27
A Multi-polar Polity
The current resurgence of identity politics, or the politics of caste and community, is but an expression of the primacy of the group over the individual. It does not augur well for liberal democracy in India.
ANDRÉ BÉTEILLE, sociologist, 2002
I
THE PREVIOUS CHAPTER ANALYSED the rise and impact of two kinds of identity-based mobilizations – that of the ‘Other Backward Castes’, organized by such parties as the Samjawadi Party and the Rashtriya Janata Dal, and that of Hindus, organized by the Bharatiya Janata Party. Notably, the 1990s also witnessed an upsurge by Dalits, as the formerly ‘Untouchable’ castes were now known. This was led by the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), which was founded by a brilliant political entrepreneur named Kanshi Ram.
After the death of Dr B. R. Ambedkar in 1956, the most prominent ‘Untouchable’ leader was Jagjivan Ram. He was in the Congress, and it was in good part because of him that the lowest castes were regarded as a captive ‘vote bank’ by the party. The claim was challenged only in Maharashtra, first by the Republican Party, founded shortly after Ambedkar’s death, and later by the militant Dalit Panther organization. One consequence was that ‘Dalit’, meaning ‘oppressed’, replaced the official ‘Scheduled Caste’ or the Gandhian ‘Harijan’ as the preferred self-appellation for the low castes.
From the 1950s through the 1980s, Dalits mostly voted for the Congress. For decades, Jagjivan Ram had ‘carried the banner of the downtrodden and stood for their interests’. His death in 1988, said an obituarist, ‘left a void’ which would be almost impossible to fill. ‘Scattered, unorganised, leaderless and oppressed, the fate of the scheduled castes, who form 15 per cent of the country’s population,… hangs precariously in the balance’.1
As it happened, by this time Kanshi Ram (no relation of Jagjivan) had been active for more than a decade. Born in 1932 in the Punjab, he joined government service after university, working in a laboratory in Maharastra where he was introduced to the writings of B. R. Ambedkar. Thus radicalized, he quit his job in 1971 and began an organization to represent government employees from a disadvantaged background. This was called the All India Backward and Minority Communities Employees Federation (BAMCEF). For the next decade Kanshi Ram travelled across India, building district and state chapters of the organization. By the early 1980s BAMCEF had a membership of 200,000, many of them graduates and postgraduates. This was a trade union of the Scheduled Caste élite, which, in the leader’s words, would form the ‘think tank’, ‘talent bank’, and ‘financial bank’ for the depressed classes as a whole.2
BAMCEF’s growth area was north India, and particularly Uttar Pradesh, where its rallies regularly attracted audiences of a hundred thousand and more. The organization’s success emboldened Kanshi Ram to start a political party. Several names were tried, but finally it came to be called the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), ‘bahujan’ being a more inclusive category than ‘Dalit’. Whereas the latter represented the Scheduled Castes or former Untouchables, the former contained within it backward castes and Muslims as well.
Four decades of affirmative action had created a strong and articulate middle class among the Scheduled Castes. In the beginning, the SCs were mainly recruited at the bottom of the state machinery, filling menial jobs; over time, they came to be better represented at the higher levels, working as Class I magistrates and officers in the secretariat.
Table 27.1 – Employment profile of Scheduled Castes in the government of India
Group
No. of Scheduled Castes employed
SC jobs as % of total jobs
1965
1995
1965
1995
Class I
318
6,637
1.64
10.12
Class II
864
13,797
2.82
12.67
Class III
96,114
378,172
8.88
16.15
Class IV
101,073
2,221,380
17.75
21.60
Total
198,369
2,619,986
13.17
17.43
SOURCE: Niraja Gopal Jayal, ‘Social Inequality and Institutional Remedies: A Study of the National Commission for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes’, paper presented at NETSAPPE Conference, Bangalore, June 2003.
