Caste did play a role in 2014 LS election

It has been suggested that the caste factor could not help regional satraps of caste- based parties of north India — most conspicuously in the Ganga- Yamuna states of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar — survive the BJP’s brutal electoral onslaught crafted under the leadership of Narendra Modi, now set to be Prime Minister. Evidently, this new element in the recent process to elect the 16th Lok Sabha cannot entirely be overlooked, but it may not serve the requirements of rigorous analysis to oversimplify matters.

What does appear true is that the parties of stalwart politicians such as Mulayam Singh Yadav, Mayawati, Lalu Prasad Yadav and Nitish Kumar polled fairly high percentages of votes ( Mr Lalu Yadav’s vote share was higher than in 2009), but could not convert these adequately into seats — Ms Mayawati, in fact, did not win a single seat in UP ( like the DMK in Tamil Nadu) although she notched up a smart 20 per cent of the vote, not too much less than in 2009.

While more detailed research may be called for to understand the details of what happened on the ground, it seems fairly clear that the caste leaders were not denied their respective caste support. Where they appeared to have missed out this time around is the backing of other social segments ( from among the Hindus) while the Muslim vote was splintered among several claimants on the secular side.

As for the BJP, it was more successful than in the recent past in getting the votes of reasonable numbers of even backward caste and dalit votes in UP and Bihar by breaking into backward caste and dalit preserves, and succeeded in picking up the votes of other non- Muslim sections almost in its entirety. What seems undeniable is the underlying subtle “Hindu” messaging of the BJP campaign which commenced with the Muzaffarnagar riots of September last year and helped the saffron party consolidate its vote.

It is a striking fact of this election that the BJP managed to win majority seats in the Lok Sabha with a mere 31 per cent of the national vote ( in spite of unusually collecting some backward and dalit caste votes in north India). The previous lowest was 40 per cent recorded by the Congress back in 1967.

To what extent the BJP’s vote share can be apportioned between Mr Modi’s initial stress on the development plank — jobs and infrastructure growth — and “Hindu consolidation” is a conundrum research can help us crack. But the strong cultural Hindu messaging continues. Witness the political use of the “Ganga aarti” in Varanasi by Mr Modi just the other day, and the comparison of yoga entrepreneur Baba Ramdev with Mahatma Gandhi and Jayaprakash Narayan by top BJP leader Arun Jaitley last Sunday.