"With 40% of the vote in West Bengal, BJP is the preferred party of Bengali Hindus. TMC is the preferred choice of other communities. This reality must be acknowledged," tweeted Swapan Dasgupta, senior BJP leader, rightwing ideologue and a Rajya Sabha member on the morning of May 24, 2019, following the thumping return of BJP for a second consecutive term under Mr. Modi. In a state where Muslims account for nearly 30% of the population, the tweet claims that BJP’s 40% votes accounted for roughly 60% of polled Hindu votes. Similarly, Modi in his victory speech remarked that those who were wearing the badge of secularism had been exposed and silenced.
Three erroneous assumptions are making round as the dominant given conclusion accounting for second consecutive stupendous saffron victory in 2019 general election. They are: the emergence of Hindus as a unified ethnic bloc, increasing irrelevance of Muslims as a community along with their decreasing institutional representation and India’s shift from being a liberal democracy to a quasi-ethnic democracy. A close reading of the subtexts of the electoral processes and its outcome would point that the rush to conclude the verdict is emanating from a lazy analysis.
First, while the BJP and its allies’ cumulative vote share of 45% indicates the spatial and sectional reach that the ruling party has acquired under Modi, they nowhere indicate ethnicization of Hindus as a majoritarian ethnic bloc as is being argued by political scientists like Christophe Jaffrelot. The premise of their argument hinges on the inference that Hindutva’s OBC and Dalit outreach signify the irrelevance of Backward caste and Ambedkarite movements as they all have accepted Hindu identity and share the Hindutva outlook of making Muslims as the common Other.
This line of argument misses the intense subtext of BJP social strategy accounting for its political success, while much focus is shifted upon the denial of representation to Muslims to entrap rival parties in turning the narrative into a battle between pro-Hindu vs pro-Muslim agendas. In fact, Muslims being denied a share of representation in the saffron party has been the case since its inception.
Rather, it’s a second kind of othering, wherein the party keeps on denying representation to the dominant intermediary and politically assertive castes in respective states where they have been a domineering socio-political presence in the last 20 years, so much so that beside upper castes, the fellow Hindu subalterns started despising them. More than any measure of Muslim othering, it’s the othering of these politically dominant castes that has made BJP under the leadership of Modi as the natural fulcrum of the upper castes and the weaker lower castes.
BJP has marginalized the Yadavs’ dominance in UP and Bihar by giving them minimalist representation. In UP while opposition alliance fielded as many as 10 Yadavs, BJP fielded just one at Azamgarh, while fielding non-Yadav OBCs in thick numbers. The same was the story in Bihar.
The party has gone against the settled trend of a dominant section occupying the prime political position in many other states which has paid electoral dividend to it. In Jat-dominated Haryana, the party appointed a Punjabi CM and encashed upon the shared anti-Jat resentment. In Jharkhand, the party fielded an OBC CM while in Maharashtra, a Brahmin occupied the post. While Hardik Patel became the anchor of Congress in Gujarat where they tried to appeal to the dominant Patidars, Amit Shah focused on non-Patidar sections.
Since 1990s in UP and Bihar and 1960s in Maharashtra, Gujarat and Haryana, the dominant castes rose to political prominence on the plank of taking along the fellow subaltern; However, these new elites acquired a feudal outlook, thereby alienating other segments. It is this alienation that BJP’s social engineering crafted meticulously, even though the party would never speak about intense othering of the dominant intermediary castes. Nowhere does this intra-Hindu split and othering makes BJP mandate anywhere closer to its ultimate aim of converting Hindus as a unified ethnic bloc. The fracture is too big to be ignored.
The Dalits outreach to the saffron fold is a partial trend. Still the majority of Jatav-Chamar Dalits are consolidated behind BSP in UP and were transferring their votes to the alliance. In Bihar, Dusadh Dalits have the tendency to vote for any alliance which its leader Ram Vilas Paswan supports. There’s no ideological of tectonic reason behind their voting pattern, indicating the fractured domain of the Dalit question– a fact that flies in the attempt to argue that India is veering into the club of illiberal ethnic democracy like Israel.
Muslim representation hasn’t only declined in the parliament but in elite institutions like IPS, IAS, it has never been more than 5% while in Army it’s less than 2%. Around 15% high caste Ashraf Muslims have been getting a fair representation in these institutions and been represented in upper chamber of the parliament and on the post of President of the republic and Governors — a fact that declined since 2014.
(The author is a political analyst associated with People’s Pulse)