FROM THE EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
Politics in India has always revolved around caste and religious divisions. For decades, the big vote bank that everyone wanted to capture was the Muslims, who constitute more than 14 per cent of the population. But with the BJP storming to power in the 2014 general elections on the back of a Hindu consolidation, the focus seems to have shifted dramatically.
Since the BJP knows the Muslim community will not vote for it, the traditionally upper-caste Hindu party has started looking at Dalits as their new catchment area. The BJP’s success in the Lok Sabha polls and its ability to form governments in several states since then, including Jammu & Kashmir and Assam, which have the highest Muslim populations in India in terms of percentages, has shown that elections can be won without Muslim support. This revelation is forcing several parties to reconsider their reliance on the Muslim vote bank. They are looking to the Dalits, who make up 25 per cent of the population when Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes are taken together, as the group to lure.
For the RSS, the inclusion of Dalits into the fold fits with its dream of a monolithic Hindu society. The Sangh, led mainly by Brahmins, is making a special effort to woo Dalits. Not only is it trying to claim the biggest Dalit icon, B.R. Ambedkar, as one of its heroes, it has launched the ‘one well, one temple, one crematorium’ slogan against discrimination in villages.
There is an electoral logic to this shift that cannot be argued with. The Dalit vote share for the Congress, as high as 53 per cent in 1980, dropped to just 19 per cent in 2014. For the BJP, it doubled between 2009 and 2014, from 12 per cent to 24 per cent. The impact of this change on the seats won by the two parties has not been lost on other political leaders in the country. So when longstanding Dalit icon, Mayawati of the Bahujan Samaj Party, raised the incident of the brutal flogging of Dalit men by a group of “cow protectors” in Gujarat, leaders from numerous parties made a beeline for Motasamadhiala village for a photo-op with the victims. After all, no party wanted to be on the wrong side of the community with assembly elections scheduled next year in Uttar Pradesh, a state with 40 million Dalits, and Punjab, which has a 32 per cent Dalit population.
But this race to be seen as champions of the Dalit cause belies a depressing counter-narrative. Not only has Dalit appeasement proved to be mere lip service, with the community still the poorest and most backward in the country, the recent gestures to placate them have caused disgruntlement among upper castes, bringing the caste conflict in India to a new flash point. This has been multiplied by the fact that Dalits are more educated than before—their literacy rates jumped 90 per cent between 2001 and 2011—and are starting to assert their rights.
Our cover story, written by Senior Associate Editor Kaushik Deka, analyses the Dalits’ dilemma, wherein political parties woo them but do little to improve their lot. We also look at the backlash from upper castes and how parties are balancing their traditional vote banks with their new Dalit push.
The sad reality of India is that we are still a caste-based society. In politics and cabinets, weddings and worship, caste equations continue to rule because these divisions have been so deeply entrenched over centuries. Even urbanisation doesn’t seem to be making a difference because people simply carry their caste baggage from one location to another. Lip service and stage-managed photo-op events by political leaders are not enough. Perhaps what India needs is another Gandhian movement to rid our society of this curse where everyone is identified as an equal citizen of India and not by his caste. Let’s not forget, a country cannot grow unless everyone grows together.