The Hindu, May 7, 2014
Hindutva redux in Uttar Pradesh
Vidya Subrahmaniam
The Hindu With Narendra Modi openly declaiming against a religiously-themed backdrop, ‘development’ could well be a phrase fashionable on another planet. Photo: Rajeev Bhatt
It is action replay in U.P., with caste and religion displacing progress and prosperity as primary campaign points
This general election, we have been told often enough, is about development, about lifting people out of poverty, about liberating them from the curse of caste and religion, and powering their dreams.
But step into Uttar Pradesh and the message is inescapably different. This election is about Hindus and Muslims, about their “naturally” adversarial relationship and about teaching “Maulana” Mulayam Singh’s foot soldiers a lesson they will not forget.
A Hindu-Muslim fight
This election is also about caste, with U.P. residents, as always, doing a caste arithmetic of who will and who will not support Narendra Modi. Among those counted as being on board are just about all the major castes, barring Mayawati’s core voters, known in the western parts as Jatavs, and in poorvanchal, or the east, as Chamars.
Barely have I have settled into the car that will take me eastward of Lucknow over the following week when my genial driver, Pandit Shivam Dwivedi, a sprightly young man proud of his Pandit (Brahmin) title and ancestry, informs me that I have arrived right in the middle of a Hindu-Muslim ladai (fight).
Fight? “Ji haan (Yes, of course),” he says, going on to explain that under Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav — perceived as a ‘dummy’ helmsman controlled by his father and the patriarch of the Samajwadi Party (SP), Mulayam Singh — Muslims have become so aggressive that they need to be put down. “The only man who can do this is Modiji,” Pandit Dwivedi declares.
In the Lucknow office of a senior bureaucrat, the mood is overwhelmingly pro-NaMo. The officer, with a record of presciently identifying electoral trends, himself argues that the consolidation in favour of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s prime ministerial candidate owes to the belligerence of Muslims post the coming of the father-son Yadav duo. To prove the point, he summons his staff — three peons, all Yadavs, and a driver, from another Other Backward Classes (OBC) caste. The Yadav peons are unequivocal in their support for Mr. Modi, which is a surprise because the Yadav caste is judged to be one part of the ‘MY’ (Muslims and Yadavs) support base of the SP.
The reason for the split, the senior-most Yadav peon explains, is because the SP government has indulged its Muslim constituency at “our” expense. Where does vikas (development) fit in all this? The answer for this is framed this way: Mr. Modi will win for three reasons — his no-nonsense attitude towards Pakistan, his appeal among the youth, and his promise of vikas, in that order. From the conversation it is clear that Pakistan can and will be used concurrently and interchangeably with Muslims. “On the border, Modiji will stand rock-like and save our jawans from being beheaded. Here in U.P., he will end the goondaism under ‘Maulana’ Mulayam.”
There is a surreal feel to a peon in the state government exploding in rage over the state of our border and positioning that as the key issue in an election flagged by the media and Team Modi as being about progress and prosperity. But the urban areas in U.P. resound with the “border” angst, and almost inexorably the anger gets directed towards local Muslims who are portrayed as an “appeased” class benefiting from the “anti-nationalist” policies of the Manmohan Singh and Akhilesh Yadav governments. The “he-man” who can fix this problem is, of course, the Gujarat Chief Minister.
Not surprisingly then, Mr. Modi’s own rhetoric has gradually, almost inevitably, changed from livelihood talk and lofty promises of highways and bullet trains to issues around Pakistan and alleged Muslim appeasement. From insinuating a Pakistani connection in the case of Arvind Kejriwal (AK-49 for his 49 days as Delhi Chief Minister) to alleging a pink revolution (euphemism for beef exports) under the United Progressive Alliance government, to repeated threats to extradite Bangladeshi migrants, the Gujarat Chief Minister has moved towards subjects his campaign had insisted would be taboo in this election.
On the stump in Ayodhya on May 5, Mr. Modi dispensed with the fig leaf altogether. The allegories and metaphors became redundant as he openly declaimed against the backdrop of a giant-sized Lord Ram picture. Add to all this the rain of unfettered rabble-rousing by Amit Shah, Giriraj Singh and Praveen Togadia — with the SP’s Azam Khan returning word for inflammatory word — and the U.P. communal pot would seem to be well and truly stirred. “Development” could well be a phrase fashionable on another planet.
The sectarian turn to the Modi campaign was inevitable because that is the route to beat caste division which is the anti-thesis of Hindu consolidation. In the event, the Modi campaign’s caste arithmetic has meshed beautifully with its religious calculations. As an eager Modi supporter enumerates, the upper castes and whole chunks of the OBCs, including sections of Yadavs, will vote for Mr. Modi. Also on the winning side, according to him, are the non-Chamar-Jatav Dalit castes, such as Pasis, Dhobis and Valmikis. Obviously, this leaves only two segments out of the NaMo grasp — Muslims, of course, and the Bahujan Samaj Party’s core voters who have resolutely resisted the Modi appeal so far.
Caste-communal politics
Call it fate, call it calculation, but U.P. continues to be mired in caste-communal politics. In the 2007 Assembly election, Mayawati hit upon a brilliant strategy. The BSP chief co-opted the upper castes in such a way that they combined with her core Dalit vote base to deliver blockbuster results. The verdict carried the imprint of a spectacular social revolution, and it was so to an extent. However, as it turned out later, sections of the upper castes had actually voted against the “communalism” of the then Mulayam Singh government.
Mayawati’s 2007 winning slogan was: Chad goodon ke chhati par, button dabao haathi par (crush the goondas and vote for the BSP). For all her faults, the BSP chief is not a sectarian person and she did not at all mean for the slogan to be read as a war against “Muslim goondas.” But that is apparently how some of her new admirers interpreted the message she conveyed.
By the time of the 2012 Assembly election, much of the upper caste anger against alleged Muslim “lawlessness” had dissipated, replaced by outrage at what was seen as unabashed Dalit assertion under Mayawati. The result was the return of the SP which has never hidden its anti-Dalit agenda.
Today, the reverse sentiment rages with Akhilesh Yadav in government. The open hostility of the BJP voters towards Muslims is doubly tragic because the fact remains that the SP government has treated the community with contempt, holding celebratory Bollywood shows when Muslims were cruelly being displaced from the relief camps in Muzaffarnagar. But mention this to Modi voters and they will insist that the state government has in fact appeased the Muzaffarnagar riot victims by awarding them cash compensation.
The same voters who had turned against the BSP admit today that Mayawati ran a super-efficient, riot-free administration. However, clearly, the muscularity of the Modi campaign, with no confusion over which segment it is targeting, holds greater appeal compared to Mayawati’s non-sectarian, riot-free record. But the story is not over yet with the BSP chief’s core voters aggregating around her in larger numbers than ever, and the shrillness of the Modi campaign dulling in the hinterland.
vidya.s@thehindu.co.in
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