Recasting caste politics- How caste politics can be done in India will headline the elections next year

Recasting caste politics: How caste politics can be done in India will headline the elections next year

By Badri Narayan

Indian politics in 2024 will renew itself against the backdrop of what happened in 2023. This renewal will take place in all three spheres—the politics of state, politics of elections and politics of people. These, of course, are interlinked. The changes and continuum in all three spheres will be quite visible in what will be a general election year.

A ‘sense of pride’ will be the strategic frame for organising politics, whether it is at the national, community or religious level even in 2024. The growing aspirations among the marginalised and general public may be a strategic tool for their political mobilisation, which various political parties would like to yield. The constant rise of beneficiary consciousness among Indian people, especially among the marginal communities, could bring drastic changes, possibly even a big shift, in how democratic politics plays out in the country. Since beneficiary consciousness works across the caste and communities, it will disturb caste-based calculations by various political parties.

To be sure, caste-based politics will also continue in the coming year, but its intensity and impact will be diluted due to emergence of beneficiary consciousness within a large chunk of the population. One can see two competing modes of dealing with caste in politics playing out in 2024. One is the caste-census-based politics of affirmative action and further reservation, based on the logic of victimhood of some or the other caste due to exclusionary dominance of powerful castes. This mode is based on a direct rivalry for power between the general castes and the Bahujan communities that includes OBC, SC, etc. This mode of caste-politics is being pursued by the INDIA alliance.

The second is the model that the BJP is pursuing, which is a mixed model of caste and class. The BJP, after its impressive victory in three Hindi heartland states, presented a new representation-based model of power-sharing between castes by appointing the chief ministers and deputy chief ministers of Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, and Rajasthan from a combination of castes groups: the general castes as well as OBC-SC-ST.

This model tries to negate the oppositional model playing out between the different caste groups. Along with this model of representation via power sharing, the BJP also proposes to distribute state resources to the people based on class and other identities. Prime Minister Narendra Modi thus is trying to redefine caste in Indian society by asserting that, for him, there are only four castes: ‘poor’, ‘farmer’, ‘youth’, and ‘women’.

In the 2024 parliamentary elections, these two models of representation politics will again clash to either gain or retain power. From what I have observed, in the coming parliamentary election, the mission of Viksit Bharat, poverty, religion, and unemployment will be the main components of the electoral narrative for both, the BJP-led and the Congress-led alliances. Poverty will appear again and again in the electoral discourse of the 2024 parliamentary election due to claims and counter-claims around the poor-centred policies, their implementation, and the beneficiary pool that has come up in the country.

The issue of providing dignity to the beliefs of the religious majority will be strengthened in the BJP’s narrative and will keep recurring, importantly due to the inauguration of Ram temple in Ayodhya. Through the political reading of the recent Parliament intrusion, the Opposition will try to give new life to the issue of youth unemployment in India. On the other hand, the BJP will try to weave its political narrative before the coming election around its politics of hope and aspiration by proposing plans for India as Viksit Bharat by 2047 and tom-tomming the dream of Gauravshali Bharat.

Political awareness among the common people is growing fast in the country, directed towards hope and aspiration from the elected government, which means long-term dissent against the State may not get fostered. So, in the coming year, I don’t see the possibility of any protest movement of major social groups in India. This is definitely the time of neoliberal aspiration, not the time of dissenting identities.

Modi will continue as the centre of politics in India in the coming year too. Like he did in the state elections this year, he could influence the coming parliamentary election 2024 in a big way by remaining the symbol of the narrative that is dominant in the imagination of the bigger section of the population now.

(The writer is Professor, Govind Ballabh Pant Social Science Institute, Allahabad)