Demonstration of a durable political event

common sense

Uttar Pradesh has entered a new political era. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has made a comeback With a two-thirds majority: the first incumbent to return to power in more than three decades. The project of the Samajwadi Party (SP) to transcend its Muslim-Yadav social base has failed. Bahujan samaj party And this Congress In fact, it has been destroyed.

Mandate as a meta narrative

The BJP’s victory is not surprising, even if its scale has been largely unpredictable. A common theme of reportage from Uttar Pradesh has been the existence of waveless elections. The journalists’ antennas caught neither the strong sentiment of pro-incumbency nor the broader sentiment of the anti-incumbency wave. What then is the interpretation of the decisive mandate given to the BJP?

Decoding a political mandate is a complicated matter. Several components are involved in forming a political majority. Some pundits have read in the mandate the recognition of Yogi Raj’s governance achievements, especially the welfare provision and strict law and order: a’ ration‘ And ‘ Rule:‘ Government Order. Others say that the BJP was saved from a difficult wicket by its structural advantages: organizational machinery and media management. There is some truth in both the explanations, yet, they both miss out on what is essentially the ideological driving force behind the mandate, which is Hindu majoritarianism. It was the meta-narrative of the BJP’s campaign, in the context of which all the smaller narratives were lumped together.

The main challenge before the BJP in these elections was to put together the vast social coalition of Hindu voters that it had gathered over the past decade: upper castes, non-Yadav backward castes and non-Jatav Dalits. The task was made even more difficult by the proliferation of multiple sources of discontent, which had hurt the BJP in the last state elections as well. These include unemployment, price rise, stagnant income and rural distress, with particularly devastating effects due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the state’s lockdown.

To say that the expanded provision of rations outweighed the combined effects of all these governance deficits adds credibility. It is difficult to imagine that in the third decade of the 21st century an Indian voter would have been swept off their feet by sacks of grain – something they have been expecting from the government for at least half a century.

more than just welfare

Cash transfers for various welfare schemes – farmer income support, toilets, houses, school bags, etc – present a strong case. However, here too, analysts reading election-impact need to be careful for two reasons. One, welfare transfers on their own did not save the BJP from the voter backlash in the recent state elections in Haryana, Maharashtra and Jharkhand. And second, neither the survey data nor the journalistic accounts indicated a whirlwind of public enthusiasm that could explain such a large mandate. In fact, two months before the election, a poll finding highlighted the ambiguous nature of public mood: while more than two-thirds of respondents claimed to be widely dissatisfied with the state government, a slim majority still held it to power. I wanted back. Clearly, there was something else at play as well.

And that deciding factor is Hindu majoritarianism, which has created an emotional bond between the BJP and Hindu voters, excluding Yadavs and Jatavs. Political activist Yogendra Yadav from his travels in Uttar Pradesh reported the existence of political and moral ‘common sense’ shared by the state’s Hindu voters. This ‘common sense’, born out of what he called the ‘Hindu-Muslim divide’, led them to pretend material suffering and misrule because they wanted to be on their ‘own’ side.

BJP vs SP

Make no mistake, it was an ideological struggle between the BJP and the SP primarily waged on non-Yadav OBC voters. With the rest of the electorate – upper castes, Muslims, Yadavs and Jatav Dalits – firmly in separate camps, the backward castes (and to a lesser extent, non-Jatav Dalits) were to decide the fate of the election.

They were the cornerstone of Akhilesh Yadav’s campaign, which relied heavily on the ‘Mandal dictionary’. Right‘(reasonable right) and’ Hisdarik‘ (Equal Representation), the promise of a ‘revolution of the backwards’.

Then how did the BJP stop its backward caste voters from coming under the influence of the SP’s Mandal politics? Or in other words, how did Hindu majoritarianism strengthen the Hindu political identity of the backward castes which made them indifferent to Mandal politics? It has two aspects.

The first aspect is to provide a sense of physical security to the backward castes – the law-and-order pitch of the Yogi government, which is the epitome of bulldozers and encounters. Under the Hindu umbrella, they are safe from kidnapping of Yadavs and (even more so) Muslim criminals. The protection of communal prejudices has reached its highest form in Uttar Pradesh. There was a clear association of ‘mafias’ with Muslim strongmen like Mukhtar Ansari and Atiq Ahmed; rioters with anti-Muslim Anti-Citizenship (Amendment) Act protesters; And anti-social elements along with Muslim cow smugglers and conspirators of love jihad. For example, more than a third of all National Security Act (NSA) detentions by the UP government (2018-2020) have been against cow smugglers. Thus, the BJP’s law and order pitch mainly involved converting Muslims into a security threat and then holding high-level demonstrations to overcome that threat. Many journalists who reported the absence of open Hindu-Muslim tensions on the ground missed the power of communal perceptions that have become commonplace among wide segments of the electorate.

financial security

The second aspect is to provide a sense of economic security to the backward castes without reference to their caste identity. Here the latter part (tantra) is as politically important as the former part (delivery). As I have argued in the previous article HinduHistorically, Mandal and Dalit politics had replaced caste mobilization in Uttar Pradesh with greater access to public goods. The welfare regime set up by the BJP, where provisions are made universally and programmatically, undermines the political significance of caste identity by cutting out middlemen, especially through cash transfers. Thus, this type of welfare politics works in tandem with a Hindu majoritarian discourse towards political change among Dalits and backward caste Hindus.

We must also consider why the Mandal strategy of the SP party failed to upset this Hindu political majority. in another article Hindu“Re-establishing the ownership of Mandal space”, I argued, was a great challenge to revive Mandal politics in the field of election campaigns.

On the eve of the elections, the SP defected from the ranks of the BJP of prominent backward caste leaders such as Swami Prasad Maurya and Dara Singh Chouhan. This was to highlight the discontent of the backward castes under the Yogi regime and to make the claim of the backward caste the central theme of the election. As it turned out, most of these leaders had no grip on their caste beyond their constituencies, and their record of opportunistic and transactional politics didn’t fit well with their sacred ideological regimens. These efforts of the SP, in short, came of little late.

make a choice

As this author noted earlier, a serious effort to revive the Mandal space would require long-term organizational and ideological reform, and contend with a new, flexible form of Hindutva. The Hindu majoritarian campaign of the BJP is carried out every year through an active organization and friendly media channels. It cannot be effectively challenged through an alternative ideological gamble that hardly lasts more than three months.

Mr. Adityanath framed this election as an 80 versus 20 election: a cryptic reference to a Hindu versus Muslim electoral contest. In the end, there was nothing more than a grain of truth in this framing. The Muslims duly united behind the SP, while the BJP took most of the Hindus along. The Hindu political majority that the BJP had built in the last three elections has now been projected to be a sustainable phenomenon. Uttar Pradesh, like Gujarat, is now a BJP-dominated state, where Hindu majoritarianism is deeply embedded in political common sense.

Asim Ali is a political researcher and columnist based in Delhi