known as Dalits, formerly “Untouchables”), and Scheduled Tribes (known as Adivasis).

Today, the BJP is strategically working to win the heart and the vote of millions of lower castes, who make up 41% of the Indian population. However, the BJP’s outreach initiatives are not born out of a concern for social justice; they are part of an electoral agenda.
 

Changing the BJP’s image

The BJP’s defeat in the 2009 general election proved a turning point for its engagement with lower castes. While still playing the Hindu nationalism card with dominant upper castes, the BJP is now deploying multiple strategies to win over lower castes too.
For example, Amit Shah, now the party’s president, first highlighted Modi’s own lower-caste background in the 2014 election in Uttar Pradesh. Later on, as prime minister, Modi was projected as the champion of lower caste groups. The party’s support for a Dalit presidential candidate was internationally hyped. Similarly, a recent cabinet reshuffle brought in more lower-caste leaders to appropriate the “numerical demographic” of OBCs for political gain.

The BJP is also making lower caste-friendly gestures in assembly elections campaigns in Gujarat and Karnataka. It highlights its commitment to provide constitutional status to the National Commission for Backward Classes (NCBC), a statutory body that works for the welfare of lower castes.

Interestingly, the BJP is also pushing the idea of revisiting the existing system of reservation, which allocates 27% of governmental jobs and seats in educational institutions to lower castes. This the party proposes to do by setting up a committee to sub-categorise these groups into “backward”, “extremely backward” and “most backward” classes.
 

Lower caste identity through history

These are big developments. For decades, most political parties – including the Jana Sangh, which morphed into the BJP in 1980 – played their politics in the usual framework, excluding the lower-caste categories from the power structure of the state.
The notion of “affirmative action through reservation” only appeared in the mid-1970s when socialist parties led by politicians Ram Manohar Lohia and Chaudhary Charan Singh started using it to mobilise and consolidate the lower castes as a separate political identity.

The identity of lower castes only began to coalesce in 1955, when the first Backward Classes Commission under Kaka Kalelkar recommended various reservation quotas in technical, professional and government institutions.

Lower castes in India have been associated with menial work and high rates of poverty. Sharada Prasad CS/Flickr, CC BY-SA

Then in 1990, lower-caste mobilisation was galvanised when the Second Backward Classes Commission – popularly known as the Mandal Commission – recommended that 27% of positions in educational institutions and public employment be reserved for OBCs.

This was violently opposed by non-political bodies, including conservative student organisations. Many of these were close to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), an ultra-nationalist ideological group that supports the BJP. In 2006, these student wings fiercely opposed the Congress-led government’s decision to implement 27% lower caste job reservations in premier higher educational institutions.
 

Towards a universal Hindu identity

But now, India’s right-wing organisations have made peace with lower-caste aspirations. This has proved electorally rewarding, with the BJP successfully winning a greater share of the OBC vote. A third of the OBCs shifted to the BJP in the 2014 election, and in subsequent state elections.

Strategically, the BJP has focused on dismantling the caste-based parties’ monopoly over lower-caste votes. The tactic of painting other parties as corrupt bastions of single-caste politics worked wonders, as did an effort to compress the existing 2,479 lower castes into a smaller unit of individualised caste identity to diminish their collective heft.

The BJP also supported the aspirations of lower castes’ leaders through either finance or political alliance, accommodating OBC leaders in the party or ministerial portfolios at local, state and national level.

At the same time, the party is building a network of lower castes cadres in both rural and urban areas, as well as among young people and women. To penetrate the lower castes’ social base, the BJP formed an OBC Morcha or “special wing” in July 2015.

Religious ceremonies are organised to include lower castes back into the folds of Hinduism. Asim Chaudury/Flickr, CC BY-SA

On the one hand, right-wing Hindu organisations are engaged in the radical Hinduisation of lower castes and Dalits through programmes such as “Ghar Wapsi” or “Home Coming”, rituals of conversion to Hinduism, and running religious, spiritual and service programmes in lower caste areas.

On the other hand, the BJP’s core clientele of higher castes are satisfied thanks to the works of its right-wing support organisations. They continue spreading messages they want to hear, such as tactically portraying Muslims as a common enemy.

With many of its much-acclaimed policies failing to deliver, the BJP knows it has to sustain the charisma of Narendra Modi long enough to fight the 2019 legislative elections.

The party’s central challenge is to retain its support base while simultaneously supplementing it enough to ensure electoral victories. To do this, it must mobilise the emerging middle-class OBC vote – and it’s clearly prepared to do almost whatever it takes.

