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2024 yearender: Revival of the caste card

ByDhrubo Jyoti
Dec 31, 2024 06:20 AM IST

In 2024, caste shaped India's politics, as the BJP faced challenges from a resurgent Opposition amidst shifting voter dynamics and evolving reservation policies.

The place that caste occupies in modern Indian life is unique. It is indelible yet sometimes imperceptible, enduring yet continually shifting. Its sticky strands entangle both the tech entrepreneur in Bengaluru and the farmer in Bihar, silently but relentlessly shaping a child’s access to the classroom or the public space, her right to drink water or get her voice heard, her health care and successes at the workplace, her choice of partner and whether it is met with violence, and her sense of belonging and self. It is not only an enforcer of discrimination, but also a source of pride for some, and community for others. In each generation, it morphs into newer challenges, swapping untouchability for un-rentability, explicit slurs for implied exclusions, and outright brutality for pernicious exclusions. It is this sobering reality that lays the foundation for the stubborn persistence of caste as a central driver of Indian politics.

The year saw India’s most explicitly caste-coded elections in a generation.
The year saw India’s most explicitly caste-coded elections in a generation.

No year embodied this phenomenon more than 2024. It witnessed India host the largest democratic exercise in the world that loosened the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) stranglehold on the electoral arena and buoyed the Opposition, before a clutch of crucial assembly polls saw the BJP wrest back momentum even as the Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance (INDIA) chalked up some victories. More importantly, more than any other general elections since the early 1990s,the primacy of caste in India’s political landscape was established, belying prophecies that predicted the gradual paling of caste, either at the hands of modern urban life and laissez-faire capitalism, or by strident Hindutva and majoritarian politics that would subsume intercaste differences under a broader Hindu umbrella.

The BJP approached the 2024 elections with a clear edge. The party had swept three heartland states in December 2023, blanking out the Congress and triggering chaos within the still fledgling INDIA. Confident of a third consecutive term, Prime Minister Narendra Modi declared in Parliament that his party’s goal would be to win 370 seats out of 543 in Parliament; a target of 400 was set for the wider National Democratic Alliance (NDA). His administration even eschewed the tradition of offering sops and freebies in the interim budget before the elections, choosing to stick to a path of fiscal discipline, seemingly comfortable in their political domination. On the other hand, the Congress could manage a victory only in Telangana while losing direct contests with the BJP, irritating potential allies. Weakened by its poor show, the Congress fought its lowest share of seats in history as emboldened allies flexed their muscles.

It turned out to be a successful strategy. The Opposition posted its best results in a decade as simmering anger over jobs and fears about the future of the Constitution dented support for the BJP and prevented it from reaching the halfway mark. The Congress improved dramatically in its head-to-head contests against the ruling party and regional satraps such as Akhilesh Yadav and Mamata Banerjee held off BJP onslaughts in their respective provinces, ensuring that India’s three biggest states – Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, West Bengal – damaged the NDA the most. Modi secured a historic third term but an energised Opposition took their seats in Parliament in numbers not seen for two decades.

The moment, though, was short-lived. The next few months saw the political momentum swing dramatically as the BJP launched a fierce counter-attack, bolstering last-mile outreach, improving coordination with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, refining its Hindutva pitch, expanding its welfare net, and exploiting Opposition complacency to clinch game-changing victories in Haryana and Maharashtra. Though the INDIA bloc won Jammu & Kashmir and Jharkhand with decisive majorities, it was undeniable that the BJP had managed to arrest any perception of slide with its thumping victories and injected confidence into the average party worker – a fact demonstrated by its aggressive stance in Parliament.

Driving these political undulations were the shifting sands of caste. 2024 saw India’s most explicitly caste-coded elections in a generation with quotas occupying a place in the campaign not seen since the Mandal churn in the 1990s. Both sides embraced the centrality of reservations in India with contrasting world views – the BJP attempted to corral Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and other backward classes (OBCs) in a singularly Hindu mould, and pitted them against Muslims; and the Congress evoked the figure of the Constitution and the potential threat to it from a supermajority. In the end, the pivotal shift of the Dalit votes away from the BJP made the difference in these elections. Of the 84 seats reserved for the SCs, the BJP won 46 in 2019 and only 29 in 2024. Its median vote share dropped from 50.76% to 45% and strike rate from 73% to 42%. In general seats, its strike rate was at 56% and tribal seats 59%, compared to 42% for SC seats.

The BJP immediately went back to the drawing board, and the results were visible in the flatlands of Haryana three months later. Seeking a third consecutive term, the ruling party defied almost every exit poll prediction and its own lukewarm pre-poll assessment to trounce the Congress by stitching together a coalition of smaller caste groups wary of the domination of Jats, the principal vote bank of the opposition party. The BJP played up memories of the violent Jat agitation for quotas and other atrocities especially against Dalits, projected its OBC chief minister and used the subclassification of Scheduled Caste quotas to cleave support in a community that had backed the Congress in the Lok Sabha polls. A similar story played out in Maharashtra – another state that had favoured the INDIA bloc in the general elections – where the much-vaunted Maratha anger about being denied reservation came a cropper as the BJP was able to successfully coalesce backward groups to neutralise quota leaders such as Manoj Jarange Patil, and again used sub-quotas to seize a substantial chunk of the Dalit vote. In both states, the Opposition campaign seemed listless, content to projecting the Constitution even as the BJP had evolved its campaign to focus on nuts-and-bolts issues and finding a more effective way to inject communal undertones – think about how the pitch blaming the Congress for faith-based quotas failed in Maharashtra in the Lok Sabha polls, but a similar slogan on “Ek Hain Toh Safe Hain (if we stay united, we’ll be safe)” slogan, asking Dalits, tribals and backwards to remain united, found tremendous success four months later.

2024, then, was the year that caste again emerged as a central pivot of Indian politics, and a battle between Mandir and Mandal that appeared to have been decisively settled for the former over the last decade became competitive again. It is a year when the BJP stumbled due to lower caste anger before crafting a new formula to keep its large but restive coalition together. It is also a year when the Opposition found great success in the image of the Constitution but failed later to translate the reverence of the document to the real-world questions of aspiration, mobility and economic stability – a seat in a school or the security of a government job. It is the year when reservations became an indisputable reality of Indian political life (and forced both the BJP and the Congress to abandon earlier opposition to quotas). It is the year Mandal evolved, and caste endured.

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