A government job provided both economic security and social prestige. By 1995, more than two million Dalits were thus advantaged. Of course, the majority of Dalits continued to live lives that were economically impoverished as well as socially degrading – working as agricultural labourers, sweepers and construction workers.3 Still, there was now a sizeable middle class to take their case forward. This was the class which staffed BAMCEF, and which then assumed leading roles in Kanshi Ram’s Bahujan Samaj Party. In this respect, the path they followed was very nearly the reverse of the OBCs. Having tasted political power, the OBCs sought to claim administrative power through the Mandal Report. The SCs, however, first acquired a stake in the administration, before seeking a greater role in party politics.
The BSP made its debut in the 1984 general elections. It garnered more than a million votes, but won no seats. It made a greater impression in state elections in Uttar Pradesh. Here, the party activists successfully wooed the Dalit masses, warning them that the Congress wanted only pliant chamchas (sycophants) from their ranks. The BSP, on the other hand, stood for ‘social justice’, even ‘social transformation’. Only a party of their own could enhance the dignity, pride and prospects of the Dalits.4
The message was carried by Dalit lawyers, teachers and officers to their less privileged brethren. Apart from holding meetings and rallies, these intellectuals published a series of tracts providing the lower castes with a heroic history of their own. These were driven by the conviction that ‘till now Indian history is mostly written by brahmins’. Now, an alternate narrative was constructed, which claimed that it was actually the Dalits who ‘created cultures such as Harappa and Mohenjodaro’. But then the invading Aryans ‘took away their land, alienated them forcibly, hijacked their culture, and subjected them to a state of slavery’. Throughout history this suppression had been stoutly resisted, by Dalit workers, peasants, singers and poets. Their deeds – real as well as mythic – were commemorated in booklets printed and distributed in the hundreds of thousands in the Uttar Pradesh of the 1990s.5
Political organization and social conscientization, working hand in hand, enabled the BSP to take impressive strides in Uttar Pradesh. In the 1993 state elections it won as many as sixty-seven seats. The BSP’s gains were mostly at the expense of the Congress. This party powered by Dalits had emerged as one of the three major political groups in the state, the others being Mulayam Singh Yadav’s Samajwadi Party and the Hindu-oriented Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
By this time, Kanshi Ram had been supplanted as the BSP’s main leader by a one-time protegé. Her name was Mayawati. She was born in 1956 in New Delhi, the daughter of a government clerk. Her ambition was to join the prestigious Indian Administrative Service, but an encounter with Kanshi Ram at a BAMCEF rally made her enter politics instead. At public meetings she attracted attention with her oratorical skills, her slashing wit aimed mostly at the rival Congress party. By the early 1990s she had become the public face of the party. Realizing that the Dalits could never come to power on their own, she sought to build cross-caste and cross-party alliances. In 1995, she became chief minister, the first Dalit and only the second woman to hold that post in India’s largest state. Her term in office was short; but she was to enjoy other and longer terms as chief minister of Uttar Pradesh.
Writing in the 1970s, the journalist and old India hand James Cameron pointed out that the prominent women in Indian public life all came from upper-class, English-speaking backgrounds. ‘T
here is not and never has been a working-class woman with a function in Indian politics’, remarked Cameron, ‘and it is hard to say when there ever will be’. Within two decades there was an answer, or perhaps one should say a refutation, when a lady born in a Dalit home became chief minister of India’s most populous state.6
In other parts of the country the Dalit voice was also being heard. The ‘most significant feature of the Scheduled Castes in contemporary India’, wrote the sociologist André Béteille, ‘is their increased visibility’. They were ‘still exploited, oppressed and stigmatized; but their presence in Indian society could no longer be ignored’.7
Once submissive as well as suppressed, the Dalits now knew of their rights under the Indian Constitution and were prepared to fight for them. Indeed, the man who piloted that Constitution, B. R. Ambedkar, had become the symbol and inspiration for Dalits everywhere. One anthropologist wrote that ‘across Tamil Nadu, statues, portraits, posters and nameplates bearing the image of Dr Ambedkar proliferate. Halls, schools and colleges named after him abound and even his ideological opponents feel obliged to reproduce his picture and lay claim to his legacy’.8 Pretty much the same was true of most other states of the Union. Wherever Dalits lived or worked, photographs of Ambedkar were ubiquitous: finely framed and lovingly garlanded, placed in prominent positions in hamlets, homes, shops and offices. Meanwhile, due to pressure from Dalit groups, statues of Ambedkar were put up at public places in towns and cities – at major road intersections, outside railway stations, in parks. The leader was portrayed standing proud and erect, clutching in his right hand a copy of the Constitution he had helped author.9
II
Against this background of lower-caste assertion and right-wing Hindu consolidation, P. V. Narasimha Rao continued as prime minister, albeit shakier than before. He was widely blamed for the demolition of the Babri Masjid, critics arguing that he should have asked the president to invoke Article 356 and dismiss Kalyan Singh’s palpably partisan government in UP. Some senior Congressmen tried to have him removed and, when they failed, left the party to float political outfits of their own.