Afroz Alam, Associate Professor and Head, Department of Political Science, Maulana Azad National Urdu University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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Villagers near Muzaffarnagar seem set to break all easy assumptions about caste and community in this election.

It started with a murder in August 2015. A dispute between Shias and Sunnis in the village of Khirwa Jalal, about 20 km from Meerut city in western Uttar Pradesh, led to the death of a man called Zahid. The police believe that the murder was the result of a political dispute between the two groups. After Zahid’s nephew filed a complaint, the police rounded up several people, including Mohammed Irfan, the man who was tipped to be the next village pradhan, or chief.

A few months later, when the panchayat elections were held, Irfan’s wife Begum Nayyer won the polls hands down. However, she is just a rubber-stamp authority. Irfan’s brother, Mohammed Irshad, is pradhan by proxy, and takes all the decisions, which his sister-in-law then signs off on.

Khirwa Jalal is a Muslim-dominated village in this part of western Uttar Pradesh. It is part of Siwalkhas Assembly constituency, which, in turn comes under Baghpat Lok Sabha constituency. Of the village population, while Sunnis have about 3,500 votes, Shias have 800 and Jats and Dalits have approximately 1,800 and 500 votes respectively.

The composition of this village is representative of the complexity of elections in the politically crucial Uttar Pradesh. This is especially apparent in the western part of the state, is considered to be a distinct political entity as compared to other parts. Jats are a distinct and numerically significant community in several districts this area – the Baghpat-Baraut-Muzaffarnagar-Shamli-Meerut belt. Most residents here are either landowning farmers, or work in farms.

This region goes to the polls on February 11, the first phase of the seven-phase Assembly elections.
 

Overcoming assumptions

Like elsewhere in India, each community in Khirwa Jalal village has certain assumptions about the other. For instance, Jats view Muslims as a single, homogenous entity. They believe Muslims will only vote for a Muslim candidate.
However, it is not as simple as that.

The divide between Sunnis and Shias in this village because of the 2015 murder has meant that the Sunni community has decided to support Yashvir Singh, a Jat candidate of the Rashtriya Lok Dal candidate, who is also supported by the Jats of the village.

This is because Sunnis perceive the Shias to be close to sitting MLA Ghulam Mohammed of the Samajwadi Party who is up for reelection.

Thus both Jat and the majority of Muslim voters here are consolidating behind the Rashtriya Lok Dal candidate.

The Rashtriya Lok Dal was founded in 1996 by Ajit Singh, the political heir of Chaudhry Charan Singh, one of the tallest Jat leaders, who briefly served as prime minister between July 1979 and January 1980. The party had a strong presence in Jat-dominated districts of western Uttar Pradesh because of the loyalty of Jats towards Singh and his successors. In past elections, the Rashtriya Lok Dal was a strong contender in every constituency in this region, either winning the seat or emerging a close second.

But the 2013 Muzaffarnagar riots changed things.

As the ruling Samajwadi Party scrambled to contain the riots and arrested several Jat leaders, Ajit Singh’s silence on the matter angered Jats. This, coupled with the “Modi wave” of the 2014 general elections, saw Jat-dominated areas in this region turn away from the Rashtriya Lok Dal and vote for the BJP en masse.
 

Anger at BJP

But things are no longer the same. The furious messages being sent across by BJP workers via WhatsApp to woo Jat voters in the region indicates that the party is aware that it is losing the community’s support.

In village after village in this region, the Jats are angry at the BJP.

“What has the BJP done for the farmers since it won the elections in 2014?” asked Rajendra Singh of Bijrol village on a cold February evening. “No one other than the RLD has ever thought about the farmers. Before 2014, we did not believe in any divisions between Jats and the Muslims. We were all farmers with the same problems. The BJP came and divided us and we are paying a heavy price for it.”

This statement is repeated in other Jat villages.

Nearer Muzaffarnagar, in the village of Sohram, Balyans, the dominant sub-caste of the Jats, are also keen to back the Rashtriya Lok Dal because they feel betrayed by the BJP.

“This village saw a lot of firing during the riots,” said Dariyo Singh Balyan, sitting under a giant photograph of the old farmer leader Mahindra Singh Tikait, who stormed and occupied Delhi’s Boat Club in the 1980s, seeking assurances for farmers from the Congress government at the Centre.
 

Farming costs up

The farmers here alternately grow sugarcane and wheat. With input costs for farming like fertilisers, electricity and seeds having escalated, most farmers here feel that the procurement price of sugarcane is no longer remunerative. At the same time, payments from sugar mills have been delayed due to demonetisation.

