The road to power in Delhi, it is said, runs through the Hindi belt. Stretching across the vast Indo-Gangetic plains, the region has been the crucible of Indian politics, producing eight of the country’s 15 prime ministers, electing the largest number of lawmakers, and wielding immense influence on its cultural and religious identity. Yet, as Ghazala Wahab shows in her latest book, The Hindi Heartland, its political clout has not translated into progress.
The centrality of the Hindi heartland, Wahab notes, is best grasped from Narendra Modi’s decision to pick Varanasi as his Lok Sabha constituency to enter the Prime Minister’s office in 2014. “An astute politician, Modi understood that the heartland provides the best path to power. Rule the Hindi heartland, rule India,” she notes.
However, despite its numerical and political weight, the region lags in all human development indices and is in a constant state of social unrest. The Hindi belt, writes Wahab, is the most impoverished, as poverty levels in the region are much higher than the rest of India. Caste violence, growing communal polarisation, and feudal structures continue to define it, contributing to the region’s description as dysfunctional.
What explains this paradox? How is it that a region that has given the country its most powerful leaders finds itself on the economic margins and social instability? These are the questions Wahab seeks to answer.
At the outset, The Hindi Heartland is not an academic work. While relying on secondary sources, Wahab leans on her journalistic skills, drawing on interviews with historians, writers, academics, and locals she met during her travels. The result is a book crowded with voices and anecdotes, which at times are repetitive. This, along with the overuse of data, can be jarring. But these flaws can be overlooked as the book provides an overarching portrait of the region whose political and social history is inextricably linked to the story of India itself.
Wahab argues that policies adopted by the British, and later sustained by post-independence dispensations, are responsible for the Hindi heartland’s economic marginalisation and communal polarisation. She traces the region’s impoverishment to the British land policies, which strengthened the zamindari system, allowing traditional landowners to collect taxes on behalf of colonisers. This enabled the owners to amass wealth while farmhands and Dalits languished in poverty.
Traditional food crops were replaced by cash crops such as indigo, opium, and cotton to benefit the British, while the raw materials were exported to fuel British industries—only to return as finished products. “On both sides of this circuitry—export and then import—the burden of the duties, freight charges, tariffs, and taxes was borne by Indians,” she writes.
Wahab also puts the colonial rulers in the dock for sowing the seeds of communal tensions that survive to this day. Referring to their ‘divide-and-rule’ policy, she says, there was a deliberate move to pit Hindus and Muslims against each other through vilification of Mughals as the British “needed history to justify their presence”. Consequently, India’s past was projected “as a series of confrontations between Hindus and Muslims”.
These religious divisions further extended into language. Wahab argues that the 1857 revolt was the turning point as the “socio-religious cleavage” witnessed subsequently also “reverberated through the linguistic landscape of North India.” It was after the revolt that the British became aware of the existence of Hindi for Hindus while associating Urdu with Muslims. This divide did not disappear, as even today Hindi is identified with Hindus while Urdu, once spoken across the region, has been marginalised.
The region’s backwardness is a “result of caste and religion-based post-independence politics which reduced the democratic process of elections to community loyalty rather than delivery of development and welfare”. The failure of the post-colonial Indian state to dismantle the political and social structures meant that landowners moved on to become lawmakers, ensuring that “power changed hands but remained within the same caste and class groups”.
With sectarian politics taking deep root in the heartland, it is only appropriate that the book should end by taking note of the grip of communal polarisation. Wahab has detailed the official and non-official methods employed to harass Muslims and Dalits. The region’s Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb has fallen prey to extreme division where tolerance is in short supply. Wahab fervently hopes the region can reclaim its legacy of co-existence. “Because what happens in the Hindi Heartland, happens in India,” she warns ominously.