In UP, BJP’s welfare model, Hindutva go in tandem
As Mandalisation exhausted its newness and set off other problems for the backward caste spectrum by creating a set of haves and have-nots among them, the Yadavs seemed inclined to assert their Hindu — as opposed to the backward caste — identity. We are Hindus first and foremost, was their refrain, and, therefore, very proud of the BJP for constructing the Ram temple.
Radhika Ramaseshan
Senior Journalist
Indira Gandhi’s ‘Garibi hatao’ (eliminate poverty) slogan always haunted the BJP like a twisted shadow. It could never decide how to deal with the penumbra — ignore, disown or tweak it. Ultimately, Prime Minister Narendra Modi uttered the catchphrase when the 16th anniversary of Chhattisgarh’s statehood was celebrated at Raipur on November 2, 2016. Modi stated that unless poverty was eradicated, “everything else will be ineffective”. It marked the BJP’s acknowledgment of the potency contained in the Congress’s slogan that never translated into reality.
The raft of “poverty alleviation” schemes, largely christened after the Nehru-Gandhi family, which the Congress had unveiled since Indira Gandhi’s time were allurements and incitements to vote the party without tangibly empowering the less empowered. It was as though ‘Garibi hatao’ was crafted to keep the poor in a state of perpetual poverty and coax their gratitude and loyalty for eternity.
As Gujarat Chief Minister, Modi took a distant view of the state-induced patronage of the less well-off. Gujarat, after all, is a state that sets great store by individual entrepreneurship, apparently attained without overt political and official interventions. When Modi coined the slogan, ‘maximum governance, minimum government’, it made sense in Gujarat’s context.
In the 2012 Uttar Pradesh elections, when Samajwadi Party (SP) leader Akhilesh Yadav promised free laptops to students and doles for the jobless, it seems Modi wondered why Akhilesh would not charge a token sum for the computer so that the recipient had a sense of ownership instead of treating it like charity.
Seven years in Delhi, Modi figured out that the Gujarat template cannot be applied nationally. There’s a no one-size-fits-all model to define and implement welfare. Under him, the BJP embraced the Congress’s top-down welfare archetype with a vengeance. Not deploying it as a means to invest in the poor based on the principles of social equity and justice, but as an opiate to mitigate their straitened circumstances.
Uttar Pradesh, one of India’s poorest and most feudal states that regards any sarkar as its mai-baap (a nanny state or benevolent dictatorship), is the perfect fit for the BJP to use its welfare prototype that claims to incorporate elements of the Jan Sangh ideologue Deendayal Upadhyaya’s ‘antyodaya’ (uplifting the last person) world-view.
It’s raining goodies in rural UP. The horrors brought about by the pandemic, especially in the second brutal attack, are barely remembered by the villagers unless the memories of deaths from oxygen shortages and denial of access to medicare and the bodies thrown in the rivers are forced out. There’s a sense of fatalism about the pandemic among people who hold the view that it’s pointless blaming the UP establishment for the casualties.
The agrarian protests against the Centre’s farm laws — that began in west UP and spread southward to parts of Avadh after the gruesome killing of farmers in Lakhimpur Kheri — impacted the districts close to the epicentre, but the empathy people displayed was transient and is unlikely to convert into lasting anger.
A recent visit to parts of central UP showed that the issue that dominated the people’s headspace three months before the Assembly elections was the loads of populist schemes announced and implemented by the state government, with the Centre’s back-up. Apportioning sops and freebies is not novel. Other poll-bound states have done it time and again, but some were unable to neutralise the anger that had bubbled over against an incumbent.
In UP, it works ostensibly because the welfare model goes hand in hand with the RSS-BJP’s ideology. The sops come with a strong underpinning and a heavy overlay of Hindutva, as if to reassure the majority community that even if the giveaways are uniformly distributed (at least on paper), the government’s heart lies with the Hindus.
The polar opposite combination of welfare state and religion as a political tool triggered a churn among hardcore Opposition supporters.
While most backward castes accepted this unusual mix, the Yadavs, who form the core support base of the SP, were confused but not agnostic. In the 1990s, when the cycle of Mandal-Mandir politics ran its course in UP, the Yadavs had distinctly distanced themselves from the BJP unlike the other backward castes and some Dalits too because the Yadavs saw that their salvation lay in backing the Mandalised socialist formations. Several years down the line, as Mandalisation exhausted its newness and set off other problems for the backward caste spectrum by creating a set of haves and have-nots among them, the Yadavs seemed inclined to assert their Hindu — as opposed to the backward caste — identity. We are Hindus first and foremost, was the refrain heard among them, and, therefore, we are very proud of the BJP for constructing the Ram temple.
What do such social complexities mean for the SP where the Yadavs form the bedrock? Akhilesh Yadav has pussyfooted around the communally polarising subjects, realising how susceptible the Yadavs were to the BJP’s propaganda. Indeed, some Yadavs resented being coupled with Muslims as the M-Y duo sustaining the SP. The SP has fallen between two stools. On the one hand, Muslims sounded upset with Akhilesh for not articulating the SP’s standpoint on issues that hit them hard, such as the UP government’s incarceration of veteran Muslim leader Azam Khan, and warned that they would look at Asaduddin Owaisi’s AIMIM as an alternative even if that divided their votes. On the other hand, an overreach to pacify the Muslims might push the Yadavs towards the BJP. The SP is skidding on thin ice.
The BJP, and more so, Yogi Adityanath’s expansion of the Ayodhya temple, whose construction was facilitated by a legal order more than anything else, gave Hindutva a focal point which was endorsed by every caste: upper, backward and Dalits. The BJP’s success in UP lies in its persistence to forge a pan-Hindu political order, that began with the Ram temple agitation and reached its fruition before the 2022 polls.
