Dalit voters will be the X factor in Bihar election — they vote differently than in UP

In UP, Dalit political mobilisation was based on Ambedkarism. In Bihar, it was based on Marxism. That explains the voting patterns.

File photo of Nitish Kumar | PTI

The X factor in the 2020 Bihar election is the Dalit voter. Will a sizeable section of the community continue to vote for the National Democratic Alliance or NDA as they did in 2019? Or will the vote get fragmented among the four major players: the NDA, the Lok Janshakti Party, the Bahujan Samaj Party-led alliance, and the opposition Mahagathbandhan?

According to the latest Lokniti-CSDS survey, the anti-incumbency sentiment within the social coalition of the NDA is strongest among the Dalits. The upper castes favour the return of Nitish Kumar by a 53 per cent to 32 per cent margin and the non-Yadav OBCs by 56 per cent to 28 per cent. The potential deserter that can unravel this NDA coalition are the Dalits who favour the removal of the Nitish Kumar government by 48 per cent to the 34 per cent who do not. The exact same thing happened in 2015, when the Dalits dumped the BJP and its allies. The Lok Janshakti Party (LJP) and the Hindustani Awam Morcha (HAM) won just three out of the 60 seats allotted to them, and thus dragged down the NDA’s final tally.

Why do Dalit voters in Bihar remain elusive to political players? And what explains the remarkable stability in Dalit voting patterns in neighbouring Uttar Pradesh?

In socio-economic profile as well as cultural influences, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar are close cousins. There isn’t a yawning difference between the Dalit populations of the two states: 21 per cent in Uttar Pradesh and 16 per cent in Bihar. The indicators of socio-economic depredation of Dalits are also much the same. This is particularly true of eastern UP and Bihar, both characterised by semi-feudal land relations and persistent underdevelopment. Yet, while the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) was a strong force in eastern UP, it is virtually absent in Bihar.

In a broad sense, the Dalit energy in UP was cultivated by the BSP in the politics of Ambedkarism and the idiom of everyday assertion, whereas in Bihar, it grew in the politics of Marxism and the idiom of class war. As Marxism atrophied under its own contradictions, the political consciousness of Dalits got subsumed within the mainstream politics of Bihar.

Dalit politics in Bihar and UP

Why did the lower-caste political assertion in Uttar Pradesh split into two streams — OBC politics, which eventually coalesced around the Samajwadi Party, and Dalit politics, around the BSP — while being monopolised by OBCs in Bihar? We suggest a historical path dependence in the nature of political mobilisation of Dalits in UP and Bihar.

First, Bihar lacked the political leadership that could foment a distinct Dalit political consciousness. As Badri Narayan has noted, the Kanshi Ram-led BSP didn’t simply focus on electoral competition, but laid a strong emphasis on the construction of a Dalit identity and adopted a confrontationist stance against the upper castes. In contrast, the Dalit parties of Bihar like the LJP and HAM, have mainly concerned themselves with getting a good deal from mainstream parties and thus, Ambedkarite consciousness remained weaker in Bihar.

Jagjivan Ram, in some ways, set the template in the state’s politics — modest reform and staying clear of any radical politics — and this was imbibed by the next generation of Dalit leaders. Perhaps for these reasons, Jagjivan Ram is said to be the central object of ridicule in Kanshi Ram’s famous book The Chamcha Age. Without having formed a distinct ideology, the Dalit leaders of Bihar — Ram Vilas Paswan, Shyam Rajak and Jitan Ram Manjhi — only command the following of their own Dalit sub-castes. In fact, Paswan publicly disapproved of the anti-upper caste rhetoric of the BSP and had a chilly relationship with both Kanshi Ram and Mayawati.

Second, Uttar Pradesh had a numerically strong and upwardly mobile Dalit caste — the Jatavs — around which Kanshi Ram initially built the BAMCEF (All India Backward and Minority Communities Employees Federation), and later the BSP. Formed by central government employees, the BAMCEF catered to upwardly mobile and office-seeking SC elite who encountered a representational blockage within the Congress party. Jatavs form approximately 56 per cent of the Dalit population in UP, and along with a fraction of Muslims and backward castes, provided the BSP a resilient vote share above 20 per cent in the four-cornered polity of Uttar Pradesh. Meanwhile, the Dalits of Bihar are more fragmented in sub-castes. Both Jatavs and Dusadhs (Paswans) account for nearly one-third each of the state’s Dalit population, and then there are numerous others.

In the post-1990s era, Ram Vilas Paswan was the most likely candidate to build a Dalit party in Bihar, but he was both unwilling and unable to do so. For one, Paswan was more inclined to play a central role in national politics, functioning inside mainstream parties, than devoting himself to create a distinct platform for Dalits. Paswan’s popular reputation of divining electoral winds and shifting allegiances (the notorious “mausam vigyanik” tag) also held little validity in terms of state politics, where he repeatedly ended up on the side of the losing coalition. Instead, he adopted a conciliatory line and courted upper castes, especially Bhumihars. This strategy was partly driven by the fact that the other Dalit castes were indifferent to Paswan. Indeed, while the BSP regularly won two-thirds of the Jatav vote since the 1990s, Paswan never managed to command more than 50 per cent of his Dusadh vote base.

Third, the mobilisation energy of Dalits was appropriated both by backward caste and Left parties in Bihar. In a 2004 National Election Survey, over 50 per cent of Dalits saw Lalu Prasad Yadav as a “messiah of the poor”. Yadav’s platform of dignity for the downtrodden and rhetorical attacks on upper-caste landlords made Dalits a key vote-bank of the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) through the ’90s. Mulayam Singh Yadav in UP was perhaps more seen as a leader of the upwardly mobile Yadavs than of the poor or Bahujans, which led to antagonism between the Samajwadi Party (SP) and BSP by the mid-90s. Similarly, Nitish Kumar mobilised the Mahadalits (mostly everyone excluding the Dusadhs) with concrete promises of social welfare and protection. Therefore, as political scientist Amit Ahuja has written, while Dalits in UP saw Mayawati as their leader, they saw Lalu Yadav and later Nitish Kumar as their leader in Bihar.

The fourth shift 

The Left parties mobilised the Dalits of central Bihar during the 1980s in violent confrontations with upper-caste landlords, promising security and an end to exploitation. The Indian People’s front, the political wing of the CPI(ML), mostly backed by Dalit labourers of central Bihar, was carried to seven seats in the 1990 election with a voteshare marginally above 10 per cent in the seats contested. This was a much better performance compared to the BSP of the time in Uttar Pradesh.

However, Dalit support for the Left had imploded by the early 2000s. This happened because the Left parties in Bihar fell between two stools: as middle castes grew stronger in terms of land ownership in the countryside, it lost much of its backward-caste support on the land question. And it failed to adopt a more representative character on the Dalit question since the leadership role in these parties continued to be held by upper castes and dominant backward castes. Furthermore, it got stuck on the land-reform question even as other parties such as the Janata Dal (United) and the RJD mobilised Dalits on development and government benefits, much like the BSP had done in Uttar Pradesh.

Dalit politics in Bihar is undergoing an unprecedented churning and how they choose to vote may not only decide who forms the next government in the state, but can also herald the fourth major shift of Dalit voters in Bihar — the first being the shift from the Congress to the Left and OBC parties, the second being the consolidation of the Dalit vote for the RJD, and the third being the shift to pre-2020 NDA constituents — the BJP, LJP and JD(U).

The authors are with the Centre for Policy Research (CPR), New Delhi. Views are personal.