How the other India came from nowhere to overwhelm Indian politics
You can call it the classic revenge of the underdog! And it’s been thirty years in the making.
Way back in 1989, a wily kshatriya politician from the heartland, VP Singh, revolted against dynastic rule of the Nehru-Gandhis, only to awaken the sleeping giant of Indian politics.
A year into office, in 1990, Singh, himself a short-lived prime minister and both an architect and victim of political machinations in Delhi’s corridors, decided to enforce the Mandal Commission Report, guaranteeing government jobs for 55 per cent of the population, comprising backward and other backward communities.
True, the anti-Mandal agitation that followed left a trail of destruction and lost lives, but it is equally true that the awakening of ‘the other India’ that took place in its wake, left its lasting impact on the country’s political, social and cultural fabric.
Mandal not only imparted dignity and jobs to the unrecognised, underprivileged nameless minions, it also went on to redefine the country’s political landscape forever, by transferring the brain-brawn electoral power combo of the Brahmin-Kshatriya nexus to the underdog’s brute force and uncanny instinct for survival.
And in that alone, history must give its due to Singh for clearly reading the tea leaves early. He brought to the national centrestage hitherto political underweights from the wrestling pits in the boondocks without hereditary hold over the electorate.
Three decades later, with the conclusion of the 2019 general election for the 17th Lok Sabha, the Mandalisation of Indian politics seems to be finally complete.
Let me tell you how.
Singh’s social re-engineering so completely overhauled the dynamics of Indian politics that backward and other backward leaders came to dominate successive regimes both at the Centre and states under the likes of Lalu Yadav and Nitish Kumar (Bihar), Mulayam Singh Yadav and Mayawati (Uttar Pradesh), Ajit Yogi (Chhattisgarh) and HD Deve Gowda (Karnataka).
More and more faceless leaders too emerged as hegemons over hitherto faceless communities, among them, Kumari Mayawati, Ram Vilas Paswan, Ramdas Athawale and Anupriya Patel.
For centuries, these worthies had not only been denied a voice in governance, but up until the 1990s, their vote banks had actively remained unstained by the indelible ink, as large-scale upper caste booth capturing and mass stamping of ballot ensured single-party-single-family dominance of governance.
The Mandal model was so powerful in its impact that it not only threw up state chief ministers and Lok Sabha MPs from underprivileged communities, but it also temporarily got India its first OBC prime minister in HD Deve Gowda. What’s more, as many as three Indian Presidents representing the BC/OBC vote banks were installed at Rashtrapati Bhawan in the last two decades alone -- KR Narayanan (1997-2002), Pratibha Patil (2007-2012) and Ram Nath Kovind (2017 till date). This, when only one backward leader Giani Zail Singh (1981-1987) held the most privileged office in land in the previous half century.
The rebellion against the upper castes brought about by Mandalisation also left its impact elsewhere, unanticipated by social theorists: the Muslims, who had hitherto been led by the upper caste Ashrafs in politics, religion, bureaucracy, academics, media and rural economy, too came to assert their identity as distinct from the elites.
Backward caste organisations such as the All India Pasmanda Muslim Mahaj, All India United Muslim Morcha and All India Muslim OBC Organisation in Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra found voice in slogans like ‘Dalit-pichda ek saman, Hindu ho ya Musalman!’ In Bihar, many a pasmanda aligned with Nitish Kumar’s campaign for social justice instead of opting for the usual Yadav-Muslim combination.
Yet, if the new caste equations brought about by Mandalisation of politics were apparent in the assertive rural vote banks of Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and pockets of southern India in the last decade of the previous century, the upper caste intellectual elites still held sway over the mainstream dispensations across the ideological spectrum, whether represented by the Congress, the Bharatiya Janata Party and even the Communists until recently dominated by the Cambridge-educated coffee-cup elites of Calcutta.
