Shift away from identity politics: Election results - lessons from UP

outlook Magazine, May 25, 2009

Disenchantment Of The Dispossessed

With the BSP, that is. The fascinating results in UP call into question the relevance of caste-based mobilisation ...

by Zoya Hasan

If the 2007 assembly results in Uttar Pradesh reflected the enchantment of the dispossessed with the BSP, the 2009 verdict is an expression of their disenchantment, cutting across caste, community and region lines. The fascinating results in UP call into question the relevance of caste-based mobilisation, which so preoccupies the media and politicians alike. UP has witnessed many twists and turns in this marathon election. Estimates of a dramatic victory for the BSP, which ranged from 50 seats six months ago to 40 more recently, have been thoroughly disproved. With only 20 seats in its kitty at the end of the 2009 elections, the BSP has clearly not been able to build on its spectacular performance in the assembly elections. Its social engineering—a mirror image of the umbrella social coalition of Brahmins, Dalits and Muslims the Congress had built in UP in the decades after independence—has collapsed, with both Brahmins and Muslims returning to the original Congress ‘coalition of extremes’.

Arguably, even the assembly verdict in 2007 was more a vote against Mulayam Singh Yadav than a marvel of social engineering. The 2007 assembly election was principally a fight between the BSP and SP, with the BJP and the Congress reduced to minor players. Then, Brahmins wanted to defeat the SP as much as Muslims wanted to keep out the BJP. But 2009 marks a decisive break, reflected in a dramatic explosion of support for the Congress across the state. Although it lacked a credible state leadership and the sound organisational machinery needed to take full advantage of the surge in its favour, Rahul Gandhi’s strategy of going it alone in UP stands vindicated. Recognising that normal economic processes do not work under the conditions of underdevelopment in UP, the Congress offered hope in the form of a positive and constructive agenda of development. The aam aadmi formula, articulated on a platform of ‘inclusive politics-inclusive growth’, has helped the party stage a remarkable comeback at the expense of both the BSP and SP. But no less significant is the failure of the BJP to take advantage of UP’s disillusionment with identity politics, mired as it still is in identity-driven politics, albeit more religion-based than caste-based.

For the past 20 years, UP has been the prime location for identity politics. It has helped the BJP, SP and BSP gain power and leverage at the Centre and the state. But the obsession with identity politics has obscured UP’s underdevelopment, backwardness and joblessness. UP’s misfortune has been the absolute subordination of state, party and government to narrow political agendas disconnected to larger public purpose. Unlike their counterparts in Tamil Nadu and Kerala, the lower caste-dominated governments in UP (of the BSP and the SP) have not produced meaningful social transformation or any major improvement in the lives of people.

Sadly for UP, the main concerns of its politically powerful people have had less to do with development, more with the calculus of caste and community. They have made minimal effort to extend benefits even to those who form the backbone of their support. This verdict has the first intimations of a shift away from identity politics. In this sense, the UP results could be read as a bellwether of post-identity politics taking shape in regions beyond it. But there is a challenge here that is easy to identify though difficult to address in the short term: How to combine economic development and a workable social welfare system with pluralism and equal respect.

(Zoya Hasan is a political science professor at JNU. Her books include Quest for Power: Oppositional Movements and Post-Congress Politics in UP.)