‘Dalit’ for president: Tokenism wins in India

With BJP and the opposition both fielding candidates keeping the caste equation in mind, the world’s largest democracy seems to have taken a step backwards towards its primordial past

It’s a no-brainer, for the result is known before the contest. The support that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has been able to muster in the Electoral College for its candidate Ram Nath Kovind for India’s presidential election will give him an easy ride to Rashtrapati Bhavan (presidential palace) in New Delhi.

Even then, the confrontation between him and the opposition’s nominee, Meira Kumar, will provide an idea of the contours of the bigger battle that awaits the two sides in less than two years — the 2019 general elections.

For the moment, the BJP has the edge. The party may succeed in retaining it till the 2019 polls. But the margin between the combatants is not written in stone. The chances of it changing, therefore, cannot be ruled out if the BJP’s outreach to the Dalits (backward caste) via Kovind fails to make an impact on the community or if the farmers’ agitations show no sign of abating.

The very fact that the BJP chose a Dalit underlined its nervousness over the widening of the gulf between the community and the party ever since the bright young Dalit scholar, Rohith Vemula, was virtually driven to suicide in Hyderabad by the combined hounding of saffron activists and supporters among students, the university authorities and the ministers in Delhi. The more recent clashes between the Dalits and the upper-caste Thakurs (upper caste) in Saharanpur, Uttar Pradesh, where a Thakur, Yogi Adityanath, is the Chief Minister, and the earlier lynching of a group of Dalits at Una, Gujarat, by gau rakshaks (cow vigilantes) for skinning a dead cow — their traditional occupation — have deepened the sense of alienation among Dalits towards the Hindutva (Hindu nationalist) brigade.

There was no alternative, therefore, for the BJP but to try to douse the flames by momentarily suppressing its ‘savarna’ (upper caste) instincts and opting for a Dalit candidate for president. It is anybody’s guess, however, whether this act of tokenism will succeed, for few among the Dalits will believe that the saffron brotherhood’s ingrained bias against the lower castes is about to undergo a dramatic change.

In real life, therefore, outside the heated atmosphere of Lutyens Delhi, the electoral arithmetic is likely to remain more or less the same, as will the efforts by a new generation of young Dalits emerging from Saharanpur and Una to put together a DalitMuslim alliance.

However, since tokenism begets tokenism, the Congress-led 17-member opposition group has also fielded a Dalit, former Lok Sabha speaker Meira Kumar, to oppose Kovind. Most observers are likely to regard her as a sacrificial lamb in view of the virtual impossibility of her coming anywhere near the winning post. But what she can introduce into a campaign whose outcome is known is the ideological difference between the multicultural “idea of India”, which she represents, and the monolithic “idea of Hindu rashtra” (state), which her opponent with his roots in the Hindu supremacist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) stands for. If the BJP’s nominee indeed believes that the Muslims and Christians are “aliens” in India, as Kovind had once reportedly said, he will set off a controversy that the BJP will not relish at a time when it is laboriously trying to feel its way through the labyrinthine diversity of India’s cultural scene as the party’s contradictory takes on what the people can eat have shown.

Low-key style

Apart from the ideological battles, what is clear is that caste has become the leitmotif of the presidential election, underlying a step backwards towards the country’s primordial past, when a person’s worth was mostly judged on the basis of his birth at the expense of his or her intrinsic merits. In the BJP’s case, however, Kovind’s caste credentials were reinforced by his persona. His low-key style evidently made him an ideal choice in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s presidential mode of governance where one man, viz, the prime minister, towers over the rest. In such a milieu, the palpably modest Kovind fits the bill.

Kovind’s moderation is another point in his favour, for he appears to be quite unlike the forthright governor of Tripura, Tathagata Roy of the BJP, who wanted those who attended terrorist Yakub Memon’s funeral to be kept under permanent surveillance as potential subversives.

Only time will show whether Kovind will be as ideal a president as he was as the governor of Bihar. Considering that the BJP’s 2002 choice as president, APJ Abdul Kalam, had once sent the office of profit bill back to the Union Cabinet, as a president is entitled to do, and publicly regretted the signing of the resolution dissolving the Bihar assembly in 2005, Kovind will have to live up to high standards.

India has seen submissive presidents such as Giani Zail Singh and Fakhruddin Ali Ahmad, the latter infamously signing the proclamation for Emergency, throttling Indian democracy, on the morning of June 25, 1975, without asking whether it had been approved by the Cabinet.

The new president will have to show that his only allegiance is to the Constitution of India.