It was only at the dawn of the current millennium that the Mandalisation of India started altering the dynamics of local and national politics where it was least expected, as the vote bank mobilised the historically hopeless to migrate in massive numbers to cities in search of a better deal. People, who for generations lived and worked as bonded labourers, goatherds and idle country bumpkins, moved to the megacities for economic stability, not only crowding urban ghettos, but also fuelling the hyper local economies as security guards, parcel delivery boys, cooks, waiters, hairdressers, auto rickshaw and taxi drivers, among others. And as they became townsfolk, they brought with them their age-old rituals and customs in their annual Kawar yatras, Ram Navami, Shivar and Ramzan festivities, setting up ideological and religious tensions in cosmopolitan surroundings.
Nowhere was this force of migration felt more forcefully than in the Brahmin-dominated, RSS-controlled, cadre-based Bharatiya Janata Party, till now a largely urban political grouping feeding off the insecurities of the upper caste intelligentsia, white collar workers and traders forming the Brahmin-Kshatriya, Bania nexus.
It is this factor that also pushed to the forefront of the party organisation hitherto little-known backward leaders.
Just about the time that the power of Mandal was digging its roots deep into the heartland’s consciousness, a young backward party worker named Narendra Damodardas Modi was silently nursing a larger-than-life ambition for himself while serving tea and handouts to the urban-centric, upper-class national media at the party headquarters in the 1990s Delhi, overshadowed by high caste stalwarts like Atal Behari Vajpayee, L K Advani and Murli Manohar Joshi.
While the BJP’s early and reluctant experiment with backward tokenism proved disastrous when its first dalit president, Bangaru Laxman, was outed on national television in a bribery scandal, that early setback ended up as only that, a sideshow, to be eventually forgotten. Instead, it was only a matter of time before the party was eclipsed by the unpredicted, yet unprecedented rise of Modi as the chief minister of Gujarat.
Modi’s dare to capture national and global attention was so audacious in its attempt that the 2002 Gujarat revenge riots under his charge not only left party stalwarts dumbfounded, but eventually marginalised and finally made them irrelevant in the national political discourse over the next decade.
Political observers have since commented that Modi’s and the BJP’s coming to power in the 2014 election was the triumph of Hindutva in a nation riven by corruption. That might well have been so. Five years later, his anticipated return to office this summer should go down in history as the undisputed and final triumph of Mandalisation over Indian politics.
What’s significant, 2019 heralds the complete capture of Hindutva politics by ‘the other India’. For, the Bharatiya Janata Party, shorn of its upper-class intellectual moorings, is as much a subversion of religious politics by the social underdog as it is the social underdog’s subversion by religious politics. And in that subversion of one by the other and vice-versa, no other backward leader from ‘the other India’ -- whether Lalu or Nitish or Mulayam or Mayawati – no longer matters.
You can see that in the awesome force with which Modi has made his statement in the vote for the 14th Lok Sabha, usurping every totem, every mascot, every insignia, every colour identified with the Hindu doctrine, and delivering a sense of national identity to the other India that no aadhar card has done till date. You can sense that when you talk to every chowkidar, every barber, every tea seller, every cobbler who went home this summer to cast his vote... for Modi. You can hear that in the brag of a lone wolf pumping up his 56-inch chest to singly take on the combined might of thousands of other contestants through 543 constituencies across the country.
You can probably better understand the audacity of that dare in a reported conversation between Modi and the Gandhi family’s saffron scion Feroze Varun, mid-course through the tenure of the previous government.
Denied a leadership role in national or state politics, Feroze Varun reportedly joined Modi over an insipid cup of tea one casual afternoon some three years ago. And… if the grapevine had it right, that conversation must certainly pass into political folklore: ‘Hum gande nali ke keerey hain, agar kal chunao har bhi jaye, hum us nali mein wapas chaley jayenge. Par apka kya hoga?’ Modi reportedly rebuked Gandhi, much in the style of Gabbar Singh’s ‘Tera kya hoga Kaliya?’ (I am that worm from the stinking gutter who can return to the drain unscathed, if I lose the next election. But what will happen to the likes of you?)
No, the exit polls predict that Modi will not return to the gutter anytime soon. But the gutter politics that he has brought to this election will change Indian politics for a long time to come. And that looks both exciting and dangerous.
Disclaimer: The author has been a casual observer of Indian politics for the past three decades. He does not subscribe to a political ideology, but casts a conscience vote in every election. Watch this space!
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