Root of welfare politics in Uttar Pradesh

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is fighting the Uttar Pradesh Assembly elections on two main issues: Hindutva and social welfare. Analytically, these two pillars of the BJP’s political mobilization are often treated as separate categories. Therefore, the deep political and ideological root of BJP’s welfare politics has been largely missed.

more than populism

However, a more careful analysis will reveal that the BJP’s particular brand of welfare politics is not merely electoral populism. Particularly in UP, the BJP’s welfare governance centered on Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT) has been designed as part of an ideological project that seeks to reshape the political identities of welfare recipients and neutralize that base on which Hindutva has been given a successful political challenge. can be imposed.

in an impressive WorkThe Political scientist Kanchan Chandra performed Basis of success of caste or caste-based parties, using the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) as a case study. The gist of Professor Chandra’s argument was that voters vote for ethnic parties not primarily because of deep psychological affiliations, but because they expect their co-ethnic representatives to garner greater government benefits. As government programs were heavily influenced by bureaucratic discretion, insufficient information and poor transparency, voters found that the most reliable way to access welfare benefits was patronage transactions with their co-ethnic parties. Thus, he portrayed India as a “protected democracy”.

These patron-client relationships have been a central part of UP politics since the days of Congress dominance, when government benefits were delivered through an upper-caste controlled party machine. When backward caste parties – the Samajwadi Party (SP) and the BSP – came to power in the state, the groups they were supporting were equally mobilized through caste-based protection networks. Thus caste became the foremost political identity, the mediator of access to the state and hence the basis of political competition.

direct cash transfer

The welfare system set up by the ‘double engine’ government of Uttar Pradesh is not eliminating the role of the caste network in accessing most of the welfare benefits, if not by upgrading it to change all that. And welfare benefits have been largely reimagined in the form of direct cash transfers. The middlemen have been replaced by a digital governance – the Jan Dhan-Aadhaar Mobile (JAM) triad – establishing a direct link between the state and the welfare recipients.

Presently UP government is sending money to people’s accounts through direct bank transfer on 36 schemes. This not only includes centrally sponsored schemes like Pradhan Mantri Kisan Samman (PM Kisan) Nidhi Yojana, Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana, and Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Yojana (PM-JAY) / Ayushman Bharat, but also various allowances distributed by the state government. . A few months back, the Yogi Adityanath government distributed ₹1,100 to parents to buy school uniforms. In January, ₹1,000 was reportedly transferred to the accounts of 1.5 crore unorganized workers in the state. Even in building tangible assets like houses and toilets, the role of the government is limited to transferring money to the accounts of the beneficiaries.

These cash handouts (along with expanded and digitized provision of rations) have been described as creating a new political arena for the BJP called labory or ‘welfare recipient’. This would be somewhat of a misinterpretation. The political identity that the BJP seeks to nurture among these voters is still a Hindu political identity. The welfare provision in a universal and programmed manner is meant to reduce the political significance of caste identity, paving the way for a Hindutva discourse for political change among Hindus of backward castes and Dalits. Thus, both welfare politics and Hindutva work together to form a singular political segment of the Hindu electorate.

protection network

Of course, this does not mean that UP has reached a post-conservation utopia, let alone a post-caste utopia. Conservation networks are still well established in UP’s political economy, helping to funnel a range of public goods, such as government contracts, into rural infrastructure. A 2018 study of Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana (PMGSY) by researchers at Princeton University showed that when members of the Legislative Assembly (MLAs) and district collectors shared a surname, there was a higher likelihood of a contractor having the same surname. Chances were high. awarded a contract.

Nevertheless, the displacement of patronage networks from larger areas of welfare distribution is a qualitative change that is shaping the BJP’s pattern of political mobilization in UP in four different ways.

Firstly, the party has been weakened at the local level where legislators and district party functionaries have lost their power as arbiters and mediators in the welfare distribution process. A centralized bureaucratic structure oversees these welfare schemes. The role of the local party machinery is merely to act as a marketing wing for these schemes, personally identified with Mr Adityanath and Prime Minister and BJP leader Narendra Modi. Thus, the patron-client relationship at the grassroots dissolves in favor of building the personality of twin liberal rulers at the top, backed by a massive advertising blitz, in whose name the BJP seeks its votes.

Second, the BJP is less dependent on cultivating a spectrum of backward caste leadership to garner backward caste votes, compared to the last election when it included many such leaders from other parties. Many of these leaders, such as Swami Prasad Maurya and Dharam Singh Saini, have now left the party, complaining of having little power. The party believes that it can face this exodus as it has managed to build its own party base to meet the material needs/welfare and psychological needs of these communities through Hindutva.

neglect of public goods

Third, the flip side of extravagant spending on cash transfers has emerged in the form of gross neglect of public goods such as education and health. While it is true that the state’s capacity in these areas in UP was always quite poor, the dramatic collapse of the health care sector during the second wave of COVID-19 provided a political narrative to the opposition. There is also little room left to expand the state sector to address the unemployment crisis, which is another important issue of this election.

Fourth, the BJP’s welfare politics is at its weakest where the presence of bureaucratic interface and organized interests is inevitable, such as in the agriculture sector. Big farmers still organize themselves into unions and get the best deal from the government. It is no coincidence that these protection networks were the main targets of the agrarian reform laws then, and it was also the sections that were at the forefront of the peasant protests. When the prime minister spoke in parliament last week, he repeatedly referred to small farmers who were trying to sideline large and organized farmers in their outreach. These small and marginal farmers are also the main beneficiaries of Narendra Modi’s flagship scheme for the farming community – annual transfer of ₹6,000 through PM Kisan Samman Nidhi.

Even as the BJP openly indulges in elaborate casteist strategies for campaigning, it claims that it is the only party that is up to the mark. casteist or racism. It also tries to convince the subaltern castes that the cash transfers they have come to expect regularly are a result of the ‘double engine’ government in UP, and may, therefore, stall under a new regime.

The ideological challenge that BJP’s Hindutva is facing in states like Uttar Pradesh is to prevent the revival of multiple political identities among voters. This is a huge task, and thus the politics of social welfare has been mixed with Hindutva for additional reinforcement. This is the ideological base of the BJP’s welfare politics, the effectiveness of which is being tested on the basis of caste in the Uttar Pradesh elections.

Asim Ali is a political researcher and columnist based in Delhi