We often use situations and metaphors from cricket to explain political complexities. This, however, is the season of the Olympics and Euro 2024. So, football and hockey would be more contextual. Therefore, let’s go ahead and see how a typical turn in a hockey or football game applies to the way national politics has moved, as indicated at the end of this monsoon/budget session of Parliament.
Take your mind back to the hockey quarter-final in which India played with 10 against Great Britain for 42 minutes. Taking advantage, Great Britain attacked relentlessly as India struggled to put men in front. But on the odd occasion that they did, the game seemed dramatically altered. That is called a counter after having been on the defensive, pushed to the wall (OK, in this case the magnificent P.R. Sreejesh) for a long time. This is precisely what is playing out in national politics.
That the 2024 general election has rebalanced national politics has been known since 4 June. The entire Opposition, pushed to the wall and hopeless for a decade, found a well-earned opening for a counter. It’s just that it wasn’t widely expected that the counter would be so strong and effective as to force the winner to alter their own plans and strategy.
In the process, Rahul Gandhi, the politician more mocked and ridiculed than any other in our history, is now seen in an entirely different light.
See objectively, however, what is happening now. Here’s a list of ideas and campaign points that came up in the election campaign from the Congress:
• Joblessness among the youth, subsidies to create more employment and an internship plan.
• Cash giveaways to the poor, the jobless and farmers.
• A legal guarantee for MSP for all major crops and loan waivers for farmers.
• Questions over the Agnipath scheme.
• A nationwide caste census and then reallocation of government benefits and spoils according to each section’s numerical strength.
Many of these were simply dismissed by the BJP as falsehoods. All caste issues were ducked, and generally countered with even stronger appeals to Hindu opinion.
In fact, the Congress’s approach to distributive socialism following a caste census was dismissed contemptuously as revdis. In simpler English, the argument was that the Congress wanted to buy votes by distributing free candy. Now, we also need to list what’s been happening lately.
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The third Modi government has quickly moved away from its dismissal of all the Rahul/Congress ideas as unimaginative and useless jokes. It is now implementing several of them. Take for example:
• This Budget makes sizeable allocations and promises to directly address the unemployment challenge. There are incentives for companies to hire more, and a plan for 10 million internships over five years.
• BJP state governments, especially those heading for elections, are already expanding agricultural MSP. The Haryana government, for example, has extended MSP to all 24 major crops in the state from the previous 14.
• If you check out the full-page advertisements in your newspapers these days, you also see a plethora of other freebies in Haryana: LPG cylinders at just Rs 500 to 46 lakh families, a free milk scheme for schoolgirls and the waiving of canal water cess.
• And you know what, there is free bus travel for all members of families with annual incomes of up to Rs 1 lakh for up to 1,000 km a month. The BJP had been ridiculing similar schemes in Delhi, Karnataka and Telangana. This was the definition of revdi.
• The state has also raised the creamy layer income limit for its OBCs to Rs 8 lakh per year from 6.
Haryana done, it’s even more worthwhile to look at Maharashtra. It has already rolled out revdis that will cost it at least Rs 96,000 crore per year. Some highlights:
• Women, young people, senior citizens below an income level, as well as the unique sect of Warkaris (casteless, Bhakti cult followers, about 16 lakh in number) will all get cash handouts and subsidies. The Warkaris will get subsidies for their annual Pandharpur pilgrimage, too. Wait till Yogi unveils something similar for the Kanwariyas before his state elections in 2027.
• A monthly stipend of Rs 1,500 for women in the 21-65 age group with an annual income below Rs 2.5 lakh. Just the cost of this is Rs 46,000 crore.
• Six-month stipends for Class 12 pass (Rs 6,000), diploma-holders (Rs 8,000) and graduates (Rs 10,000) to help them train and reskill.
• Each family of five will get three free LPG cylinders per year.
I would think that all this adds up to sufficient evidence that it’s the Opposition, which had cowered in defence for a decade, that’s setting the agenda at this point. From mocking such distribution, the BJP itself has become a revdis-for-votes party. The underdog is repositioning the top dog.
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Just in case you are inclined to dismiss all this as mere election-eve profligacy, we can move to a more substantive, durable — in fact, eternally so — ideological issue in our politics. See if the same logic, the dominant team falling back on defence, applies there.
Since 1989, one binary has determined who will rule India: Can you employ caste to divide what religion united? Or, can you use religion to reunite what caste divided? We’ve often said that for the first 25 years, caste won. The rise of Narendra Modi saw the unification of the larger Hindu vote, cutting across the caste divides. This is when the epoch of religion, or Hindutva, began.
This was challenged again by Rahul Gandhi with his caste census slogan. He has brought it up again in Parliament and asserted that his party will ensure a caste census “from this Parliament”. The BJP has struggled to find an answer.
It is because of a paucity of ideas on the caste issue that the BJP is doubling down on religion. The new Waqf bill, Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma’s talk of “land jihad”, Yogi’s proposed legislative amendment to bring in life imprisonment for “love jihad”, and Rajasthan Chief Minister Bhajanlal Sharma accusing one community of not controlling its population — these are all instinctive, defensive moves.
I call it confusion because the same approach was used in the general election but did not work. The BJP is struggling with the caste issue again. Forget a caste census, it isn’t even talking of holding the normal decennial census, delayed since 2021.
The BJP itself talked of sub-categorisation of the backward classes and set up a commission under retired Delhi High Court chief justice G. Rohini to examine it, but is sitting on that report. If it moves towards sub-categorisation, a caste census will become imperative, handing another victory to Rahul Gandhi. If it doesn’t, the redivision of the Hindu vote along caste lines will gather pace. The Opposition can sit back and watch as it does not rule any Hindi state.
The BJP cannot even whisper the thought of amending the Constitution given how big an issue it was in the campaign. It is still like a team in the lead, but thrown on the defensive and searching for ideas to break out, with the challenger in full press.
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