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August 15, 2017

India: How identity politics is programmed to classify and rule

The Economic Times

India @70: How this identity politics game is programmed to classify and rule

August 15, 2017, 12:39 am IST in Red Herring | India, politics | ET
 
Inshallah, India may never believe in the two-nation theory, but like Hinduism’s belief in 330 million gods — one deity for every Indian in 1947 — it was hardwired from its bloody birth to practise its politics according to a multi-nation theory. If the All-India Muslim League was the first to successfully introduce the notion in December 1906 of a political entity to represent a people — in its case, Muslims — over the decades, independent India’s political parties learnt well from that template.
Divide and rule, of course, predates the formation of Pakistan and the independence of India. But the British divvied up India through (already existing) religious communities and castes — not to mention ‘martial and non-martial races’ after the 1857 mutiny — to handle their affairs of state better. In the case of their successors, as well as those competing for a slice of political action, identity politics became the most efficient way of keeping and getting their snouts in the trough of power.

In the early days of Independence, of course, the Congress, radiating with the afterglow of being the political party of the freedom struggle, successfully represented the proverbial everyone: the upper caste, the lower caste, the Hindu, the Muslim, the poor, the affluent, the middle classes, the peasantry, the trader, the nationalist, and all variations thereof.
Even as challenges came from the CPI (which accused Nehru’s government of not being socialist enough), and from C Rajagopalachari’s Swatantra Party (which accused Nehru’s government of being too socialist), the Congress managed itself to be seen as everything to everyone in the first two decades of the ‘sovereign democratic republic’.
The addition of the words ‘socialist’ and ‘secular’ — to the existing ‘sovereign’ and ‘democratic’ in the preamble of the Constitution — via the Constitution (42nd Amendment) Act, 1976, during Indira Gandhi’s Emergency was a good indicator of the desperate need for the Congress in government to emphasise that it, and not the communist parties, was the natural port of call for the peasantry and working class, and that it, and not other entities, was the protector of Muslims and other minorities.
The 1956-founded Republican Party of India (itself evolving out of the Scheduled Castes Federation founded by B R Ambedkar in 1942) made as little headway in electoral politics as a party representing Dalits as the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, founded in 1951 by Shyama Prasad Mukherjee, representing Hindus.
It was only after Janata Dal Prime Minister V P Singh announced in Parliament in 1990 that his government was keen on implementing the recommendations for reservations along caste lines made by the Government of India Report of the Backward Classes Commission — a.k.a. the ‘Mandal Commission’ — set up by the 1979 Morarji Desai Janata government to “identify the socially and educationally backward”, that saw political parties ideologically moored to identity politics erupt.
If the Bahujan Samaj Party, founded by Kanshi Ram in 1984 to represent Dalits in general and Jatavs in particular, had lost its security deposit in 222 of the 246 seats it contested in the 1989 Lok Sabha, by 1993, riding the Mandal surf, it came to power in Uttar Pradesh in a coalition with Mulayam Singh Yadav’s Samajwadi Party, a political entity ‘for Yadavs and Muslims’. In 1997, breaking away from the Janata Dal to create his own identity politics brand equity after the fodder scam made his tenure in the party untenable, Lalu Prasad Yadav formed the Rashtriya Janata Dal — this after two stints as chief minister of Bihar that started in that magic year for caste politics, 1990.
Year Mandal also marked the breakout year for the BJP, which now was able to pitch itself properly as the ‘sole unifier’ of Hindus in a political marketplace filled with self-proclaimed guardians of more and more atomised identities. The Babri Masjid demolition in December 1992 would become both the cause and an effect of this trajectory.
At the national level, the 1990s and 2000s saw the golden age of coalitions: each ‘tribal chief ’ bringing their tribes demands and support to the long wooden table. But for both the Atal Bihari Vajpayee-led NDA government and the Sonia Gandhiled, Manmohan Singh-prime ministered UPA government, identity politics retained its lustre.
That is, until the ‘coalition compulsions’ that made corruption so visible and risible for a national electorate, ended the UPA’s tenure. Gujarat CM-turned-BJP’s prime ministerial candidate managed to convince India’s voters in 2014 that more than just narrow pipelines are needed as delivery mechanisms for ‘corruption-free’ development and progress.
This hardly spelt the end of caste and religious politics. It was about identity politics getting subsumed. Identity-based deliverables — as seen in both Nitish Kumar’s victory in Bihar and Narendra Modi’s BJP’s in UP — is today a more evolved, sophisticated, precise and subtle welding of the promise of governance and development with micro-managing the caste and community pipelines.
In Annihilation of Caste, Ambedkar had written, “I have no hesitation in saying that if the Mahomedan has been cruel, the Hindu has been mean; and meanness is worse than cruelty.” And by ‘meanness’ he meant denying the fruits of empowerment and wealth. Pure ID politics of the kind in decline today — as witnessed by the defenestration of Mayawati and defeat of the Yadav clan in UP, and the relative ease with which Nitish Kumar could dump Lalu Yadav in Bihar — was based on denying those not ‘in your fold’.
The new identity politics seeks to retain community and caste lines, perhaps even to accentuate them. But the stated objective is to make this kind of identification easier to deliver the goods. In that sense, it is a return to the old British strategy of classify and rule. It’s about not being stingy to anyone any more. Or, at any rate, not coming across as mean.