There have been many people who have asked me as to why I did not write blog piece on the elections that brought the Samajwadi Party to power in UP and Mamata Banerjee in West Bengal. Some also said that I did not express any opinions on the by polls in Andhra Pradesh and some close friends have even asked me if I ignored the results simply because the TRS has done well and I stand for leaving Andhra Pradesh as it is. I ignored these comments for a long while since they had nothing to do with why I was not writing about these developments. But the number of questioners has increased and I therefore decided to respond to them with this post. If someone were to know why I did not write before the answer for me is a no brainer. There is absolutely no need to write about them since they do not represent anything positive in Indian politics. But off late I am being forced to think about governance in this country because the nature of coalition politics has become such that two bit political parties who have less than a handful members in the Parliament are dictating what should be done and what should not be done. While opposition and checks and balances are an absolute necessity for a vibrant and functional democracy, too much of interference and unnecessary opposition to things become obstacles to governance and that is what is happening now in India. I therefore decided that I will break my silence over this and actually get down to writing something about what we can expect in the future of India.
First of all let us take the election results. What to do they indicate? The futility of electoral politics. Look at the case of Tamil Nadu. Jayalalitha and the AIADMK have snatched victory from the DMK who had previously snatched victory from the AIADMK. In effect, what we are seeing there is a phenomenon of people voting against a party rather than for a party. After more than three and half decades of control over politics of West Bengal the CPI(M) finally succumbed to the agenda of voting against and therefore Mamata Banerjee and her Trinamool Congress have come to power. To the average Bengali that has made no difference. The only difference if at all seems to be that Mamata Banerjee is more dictatorial than anyone else thus far in the politics of West Bengal. Her fascist tendencies can be seen behind the arrest and beating up of a Professor of the Jadhavpur University for simply having forwarded a cartoon which involved her. A legal case has been slapped against the man, on the grounds that he had outraged the modesty of a woman. In UP previously the Samajwadi Party was defeated by the BSP or the Bahujan Samaj Party of the equally dictatorial and self-aggrandizing Mayawati. This time around it was her turn to get defeated. Obviously this was bound to happen, when the resources of the UP state are used for erecting statues of Mayawati there is not much to show in terms of development of the people. The media of course is going gaga over this because it has thrown up a "suave and well educated young leader" in the form of Akhilesh Yadav, while the so called youth icon of Indian Politics Rahul Gandhi could not make a difference in UP once the bastion of the Congress party. You can safely put a bet that five years hence the Bahujan Samaj Party will come back to power and erect even more statues of Mayawati.
At this point it is relevant to ask oneself the question of why national parties such as the BJP and the Congress are unable to make an impact in the politics of cow belt states. The answer lies in the complex social equations that are now driving the politics of states such as UP and Bihar. The complex social equations that I mention pertain to caste alignments and their echo in the politics of the two states. For long, the Yadavs and the Khurmis have wielded substantial power in these two states, power that equalled that of the Brahmin Bhoomihars (zamindars) and the Rajputs. It was VP Singh's act of dusting and bringing out the Mandal Commission report and implementing reservations for OBCs that has started the trend of caste based regional parties becoming powerful. Technically speaking OBC stands for Other Backward Classes and we all know that a class is more of an economic stratification based in wealth rather than in birth which is what caste is. The Mandal Commission identified some castes as backward and this was based in the caste census of 1931. VP Singh's electoral gambit was that through the unification of castes along the lines of OBC and Dalits along with Muslims it would be possible to neutralize the growing power of Devi Lal who was rallying farmers around himself in order to become Prime Minister of the country instead of remaining Deputy Prime Minister to VP Singh. This particular move saw the incorporation of the powerful Yadavs and Khurmis into the roster of OBCs in the states of UP and Bihar in the north just as one saw the powerful Vokkaligas and the Lingayats being in the list of OBCs in Karnataka. VP Singh's gambit failed spectacularly and produced effects that he was not ready for. By clubbing OBCs (who were being called Bahujans since Jotirao Phule who coined the phrase Bahujan Samaj belonged to a caste that post independence came to be incorporated into the list of OBCs in Maharashtra) and Dalits (a description that B.R. Ambedkar used to describe the untouchables of Hindu society and the OBCs actually were trying to create a rival icon in Phule) and the Muslims VP Singh unintentionally strengthened the BJP which was till then just a fringe party. The BJP found it easy to convince people belonging to the "Hindu religion" that they were all one and should fight against the Muslims who were invaders in the country.
