Why BJP is here to stay
Prashant ‘PK’ KISHOR has upset his greatest supporters, India’s English-speaking liberals, by saying that the BJP is going to be the ‘centre of Indian polity’ for decades to come, and that one should not ‘ever get into the trap that people are getting angry and they will throw away Modi.’ This, to many anti-Modi voices, is the unkindest cut of all, because they were hoping that India’s best-known mercenary electoral-strategist was going to work some magic to oust PM Modi in 2024.
The alliance between economically dominant mercantile castes and the ‘Sanskritised’ non-dominant OBCs and Dalits holds the key to BJP’s hegemonic presence.
The question is, what has made the BJP the ‘Party of Rule’, which dominates political discourse even when it loses (such as in West Bengal, for instance)? There are two key reasons for this; the change in the composition of India’s ruling elite and the consolidation of non-dominant OBCs and Dalits. The first is a result of a process that began in the mid-1980s, the second is of more recent origin.
The first 35 years of India’s post-Independence polity was dominated by policies of dirigisme, where the state controlled the ‘commanding heights’ of the economy. Critics called this ‘state capitalism’ and argued that all that the ‘Nehruvian socialism’ was doing was building a launching pad for India’s homegrown capitalists to be able to take on international capital. While the Congress, which ruled for most of these years, needed support from captains of industry to sustain its rule, it had a love-hate relationship with capital.
Much of this can be traced back to the colonial period, and the anti-colonial struggle. As is well-known, the Congress was dominated by the professional classes, English-educated, upper-caste Indians, whose ‘nationalist consciousness’ was derived from western enlightenment discourse. What is less spoken about is the caste-basis of those who were to take over the reins of post-Independent India. It was overwhelmingly dominated by the ‘knowledge castes’ who had apprenticed in modern state-craft within the structures of the Raj. They had a disdain for the ‘mercantile castes’ that had money, but lacked social capital.
Nehru was to clearly articulate this attitude in 1936, when he equated capitalism with the ‘bania or money-lender civilisation’, and socialism with ‘the old Brahmin ideal of service’. Although Nehru wrote this at the peak of his momentary flirtation with Marxism, this disdain would continue throughout the period of ‘Nehruvian socialism’ where money-making was seen as dirty and entrepreneurs had to kowtow to ordinary babus. The result was that the share of the richest 1% of Indians in total national income almost halved from 11.8% in 1951 to 6.3% in 1981. The share of the poorest 50%, on the other hand, increased from 18.9% to 21.4%.
This was a difficult period for India’s mercantile castes and communities, who dominated trade and enterprise, but had very little representation in government. Their historical ties to anti-Congress trends during the national movement, especially ‘Hindu nationalism’, made it difficult for the mercantile caste communities to find a space in the system of power in Delhi. This would change dramatically from the early 1980s, when first Indira Gandhi, and then Rajiv Gandhi would gradually open up the economy to private capital.
The rise of the mercantile caste communities in India coincided with the victory of neoliberalism in the West. As finance capital established its global hegemony and India jumped on the privatisation-globalisation-liberalisation bandwagon, India’s mercantile caste communities were best suited to make the most of it. By the mid-1990s, public discourse had turned turtle; from looking down upon businessmen to worshipping them.
The BJP, and its previous avatar Bharatiya Jana Sangh, had always backed the mercantile caste communities, and they, in turn, helped the party’s rise from the late 1980s. As the mercantile caste communities began to dominate the economy, they were bound to gain gradual control over politics, as well. Although, non-English speaking ‘vernacular’ Brahmins from the Hindi belt would man the edifice of power from the late 1990s, it was only in alliance with India Inc, which was dominated by the mercantile caste communities. That economic policy was now firmly in their control can be gauged from the change in the distribution of national income. From 1991 to 2014, the share of national income of the richest 1% rose from 10% to 22%, while that of the bottom 50% dropped from 20% to 13%. Per capita real income of the richest 1% rose at an annual rate of 6% during this period, while that of the poorest 50% rose at just 1.9%. In other words, the poorest 50% of Indians were better-off during the period of ‘Nehruvian socialism’ than they were after the Rao-Manmohan reforms of 1991.
This growing inequality that positioned the mercantile caste communities firmly on the throne could only be sustained and reproduced through a wider alliance beyond the elites. It is here that the new BJP, under Modi, played a crucial role. The ground for it was created by two related processes. The first was that the extension of market economy across India created wider ties across geographies. Ironically, this not only did not weaken caste, but also strengthened it, especially as imagined communities based on kinship and a common relationship with the state. Dominant OBC and Dalit groups consolidated across states to be able to win regional elections and form state governments.
While these ‘caste’ parties were initially able to attract a wider set of backward castes and Dalits, once in power, they only promoted a small set of dominant castes who managed to get government jobs, including in the police. This created a schism within the OBC and Dalit political movements. This was fertile ground for political Hindutva, to promote the idea amongst the Most Backward Castes and ‘Mahadalits’ that their future lies in asserting their religious identity. Once Modi became Prime Minister, this support was consolidated further through targeted government schemes.
It is this alliance between the economically dominant mercantile castes, now led by a handful of all-encompassing business houses, and the newly ‘Sanskritised’ non-dominant OBCs and Dalits that holds the key to the BJP’s hegemonic presence in India’s polity.
The author is a senior economic analyst
