The tricky business of playing the castes card: Looking ahead into 2024
The Congress and BJP are both trying new tacks. The key will be holding on to their traditional bases, while navigating caste.
It is among the oldest fault lines cleaving Indian society, yet the impact of caste on the world’s largest democratic exercise is insufficiently understood.
As a key determinant of social patterns and personal behaviour, caste norms routinely seep into electoral preferences, and remain among the most potent forms of mass mobilisation, even as regional, gender and class variations increasingly add complexity to bloc-based analysis of caste and politics.
2024 will see the clash of two forms of caste-based mobilisation at the hustings. The Opposition, led by the 28-party Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance (INDIA), is attempting a reboot of 1990s-style politics with its bid for a nationwide caste census. In itself, this is a big step for the Congress, which spent decades resisting calls from the heartland for reservations for other backward classes (OBCs), doggedly refusing to move forward with the first backward classes commission report, and sitting on the Mandal Commission report for years before Janata Dal founder VP Singh, as head of the short-lived National Front coalition government, implemented it in 1990.
Heading into a general elections now, the Opposition’s hope is that the promise of a caste census — such an exercise has only been conducted in Bihar so far, and it showed that OBCs formed 63% of the state population, prompting the government to expand reservations in that state to 75% — will help erode a chunk of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s support among OBCs and Scheduled Castes (SCs), because implicit in the promise of a caste census is the promise of a hike in the quantum of reservation.
But beyond symbolism, and the consequent salve in the bitter relationship that the principal opposition party shares with some regional outfits that owe their rise and political constituency to the backward classes churn, the electoral dividends such a strategy can hold remain unclear.
The BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) is trying a completely different tack. Over the past decade, it has built a rainbow alliance of Hindu castes, built on the promise of welfare for all, Hindutva ideology and overall economic growth — with Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s popularity acting as the glue that holds it all together.
The BJP recognised that the caste census was a tricky issue — especially in Bihar, the cradle of Mandal politics — and adopted a cautious position at first, focussing on procedural critiques of the exercise instead of rejecting the idea outright. Since then, its strategy has become a bit clearer. Modi has sought to redefine the paradigm by saying that only four “castes” matter to him: the farmers, the poor, the young, and women. Not since Indira Gandhi, with her “Garibi Hatao” slogan, has a PM held such personal appeal that they could afford to reject the conventional caste paradigm. Yet, undergirding this new strategy is likely to be a carefully calibrated plan of holding on to the non-dominant OBCs and SCs with a mix of welfare and historical symbolism (after all, it was the BJP that realised that these blocs were a potent electoral force that felt ignored under the dominance of larger groups in these caste brackets) while bolstering support among its traditional support base, the “upper castes”.
Additionally, the BJP holds a hidden wildcard: the as-yet-unreleased Rohini Commission report on sub-categorisation of OBCs, which could upend caste-based politics by drastically curbing the dominance of large groups.
All of which, in the coming months, will boil down to four key factors determining how the pre-election landscape evolves.
First, electoral promises don’t automatically translate into political dividends. In the five recent state elections, for instance, the caste census was barely a factor. Even in the 1990s, the churn stoked by the Mandal Commission was first social, and only then political. Grassroots leaders and social activists worked on the ground for years before OBCs started voting as a bloc. In this quest, regional specificities will matter. For example, the south is far ahead of the north in sub-categorising OBC and SC brackets, and this gives rise to a new kind of politics. And in states such as Bengal and Bihar, the BJP has often made an issue of Muslim groups being offered a chunk of the OBC quota.
Second, the behaviour of dominant castes that influence play in the Hindi heartland will be crucial. If the 2019 narrative was all about non-dominant OBCs and SCs carving out their own political space and moving to the BJP, 2024 may well be about what the Yadavs and Jatavs do in this key region. The BJP has already made a play for the Yadav vote — which has long been the base of support for the Samajwadi Party and Rashtriya Janata Dal, in Uttar Pradesh (UP) and Bihar respectively — by appointing Mohan Yadav chief minister of Madhya Pradesh in December.
After bleeding support and failing to find its footing among smaller SC groups, the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) will be keen to hold on to the Jatavs, one of the largest caste groups in UP. Whether this caste responds to the BJP’s overtures on the lines of welfare and iconography might decide the balance of power in these states.
The third key factor will be the role of upper castes. Despite their smaller numbers, such groups remain signal boosters of the electoral mood, and their continued dominance in the countryside makes them a powerful weapon. Given how the promise of quotas for economically weaker sections caused the upper-castes to rally behind the BJP in 2019, will the Opposition’s caste-census rhetoric wipe out whatever scraps of support it enjoyed among these groups?
Finally, the power of aspiration will loom large over voter choices. India is a young country, and lower-caste groups have large pools of young men and women looking to leave villages and small towns and make lives for themselves in larger cities. They are keen to shatter the fetters that caste puts on their aspirations. This is why reservations continue to hold allure, despite shrinking government job opportunities — not because of their (now vanishing) economic benefits but because of what it represents socially (a defiance of caste strictures).
Political parties will have to continuously rewire their messaging to keep pace with this restless, relentlessly ambitious young India.