A demonstration of an enduring political phenomenon

common sense

Uttar Pradesh has entered a new political era. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) came back strong with a two-thirds majority: the first incumbent to return to power in more than three decades. The Samajwadi Party’s (SP) plan to transcend its Muslim-Yadav social base has come to a halt. The Bahujan Samaj Party and the Congress were virtually wiped out.

Mandate as Meta Narrative

The BJP’s triumph is not surprising, even if its magnitude was largely unanticipated. A common theme of reporting from Uttar Pradesh has been the existence of an election without waves. Journalists’ antennas did not pick up strong pro-incumbent sentiment or widespread anti-incumbent sentiment. What then explains the decisive mandate given to the BJP?

Deciphering a political mandate is a complicated affair. There are several elements that go into forming a political majority. Some experts have read the mandate as a validation of Yogi Raj’s governance achievements, particularly social welfare and strict law and order: a ‘ rasan‘ and ‘ shasan‘ mandate. Others argue that the BJP was saved from a sticky wicket by its structural strengths: organizational apparatus and media management. There is some truth in both explanations, but they both miss what is essentially the ideological driving force behind the mandate, namely Hindu majoritarianism. It was the meta-narrative of the BJP campaign, in reference to which all the small narratives were assembled.

The main challenge facing the BJP in these elections was to hold together the broad social coalition of Hindu voters it had assembled over the past decade: upper castes, non-Yadav backward castes and non-Dalits. -Jatav. This task was made even more daunting by the prevalence of multiple sources of discontent, which had also hurt the BJP in previous state elections. These include the usual litany of unemployment, rising prices, stagnating incomes and rural distress, coupled with a particularly dire impact that the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdown have had in the State.

To say that an increased supply of rations offset the combined effects of all these governance deficits is beyond credulity. It’s hard to imagine an Indian electorate in the third decade of the 21st century getting carried away with sacks of foodgrains – something they’ve been waiting for from the government for at least half a century.

More than well-being

Cash transfers for a variety of social protection programs – income support for farmers, toilets, houses, school bags, etc. – present a stronger case. Although, here too, analysts reading an influence effect on elections should be cautious, for two reasons. First, social transfers alone did not save the BJP from a voter backlash in recent state elections in Haryana, Maharashtra and Jharkhand. And second, neither survey data nor journalistic accounts have indicated a whirlwind of public enthusiasm that could explain such a huge mandate. In fact, two months before the election, a poll highlighted the ambiguous nature of the public mood: while more than two-thirds of those polled said they were generally dissatisfied with the state government, a slim majority wanted always want him back in power. Obviously, something else was also at play.

And that deciding factor is Hindu majoritarianism, which has forged an emotional bond between the BJP and Hindu voters, except for the Yadavs and Jatavs. Political activist, Yogendra Yadav, has reported from his travels in Uttar Pradesh that there is a shared political and moral “common sense” among Hindu voters in the state. This “common sense”, stemming from what he calls the “Hindu-Muslim divide”, led them to excuse material suffering and bad governance because they wanted to stay on their “side”.

BJP vs. SP

Make no mistake, this was mainly an ideological clash between the BJP and the SP, fought mostly against non-Yadav backcaste voters. With the rest of the voters – upper castes, Muslims, Yadavs and Dalits Jatav – firmly in different camps, the backward castes (and to a lesser extent non-Jatav Dalits) were expected to decide the fate of the election.

They were the linchpin of Akhilesh Yadav’s campaign, which relied heavily on the Mandal lexicon of ‘ haq‘ (duties due) and ‘ hissedari‘ (parity representation), promising a ‘revolution of retrogrades’.

How then did the BJP manage to prevent its backcaste voters from falling under the sway of the Mandal politics of the PS? Or in other words, how did Hindu majoritarianism reinforce the Hindu political identity of backward castes which made them indifferent to Mandal politics? There are two aspects to this.

The first aspect is to provide the backward castes with a sense of physical security – the law and order discourse of Yogi government, symbolized by bulldozers and encounters. Under the Hindu umbrella, they are safe from the depredations of the Yadavs and (more so) Muslim criminals. Securing communal prejudice has reached its highest form in Uttar Pradesh. There was an explicit confusion of “mafias” with Muslim strongmen such as Mukhtar Ansari and Atiq Ahmad; rioters with Anti-Muslim Citizenship (Amendment) Act protesters; and anti-social elements with Muslim cow smugglers and amorous jihad conspirators. For example, more than a third of all National Security Act (NSA) detentions by the UP government (2018-2020) have been against cow smugglers. So much of the BJP’s law and order discourse consisted of converting Muslims into a security threat and then making sharp displays to tame that threat. Many journalists who pointed to the absence of overt Hindu-Muslim tensions on the ground missed the power of communal assumptions that have become normalized among large swaths of the electorate.

Economic Security

The second aspect is to provide backward castes with a sense of economic security – without reference to their caste identity. The last part (mechanism) is here as politically crucial as the first part (delivery). As I explained in a previous article of The Hindu, “In Uttar Pradesh, the crux of welfare politics”, historically, Mandal and Dalit politics had gained traction in Uttar Pradesh by turning caste mobilization into a pathway for greater access to welfare. public goods. The social welfare scheme instituted by the BJP, where provision is made in a universal and programmatic manner, cutting out the middlemen including through cash transfers, dilutes the political significance of caste identity. Thus, this type of welfare policy works in tandem with a Hindu majority discourse towards the political transformation of Dalits and backward castes into Hindus.

One also has to wonder why the SP party’s Mandal strategy failed to disrupt this Hindu political majority. In another article of The Hindu“Restore ownership of Mandal space”, my argument was that it was a huge challenge to resuscitate Mandal politics in the space of an election campaign.

On the eve of the elections, the PS staged defections from the BJP ranks of prominent backward caste leaders such as Swami Prasad Maurya and Dara Singh Chauhan. This was intended to highlight the discontent of the backward castes under the Yogi regime and to make the assertion of the backward castes a central theme in the election. It turned out that most of these leaders had no hold on their own caste beyond their constituencies, and their record of opportunistic and transactional politics did not mesh well with their pious ideological refrains. These efforts of the PS were, in short, too little too late.

Formulate an alternative

As this author had previously mentioned, making a serious effort to revitalize the Mandal space would require longer-term organizational and ideological overhaul, and coping with a flexible new form of Hindutva. The BJP’s Hindu Majority campaign is carried out year-round, every year, through active organizing and friendly media channels. It cannot be effectively challenged by an alternative ideological wager that lasts barely more than three months.

Mr. Adityanath had presented this election as an election of 80 against 20: a poorly concealed reference to an electoral competition between Hindus and Muslims. With hindsight, this framing contained more than a grain of truth. The Muslims duly consolidated behind the SP, while the BJP took the majority of the Hindus with it. The Hindu political majority that the BJP had built over the past three elections has now proven to be a lasting phenomenon. Uttar Pradesh, like Gujarat, is now a BJP-dominated state, where Hindu majoritarianism is deeply rooted in political common sense.

Asim Ali is a Delhi-based political researcher and columnist

• Hindu majoritarianism was the meta-narrative of the BJP campaign, in reference to which all the little narratives were assembled.

• The welfare policy works in tandem with a Hindu majority discourse towards the political transformation of Dalits and backward castes into Hindus.

• Uttar Pradesh, like Gujarat, is now a BJP-dominated state, where Hindu majoritarianism is deeply rooted in political common sense