A contest of competing caste elites in Bihar | Number Theory

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The first part of this series described how upper caste economic dominance has moved away from agriculture in Bihar. The second part of this series will explain the contours of political competition by caste and the third part will articulate the political economy which can actually lift the fortunes of Bihar’s majority.

Bihar Vidhan Sabha building.

A contest of competing caste elites in Bihar

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  The social skew among Bihar’s rich

  That material well-being follows the broad social hierarchy in India where Scheduled Castes (SC) and Scheduled Tribes (ST) are the worst off, the Other Backward Classes (OBCs) are middling, while the non-SC-ST-OBCs are at the top is a given. However, what is often lost in this broad generalisation are the granularities of sub-caste-level differences. Because the government of Bihar did a caste-survey with sub-caste-wise basic characteristics in 2023, Bihar is the only state in the country which has statistical information on sub-case-wise inequality. While the survey does not have wealth data and even its highest income category is capped at ₹50000 per month or above, it does give us something to analyse Bihar’s society. A basic comparison of sub-caste-wise relative shares among the richest by income category shows a wide divergence among different social groups in Bihar. The proverbial upper castes or non-SC-ST-OBCs are right at the top while SC and Extremely Backward Class (EBC) sub-groups are significantly behind.
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  The strong correlation between richer sub-castes and candidates of NDA, MGB

  Bihar’s caste calculus often speaks of the importance of mobilising the really downtrodden sub-castes among EBCs and Dalits. While every major political party wants their votes, when it comes to fielding candidates, they seem to prefer sub-castes which have a higher share of the rich in Bihar. This comes out clearly from the strong positive correlation between sub-caste-wise share among the richest in Bihar ( ₹50000 or more in monthly income) and total number of candidates put up by the two major alliances in the state, namely, the Mahagathbandhan (MGB) and National Democratic Alliance (NDA). The sub-caste-wise candidate data is from HT’s candidate database for these elections prepared by the second author of this story. This makes perfect sense from a realpolitik perspective as contesting elections in India requires a lot of money.
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  What Bihar really has is competing elites from two major blocks: Upper castes and Yadavs

  There are only four sub-castes in Bihar which have a more than 10% share in the overall pool of households with a monthly income higher than ₹50000. They are, descending order, Yadavs, Bhumihars, Brahmin and Rajputs. Yadavs are the largest sub-caste in terms of population share in Bihar and part of the Backward Class (BC) category. The other three are upper castes and their population share, put together, is lower than that of the Yadavs. However, their dominance among the relatively rich, makes up for their lack of dominance in the overall population. A sub-caste-wise breakup of MGB and NDA candidates shows that both of them are given almost half of their tickets to candidates from these four sub-castes. Of course, the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) led MGB has fielded more Yadavs and the NDA has put up more upper caste candidates. This share becomes even larger if one were to exclude SC and ST reserve ACs and reaches almost 50. If agriculture is not really a site of caste or class conflict like it was until the 1990s in Bihar and electoral politics is essentially a contest between competing blocks of caste elites, then what can actually be a progressive political economy agenda for Bihar? This is what the concluding part of this series will try to answer.