Despite his political weakness, and his apparently diffident personality, Narasimha Rao initiated radical reforms in economic policy. He also made bold moves in foreign policy. For instance, he took an active interest in forging better relations with the countries of South-east Asia. This was prompted by an awareness of the rising economic strength of the region, yet tactically justified as being a return to the ‘pan-Asian’ policies of Jawaharlal Nehru.10 It was also under Rao that India first established diplomatic relations with Israel and, reversing decades of frosty relations between India and the United States, brought these two estranged democracies closer together.11
All through his political career Narasimha Rao had been a loyal follower, not to say sycophant, of the Nehru-Gandhi family. But when he became prime minister he began to show that he could be his own man. In his first months in office, he would regularly visit Sonia Gandhi, the widow of Rajiv. However, as time went on these visits became less frequent.
In 1994, India, and the world, observed the 125th anniversary of the birth of Mahatma Gandhi. To mark the occasion, Narasimha Rao announced the creation of a Gandhi Peace Prize. That Rao admired Mahatma Gandhi was not in question. Yet in creating this prize, he was also perhaps dealing a subtle snub to an unrelated family carrying that surname. For one of Rajiv Gandhi’s own first acts as prime minister had been to set up an award named after his mother, which his government claimed would become as prestigious as the Nobel Peace Prize. The Indira Gandhi Prize was worth 25 lakhs. Narasimha Rao now announced that the Gandhi Peace Prize would be worth four times that amount.
III
One of Narasimha Rao’s initiatives was however owed directly to Rajiv Gandhi. These were the 73rd and 74th Amendments to the constitution, the first mandating the creation of local government institutions at the level of the village, taluk (county), and district; the second doing the same for towns and cities. Office-bearers were to be chosen on the basis of universal adult franchise. Everywhere, one-third of the seats were reserved for women, with additional reservation for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes.
Panchayati raj, or village self-governance, had been an abiding concern of Mahatma Gandhi’s. However, both Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi were hesitant to devolve power to lower levels, if for different reasons: the former because he felt it would be inimical to economic development, the latter because of a general preference for centralization. In the 1960s, Rajasthan and Maharashtra had both experimented with village and district councils. However, the first serious attempts to create village panchayats were in West Bengal, after the Left Front came to power in that state in 1977. The process was taken further by the Janata government in Karnataka, which between 1983 and 1987 devolved significant responsibilities to local institutions.