This was also the time when in Andhra Pradesh an important development was taking place. The Telugu Desam Party (ostensibly under the leadership of Chandra Babu Naidu who operated from behind the scenes since his father in law NT Rama Rao was devoid of any political acumen) decided to inaugurate OBC reservations in the state and incorporate the powerful OBCs of Andhra Pradesh in the Telugu Desam party. In AP the powerful OBCs were the Yadavs and the Gouds whose power increased exponentially during the time that the TDP was in control. This strategy was to break the stranglehold of the Reddy caste on the politics of AP and in doing so also rendering the Congress powerless. The strategy worked till such time that Naidu's arrogance and his running of the state like a company led to his and his party's downfall. But by now OBCs had gone into all parties operating in AP and became powerful so much so that without their support no party can win the elections in the state.
These politics brought a new contradiction in the Indian society to the forefront. As is usually what happens when an entire caste grouping experiences upward mobility, the new power centres become exactly that and see very little in common with the other oppressed groups. So the unity of Dalit-Bahujan has only remained an aspiration because at the ground level things have been very different. In the northern states of UP and Bihar the fight is between the SP which is essentially a Yadav party and the BSP despite claiming to be Bahujan Samaj Party is actually a Dalit party. The interesting thing is that the BSP is not powerful on its own and therefore has co-opted the upper castes, especially the Brahmins into itself and started claiming that its goal was a Sarvajan Samaj and the media started calling this age old phenomenon a new thing by calling it new social engineering.
For those who are wondering as to why a Dalit party would team up with Brahmins the perpetrators of all social atrocities originally, the answer ins simple. The Dalits were fiercely controlled by the OBC sections of northern India and needed allies to help them step into politics. The Brahmins were convenient because they were ready to team up with Dalits to wash the impression that they are still casteists. I remember vividly in a programme called the Big Fight which is aired on NDTV 24X7 a Dalit leader joining issue with an OBC leader saying that in India there was consensus on reservations for the scheduled castes (dalits) and scheduled tribes and this consensus was broken by the introduction of reservations for the powerful castes who were actually the new perpetrators of casteism. Needless to say that whole thing was a shouting match but the important thing is that it was for the first time that a well known Dalit leader said this in public. In this process in the northern part of India the traditional leaders of the Congress and the BJP are still unwilling to hand over the reigns of their parties either to dalits or to OBCs and therefore in the caste ridden politics have become insignificant. In the southern part of the country however, the story of Karnataka is interesting for both in the Congress and in the BJP leadership at the level of the state is firmly in the hands of the OBCs. But since the BJP has been stronger in the more immediate past it has meant that there is no incorporation of Muslims into the agenda of that state's politics.
One more reason why the BSP and the SP have become powerful in the northern states is the disenchantment with the Congress party that set in to the Muslim community who see it as having done nothing to protect the demolition of the Babri Masjid. They also do not vote for the BJP because of the overtly communal ideology of the party. With two of the biggest states taken out of the equation of the national parties coalition politics is the only way forward. In the south AP presents a peculiar problem if different divisions at different levels. One is now the overriding concern of all parties on the issue of Telangana and this has seen all parties saying that they agree to the formation of Telangana but nobody is coming forward to make that happen. One OBC leader had once remarked that they are not interested in the Telangana that will be governed by the upper castes and as soon as he said that there were mutterings from the dalits and the tribal people that they wanted assurances that they would not be continued to be dominated. While public utterances have said all the politically right things no leadership has convinced anyone of anything. So politics in AP have taken an interesting twist.
Assuming that the Kiran Kumar Reddy led Congress government finishes its term in early 2014 it would be interesting to see what the outcome of the elections will be. The Congress fearing reprisals from other parts of the country is remaining non-committal on the Telangana issue but more importantly is seeing a huge deficit in governance and therefore a legitimation deficit which makes it an unlikely candidate to come to power again. If the pitch had not been queered by the Telangana issue one could have safely predicted that good times were ahead for the TDP, but Naidu's two eyes theory is not helping the party's cause. It was interesting that after the results of the bye elections in AP were out and when in most parts of Telangana the TRS candidates emerged victors, a congratulatory message was sent to the party leader K Chandrashekhar Rao. The congratulatory message came from the Forum for United Andhra Pradesh members in the coastal districts and it came with a twist. It said that KCR should change his party to Telugu Rashtra Samithi from Telangana Rashtra Samithi and that people from Andhra and Rayalaseema would vote for his party and him. Most people tended to see this as a joke but I think there is a significantly serious message there. People of AP are tired of the same two parties and now want a third alternative. That KCR and the TRS will not be that is a foregone conclusion but it is definitely an expression of frustration with the two dominant parties in the state.
This basically shows that electoral arrangements are going to be primarily driven by leaders of parties on the lines of caste and that India is unlikely to see any one party have the strength to come to power. Coalitions politics will be the way forward but what results will they bring to the country is the question. That is a question that I will try to answer in part two of this because this post has already become too long and is bound to test your patience. In the second part of this post which I shall post later I shall try and see not just the ramifications of the present politics for the future of the country but also explore if there are any better democratic alternatives to overcome these politics.
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