Bihar’s very big picture

The voter in Bihar defines for all of us a welcome new notion of empowerment in India's political heartland — social equality with religious tolerance, security & economic upliftment.

Voters standing in queue to cast their votes for Bihar assembly elections | Praveen Jain | ThePrint

Politics in India is in grave danger of being trivialised by yet another factor, psephology. If every electoral verdict were to be reduced to simple arithmetic, it would not only become dull and predictable, but also irrelevant. True, the psephological indicators in the Bihar result are clear and significant. Laloo nearly retained his ‘MY’ combination of votes but was bested because the so-called Most Backward Castes joined hands with the so-called most forward castes. But why did they do so? Why did they so decisively junk one, who wasn’t just a self-styled messiah of the poor but also largely acknowledged to be so by our vast community of pseudo-socialists and political pundits. It is in this spectacular swing of the Most Backward Castes towards a grouping of allegedly the most forward – though the number of below-poverty-line Brahmins in Bihar or just the number of Brahmins among the Bihari rickshawallah‘s in Delhi’s Chandni Chowk would raise some questions over that description – that the real message of this Bihar verdict lies. It goes way beyond psephological arithmetic, has a great relevance not just to the political future of Uttar Pradesh but also for the power balance at the Centre in the coming years.

Could it be that this Bihar election marks another watershed in the political history of the Hindi heartland just as Mandal and Mandir had done in 1989-1990? Is the voter in Bihar telling us that the ‘use-by’ date on Mandalite, casteist politics is now over as indeed it is over on Hindutva? In a politics frozen for nearly 40 years after Independence, backward caste assertion and Hindutva were two history-changing ideas from two great practitioners of the politics of that period, V.P. Singh and L.K. Advani, respectively. In this election, V.P. Singh has seen the brightest star of his Mandal politics thrown by the wayside. And Advani in a reverse irony, celebrates his own party ceding political primacy to an ally of the backward castes, along with whom the party has won the election without ever daring to mention the word ‘Hindutva’.

It may be early days yet but in the afterglow of this election, you could afford to be an optimist and hope that these twin demons of casteism and communalism have been defanged to an extent in the Hindi heartland. Or at least it marks the beginning of that process. The question obviously is, which new idea replaces these? For that, we have to get back to Bihar.

The bulk of Laloo’s Muslim and Yadav voters may have still backed him out of their fear of the BJP and caste loyalty, respectively. But if the poorest and the most downtrodden have moved away so spectacularly, it could only signal the arrival of yet another upsurge of social justice. Only this time, it goes beyond the old idea of caste.

Having acquired a voice against traditional upper caste domination and tyranny over the past 15 years, the poorest Indians are now expanding the definition of social justice and taking it to a higher, more evolved level. This is what led to the wave that got the Congress out of the west central states in the winter of 2003 – bijli, sadak, paani. To this, the people of Bihar have now added padhai and naukri (education and jobs). This Bihar election, therefore, marks the arrival of an aspirational wave in the most backward Bharat where no more than 12 per cent of infants are immunised at birth, where birth rates are higher than the most backward countries of the world, and where per capita income is one-third of the national average and even one-sixth of some of the richer states of India. The voter in Bihar is defining for all of us a welcome new notion of empowerment in India’s political heartland: social equality combined with religious tolerance, security, and economic upliftment and opportunity. Shouldn’t it be reasonable to believe that this very welcome infection will inevitably spread to UP as well?

True believers of ‘social justice’ politics will again argue that this is wishful thinking. They will draw comfort from the fact that even following the political upheaval of 1989, the voters in the two neighbouring states followed very different paths. Mulayam and Laloo never succeeded in making any impact on Yadavs outside of their own respective states. Similarly, Mayawati’s appeal with Bihar’s Dalits is even less than it is in Maharashtra or Punjab. So, if Bihar was such a sui generis case that even while accepting the larger ideas of caste-based social justice and aggressive secularism, sharpened by its implicit anti-upper caste energy, the voters made a choice peculiar to their own political landscape, why should you expect their new mood to influence UP now?

The answer depends on whether you accept bijli, sadak, paani, padhai and naukri as a new big idea in our politics. I am happy to stick my neck out and say so, not on the basis of any scientific research but on the evidence of three tours of duty in successive elections in the two states.

The mood all over is impatient and aspirational. In these times of live television and easy travel and migration, people are seeing how they are falling behind not just the western world or China, but their own countrymen in better governed states. They are also beginning to see through the self-serving nature of the post-1989 politics which rides their insecurities or anger of their past rather than hold out the promise of a better future.

One reason why both the national mainstream parties so completely lost their political space in the Hindi heartland is that, confused by the rise of Laloo, Mulayam and Mayawati, they also started playing on their terms. In a decade and a half of this politics of vote division, neither the Congress nor the BJP has put forward an inclusivist, forward-looking agenda. And when the BJP half-reluctantly agreed to join one such under Nitish, the rewards were so remarkable. The BJP was first obsessed with the theological idea of uniting with faith what was divided by caste and, when that did not work, it tried caste cocktails of its own, joining hands with Mayawati in a hopeless alliance or expecting the voters to be fooled by the appointment of a leader as embarrassing as Vinay Katiyar as its chief in UP. As a result, it even lost large chunks of the upper caste vote. The Thakurs went to the Mulayam-Amar Singh combine and the Baniyas, whose vote in UP is sizeable, drifted into no man’s land – so now you know why Mulayam is holding out on VAT. The result was the party’s destruction in 2004. This ultimately lost NDA an election it always thought to be in its bank.

The Congress has a more complex problem. Its political strategists are unfortunately still of the same vintage as those that cheered on as they made Rajiv Gandhi walk into the serial blunders of Shah Bano and Shilanyas. If the BJP committed the folly of fighting caste with faith, the Congress was its funny mirror image countering minorityism with minorityism. How imaginative for the party with the largest pan-Indian signature! So, fight for Muslim representation in AMU, offer them 5 per cent of jobs in Andhra Pradesh, and of course appoint a Muslim to head the UPCC. All in the hope of the Muslim vote returning to it.

If this tokenism was all that mattered to Muslims, wouldn’t they be better off with Mulayam instead? In the process, the Congress has also lost all its other voters, barring in the small Amethi-Rae Bareli-Sultanpur enclave. Amar Singh is forever repeating the Congress score in the recent Allahabad by-election, some 632 votes. This, as he points out, in the Nehru-Gandhi hometown.

Both Congress and BJP have to junk these borrowed ideas and move towards inclusivist, positive, forward-looking agendas. For this country’s politics to find a centre of gravity, these two parties must have at least 350 seats between them in Lok Sabha. Only then can we have meaningful governance. And it is only possible if they draw the right lessons from Bihar. A resurgence of hope and aspiration in the Hindi heartland is an event to cherish and celebrate. Use it also as the beginning of a new centrist, inclusivist and optimistic politics that may just be the big idea to fill the vacuum, as Mandal and Mandir decline and fade away.