As prime minister between 1984–89, Rajiv Gandhi sought to create an all-India system of local self-governance. His interest was in part a genuflection to the rise of local autonomy movements, which called for a wider sharing of power and authority. But it was also based on political calculation – namely, the fact that while the Congress ruled at the centre, many state governments were dominated by parties hostile to it. Panchayati raj would allow New Delhi to bypass these parties and deal directly with the grassroots, allocating local bodies a portion of the funds previously transferred to the state administration.12
The process initiated by Rajiv Gandhi bore fruition after his death, when the Congress regained power at the Centre. During the discussions leading up to the amendments, state governments had expressed concern about the undermining of their authority. The legislation as finally passed gave individual states the discretion to specify the functions and powers of the panchayats in their territory. The provincial acts varied widely in intent and consequence. Some states gave panchayats responsibility over all aspects of development work – irrigation, education, health, road-building, etc. – and transferred funds appropriately. Other states upheld a more parsimonious view of the functions and finances of their local institutions.13
To begin with, West Bengal was in the forefront of panchayati raj; afterwards, the lead was taken by the other state with a strong Communist presence, Kerala. When it came to power in 1996, the ‘Left Democratic Front’ (LDF) decided to allocate 35–40 per cent of plan funds for programmes designed and executed by local institutions. Across the state, panchayats were encouraged to hold meeetings, where villagers interacted with officials and technical experts to set their own priorities. Hundreds of locality-specific plans were prepared, which tended to highlight the careful management of natural resources such as soil, water and forests.14
In Kerala, as in Bengal, the promotion of panchayati raj was based on an unstable mixture of idealism and opportunism. On the one hand, left-wing intellectuals and activists believed that by devolving power, villagers could spend public monies on projects relevant to their needs, instead of being subject to directives from above. There was also some evidence that decentralization reduced the leakages in the system, that there was less corruption and thus more money actually spent on development works. On the other hand, in the original Gandhian vision, panchayati raj was to be a ‘party-less democracy’, where the most respected (or able) villagers were elected regardless of political affiliation. In practice, the process was deeply politicized. In Kerala, and even more so in West Bengal, the CPI(M) saw in panchayati raj an instrument to deepen its hold over the countryside. The power of the panchayat, and its officials, was used not merely in and for themselves but, crucially, to mobilize votes during assembly and parliamentary elections.15
Panchayati raj had profound implications for relations between castes. In Uttar Pradesh, where the Dalits were vocal and organized, the dominant castes were now forced to share power at the local level with those historically less advantaged. In Orissa, where the Dalits were more submissive, they were excluded from partici
pation in many panchayats (in violation of the law). In Tamil Nadu, the formation of village councils sharpened existing conflicts between the landed Thevars and the Dalits. About one-fifth of panchayat presidents had by law to be Dalits, but these often found their authority eroded by the upper castes. Likewise, while some women presidents acted autonomously, others were mere mouthpieces for the male members of their family or caste.16
IV
While Jawaharlal Nehru was alive, the Congress always ruled at the Centre. And of all the Opposition parties, only the Communists in Kerala had enjoyed power in the states. Beginning with the elections of 1967, the political landscape of India became more variegated. An increasing number of state governments fell into the hands of non-Congress parties. In 1977 the first non-Congress government came to power in New Delhi. The 1980s saw Congress regain power in the Centre, but at the end of the decade it lost power again.
This growing decentralization of the political system manifested itself in the rise of coalition governments. The Janata Party which came to power in 1977 was itself a coalition of four different parties. The next non-Congress government was the National Front that came to power in 1989. This had seven distinct components, and was yet a minority government.17
In 1991, in the elections held in the aftermath of Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination, the Congress won 244 seats. It was by some distance the largest single party, but still fell nearly 30 seats short of a majority. However, the support – brought about by persuasion or other means – of independents and the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha allowed it to remain in power for a full five-year term.
In the elections of 1996 the tally of the Congress fell to 140 seats. P. V. Narasimha Rao resigned as prime minister and, shortly afterwards, as party president. The Bharatiya Janata Party won 161 seats, more than anyone else. Following established procedure, the president invited the BJP to form the government. The party’s candidate for prime minister was Atal Behari Vajpayee. Vajpayee was considered more ‘moderate’ than the leader of the Ayodhya movement, Lal Krishna Advani. He had a warm and gregarious personality; was noted for his sense of humour; and had even gone so far as to praise the Hindu Right’s pet aversion, Jawaharlal Nehru.
India After Gandhi Revised and Updated Edition Page 80