Badri Narayan interview: BJP BSP compete to mobilise Dalits

The Times of India, 4 March 2009

'Cultural symbols are reinterpreted to suit ideologies'

Political parties use various methods to expand their vote base. The BJP and the BSP are using cultural tools myths, symbols, legends and heroes
to build new political communities, especially in Uttar Pradesh. Badri Narayan of the Govind Ballabh Pant Social Science Institute, Allahabad, has written extensively on the phenomenon. He spoke to Amrith Lal:

Your recent writings reveal how the BJP and the BSP are using cultural tools to expand their base in UP. Could you explain this process?

The new political strategy of both the BJP and the BSP for mobilising small and marginalised Dalit castes is to arouse their sense of past using cultural symbols of each community. The process is being reinforced by the strong desire of the communities themselves to assert their identities through myths, memories, legends and heroes.

Cultural symbols are reinterpreted, recreated and reconstructed to suit the political ideology of the party concerned. The BSP is using them to create a homogeneous Dalit identity. The BJP is trying to bring various castes within the framework of Hindutva by linking them with Hindu icons and reshaping them to highlight the contribution of Dalits to the Hindu past and history. Both organise celebrations around these heroes. Pamphlets, brochures, stickers are distributed among the target group to mobilise them as a consolidated vote bank.

The two parties seem to be consolidating various caste groups from different ideological vantage points. Could they coalesce into one single political group at some point?

In a fractured and multi-caste society like India where new groups are entering the democratic arena, both the parties are actively trying to mobilise them as consolidated vote-banks. These parties have to continuously readjust and renegotiate with identity aspirations of various communities and revise them to suit their political ideology. They also have to mobilise them in their favour as a compulsion of democratic politics. As each new group joins the democratic arena, they remain a distinct ideological group. Until they develop their own political ideology, they will never coalesce into a single group.

In Fascinating Hindutva, you have talked about the sangh parivar expanding its ideological influence in UP. But the BJP's vote share has been on the decline there. How do you explain this contradiction?

The BJP's political strategy for mobilising Dalits electorally is a part of the overall strategy of the sangh parivar of spreading the notion of Hindu cultural nationalism under the Hindutva nomenclature, based on moral and cultural codes preached by epics like the Ramayana and the Mahabharata and the code of law propagated in Manu Samhita. The BJP might fail politically in UP in the short run, but the long-term agenda of the sangh parivar to culturally saffronise Dalits and others is continuing. If the Hindutva forces succeed, UP might go the Gujarat way and end up as a communally divided region.