“Modi tells us that he has sent us money but Akhilesh [Yadav] is delaying the payments,” said an elderly Jat farmer in Sohram village, referring to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s claim during election rallies that the Samajwadi Party government was not delivering central grants to its beneficiaries. “But what stops Modi from sending the payments directly to our bank accounts? After all, if he can start Jan Dhan Bank accounts and send money directly, why can’t he send out money to us as well.”

The farmer added: “The BJP used the riots to gain ascendancy here, and now that our people are facing cases, they have pushed off and left us to our fate. We never fought the Muslims until 2013.”

The procurement price for sugarcane is a sore point.

Most Jat and Muslim farmers recollect that the only time the price went up was during Mayawati’s reign as chief minister from 2007 to 2012.

“She raised it by Rs 40 per quintal,” said Rajendra Singh. “No leader has ever done so much. That is why we must support the RLD [Rashtriya Lok Dal]. Ajit Singh may not become chief minister, but like his father [Charan Singh] he will speak for us and he is one of our own. We must ensure his people win.”

But in that case, why not support Mayawati instead?

The response is that the Dalit leader raises none of the issues important to them.
 

Remember Haryana

One of the WhatsApp messages being forwarded to the Jat community speaks about how the Samajwadi Party and the Rashtriya Lok Dal abandoned them after the 2013 riots, and of how the BJP stood by them.

But that argument finds few takers.

The BJP’s radio jingles also holds up the Muzaffarnagar riots as an example of the abysmal law and order situation in the Samajwadi Party-ruled state.

But most people here smirk at such messages.

“We all know who created the riots,” said Amit N, a young Jat, who lives in Baraut, Baghpat, while preparing to head to the fields to tend to his crop. “In 2014, our fathers were very angry with us for abandoning the RLD, Some even stood with lathis [wooden sticks] at home, ready to hit us for voting for the BJP instead of RLD. But many of us won’t make that mistake any more.”

The other refrain among the old and the young is to forget Muzaffarnagar and remember BJP-ruled Haryana, which saw riots last year by Jats demanding that they be included in the Other Backward Classes category, and thus be eligible for reservations in government jobs.

A Jat mahapanchayat held in Kharad village in Muzaffarnagar district on January 8 decided that the community would not vote for the BJP this time, and the khaps, or village councils, have been entrusted with the task of ensuring that the message reaches all members of the community before the elections.

A video of a BJP leader asking all other Hindu castes to isolate Jats is also doing the rounds on WhatsApp. This counters all the forwards being sent by the BJP in one stroke.

The fact that the BJP has fielded complete outsiders like Avtar Singh Bhadana, a former Congress MP from Haryana, as a candidate in Mirapur constituency in Muzaffarnagar district, has led to further anger against the saffron party.
“We will teach the BJP a lesson,” mutter many young Jats quietly in village after village.

Another refrain in the villages in this area is: “Where is Satyapal Singh [the MP from Baghpat]”. Many allege that Singh, former Mumbai police commissioner, has not been visible in the constituency.

All this is an indication that though different consolidations are taking place, none of them seem to favour the BJP right now.
 

Dalits divided

Back in Khirwa Jalal, these consolidations throw up more surprises. Take Dalits, the majority of whom belong to the chamar sub-caste in this village. Many were once dedicated supporters of the Bahujan Samaj Party. But this time, they are a divided lot.

“Look at our corner in the village,” said Sewa Ram, as he gathered around Jats sitting on a wooden cot discussing politics. “Mayawati has not managed to do anything for us. Instead, many of us are with the BJP.”

“Or with the RLD,” piped up Lal Sigh, also a Dalit, who has moved away from the Bahujan Samaj Party.

Back at the village chief’s house, Mohammed Irshad is using his position as as proxy pradhan to pick households that will be the next beneficiaries of the Union government’s ambitious toilet-construction programme under the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan. Under this scheme, the government has sanctioned Rs 12,000 per beneficiary to enable them to construct a toilet in their homes.

Irshad had a village voters list to guide him.

“Look at the list of people I am ensuring get toilets,” said Irshad. “They are not only Muslims but also harijans [Dalits].”

Ask him who he is supporting, and he mentions Yashvir Singh, the Rashtriya Lok Dal candidate.

The defacto pradhan of Khirwa Jalal village, Mohammed Irshad. (Photo credit: Saikat Datta).

This article was first published on Scroll.in

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