All national parties claim to oppose casteism but indulge in it. None has also been able to get its caste equations right, in terms of its larger leadership and appeal. But no national political force has been as confounded by caste as the BJP.
Now, how dare we say that about a party that won a full majority of its own, the first time for any party since 1984, installed not only a backward caste prime minister but also two chief ministers and got an impressive number of scheduled and backward caste candidates elected. It has produced more empowered backward caste leaders in the past two decades than the Congress has in the previous four. It has also had at least one Dalit serve as its president. We must also note that Prime Minister Narendra Modi has always spoken against casteism in politics, in fact even as this column is being written this week, while laying the foundation stone of a new All India Institute of Medical Sciences in Gorakhpur.
Yet, of all the threats the party has faced since it won in 2014 and embarked on an all-conquering Aswamedha across the country, the biggest has come now and it isn’t that dreaded new three-letter acronym, AAP. It also hasn’t come from the scared, angry and isolated minorities, but from an even larger vote bank of fellow Hindus. Just one video of a few Dalit boys tied to a vehicle and flogged in Gujarat, the party’s vice-president in Uttar Pradesh describing Mayawati as “worse than a prostitute” and a rape in Haryana have taken even Kashmir off our minds and prime time, never mind the endless curfew, 44 dead, 2,000 injured and a sobbing chief minister.
Many excuses will be discovered in the coming days, including, surely, that it is all a conspiracy by vested interests, that the odd Muslim boy was included in the group that humiliated and tortured the Gujarat Dalits for skinning dead cows and, also that Dayashankar Singh, the now suspended party leader, didn’t quite mean to compare Behenji’s ethics with a prostitute’s. The blot will, however, endure and unless the BJP is very astute hereon, it will spread.
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There are important factors that make caste more confusing for the BJP. First, unlike the Congress, its main national rival or any of its regional challengers such as the SP, BSP, RJD, JD(U) or even, say, Mamata Banerjee’s TMC and now Arvind Kejriwal’s fast-growing AAP, it cannot count on many minority votes. In Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s times it may have succeeded in making some of them less apprehensive of it. But after the Vajpayee era, it has returned to its essential majoritarian impulse. After 2014, it has been less hesitating to flaunt this.
That’s how a Muslim would read, for example, the prime minister not only stopping the practice of a 7, RCR iftar but also missing it at Rashtrapati Bhavan for the third year in a row. The party’s think tank has decided to follow its own definition of secularism, presuming that anything more would be old appeasement. Its belief is that India is a secular country because it is a Hindu country and Hindutva is in itself an inclusive philosophy. It means, therefore, that the BJP begins with a deliberate — or inevitable — handicap, limiting itself to a catchment of just about 80 per cent of all voters.
Further divisions in this are crippling, and unacceptable. The party has been at great pains to highlight Mr Modi’s backward caste background in elections. Its remarkable score of 73 seats out of 80 in Uttar Pradesh had convinced its think tank that finally the Dalits were leaving the Mayawati trenches. Now the clock is set firmly back in the pre-2014 past.
It isn’t just because of a couple of indiscretions. Leaders of other parties — including the Congress — have used undignified language about her in the past too. But it is because it has unravelled the BJP’s careful effort over the past decade to cast away its Hindu “upper-caste” image. It is also because it exposes once again its ideological and philosophical core which still deeply believes in the wisdom behind the caste system “as long as you don’t exploit it for political gain”. To the BJP/RSS ideologue, it means, what is wrong in a population having castes with pre-determined skills and professions, each with its own vital place in society? So a scavenger or a tanner would be as important as a Brahmin, because no one else would be able (or capable and willing) to clean our toilets or skin our dead cattle. Subverting that arrangement, particularly if it is aimed at getting political power, is “misuse of caste” in politics.
This is not simplistic. As long as RSS is the ideological parent of the BJP, it will be impossible for it to convincingly reject the logic of caste as RSS won’t denounce Manu and his philosophy in its entirety. Caste, or what Mayawati calls “Manuvad,” is essential to the governance doctrine inherited from our Vedic past. Once you embrace the idea of caste-denominated skills and professions, you can’t offer much more than the usual lip service for the lowest castes: platitudes and drinking water in their homes for cameras, as leaders of all parties routinely do.
No party is faultless. Even Anna Hazare’s movement, the precursor of AAP, indulged in the most awful exploitation of identity when it had a Muslim and a Dalit child feed the social activist a glass of juice to break his fast, possibly the first time children had been introduced thus on a political stage. The Congress has failed to produce a Dalit leader of consequence since Babu Jagjivan Ram left it. But the BJP-RSS have a deeper challenge. Since it was founded in 1925, all RSS chiefs have been upper-crust Brahmins, barring one Rajput (Rajendra Singh). Most of its top leadership is Brahmin and there is an unspoken acceptance of caste hierarchy as scripted by Manu.
The BJP top leadership has also been upper-caste dominated. Bangaru Laxman was its only Dalit president. He was dumped, left undefended and to die in solitude after he was caught accepting Rs 2 lakh in the Tehelka sting. Not much later, minister Dilip Singh Judeo was caught on camera taking Rs 9 lakh and saying, “Paisa khuda toh nahin par khuda ki kasam, khuda se kam bhi nahin (I swear by God, money isn’t God, but isn’t any less important).” He was not just forgiven but given the party ticket again. Please note: Laxman was a Dalit, Judeo a blue-blooded Rajput.
If you want to see RSS’s challenges with caste, watch my old Walk The Talk interview with former RSS chief K S Sudarshan on YouTube. I asked him about the problem with a then rebellious Uma Bharti, a prominent OBC leader. His reply (paraphrased and translated) was that Uma Bharti is two personalities. One from a previous birth when she might have been a yogi. That’s why she is a brilliant preacher and parliamentary debater. Second, from the family she was born in, which was not a family of cultured people. This makes her behave like a stubborn, small child. To be sure, he added, “I have told her this.” This is the fundamental contradiction that prevents the BJP-RSS from realising their old dream of uniting with culture (Hindutva) what remains divided by sociology (caste). Immediately, it also explains the gau rakshaks’ inability to appreciate that not all Hindus (especially Dalits) consider the cow to be equally holy.
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