Terms of Trade: 2025, 100 years of two polar opposite political projects in India

The RSS has proved to be far more successful than the CPI hundred years after they were formed. But this does not mean class has become irrelevant in India

There are many ways in which one can begin a new year with a weekly column. It can involve outlining the basic fault lines in the year that will be; this is something this column often does, making predictions for the year ahead; this the column rarely does, or even outlining a wish list. In any other year, these would have been plausible options for the new-year edition of this column. However, 2025 is a special year for Indian political economy. After all, it marks the completion of a long arc of history of two mutually opposed political projects in modern India. On 17 September this year, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) will complete 100 years. Three months later, on December 26, it will be hundred years since the formation of the Communist Party of India (CPI).

On 17 September this year, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) will complete 100 years. (Representative photo)

Ironic as it may sound in the case of the RSS, it was as modern a political project as the CPI was, and drew its inspiration not from India’s ancient heritage and culture but the ethnic-nationalist political thought and nation-states in contemporary Europe at the time of its founding. How should one evaluate these two political projects of the left and the right in India hundred years after they started? In many ways, there is only one clear winner in this story.

After decades of ups and downs and ideological confusion and compromises — the BJP’s predecessor Jan Sangh often did business with the Communists at one point of time and even the BJP and communists were supporting a National Front government in 1989 — the RSS’s political clout – it is manifested through its political arm BJP – broke new ground in the 1980s to get into a rising trajectory. The BJP has ended up as the single largest party in all but two national elections since 1996. It achieved back-to-back parliamentary majorities in the 2014 and 2019 elections and has managed to capture power for the third consecutive time in 2024 on the basis of a pre-poll coalition. By all means, the BJP is the dominant political force in the country.

What makes the post-2014 phase of the BJP’s dominance even more special from the RSS’s perspective is the fact that the former has managed to capture executive power without having to dilute the core ideological agenda of the RSS unlike in the 1990s. We already have a Ram temple in Ayodhya, Article 370 has been abrogated from the constitution and a lot of BJP-ruled states are already playing with the idea of state level uniform civil codes. With the core trifecta already in sight, the RSS and its affiliates could not have asked for a better way to reach their hundred-year-mark.

The Communists, on the other hand, are ending their centenary year on a very different note. They are a marginalised electoral force in the country today. On a strictly self-sufficient basis, they are in power in just one state of the country, namely, Kerala. To be sure, their biggest adversity has been a global rather than national political event. The disintegration of the Soviet Union brought an end to the socialist project which had inspired and guided the formation of communist parties, some even made revolutions, across the globe, including in India. In many ways, this has raised serious questions about the raison d’être of communist parties, which are still, at least on a de-jure basis, programmatically committed to making a revolution. No communist party or leader today seriously believes in the prospect of such a revolution in their lifetime.

To be sure, what makes the Indian communist project special is the fact that not only did it survive the disintegration of the Soviet camp, it even managed to increase its electoral strength in its aftermath, so much so that the communists were almost at the cusp of getting the prime minister’s post in 1996. They also became a key pillar of the union government from 2004 to 2008. Since then, it has been a downhill ride to near self-extinction. It is only natural that the electoral debacle of the last two decades is of much bigger interest to the Indian communists than ideological questions about the relevance and feasibility of socialism per se in their centenary year.

Beyond these obvious empirical observations, is there something more to be said about hundred years of the communist-left and Hindu-right political projects in India?

Both these projects have had to deal with an inherent contradiction specific to Indian conditions in their otherwise monolithic polarisation designs: the majority Hindus in the RSS’s case and the proverbial proletariat in case of the communists. This contradiction has been caste, which is unique to Hinduism but has also permeated into other religions in India. The caste contradiction in politics became more and more pronounced as India adopted a universal franchise-based democracy after independence and it gradually changed the nature of electoral competition.

It is not a mere coincidence that both the RSS and the Communists came up with what can be described as their most critical treatise on navigating the caste question in the 1970s, by which time, post-independence polity and the Congress dominance both were in a state of flux and caste was a major driver of this political churning.

For the RSS this was conveyed in the 1974 Vasant Vyakhyanmala lecture on Social Equality and Hindu Consolidation by the then RSS chief Balasahab Deoras which unambiguously declared that caste discrimination was an anathema to RSS’s goal of achieving Hindu consolidation. “May all of us feel that the Hindus must unite and that for their unity the basis can only be social equality”, Deoras said in the lecture, making a clear appeal to the otherwise conservative base of his organisation for the sake of political survival.

For the communists, the line came from a 1979 Economic and Political Weekly article called Caste, Class and Property Relations by B T Ranadive. Ranadive, or BTR, as he was popularly known, was one of the senior-most Communist Party of India (Marxist) or CPI (M) leaders and a former general secretary of the undivided CPI who had given the infamous armed struggle line to the party after 1947; it was subsequently withdrawn later.

BTR’s line was more vanguardist than persuasive. “The consciousness of the sufferers (lower castes) is however lagging behind this reality. Instead of a common struggle it appears as if the caste-struggles are reaching a new crescendo, castes appear to be pitted against each other as never before, and civil strife seems to be the order of the day…It is sheer deception to think of abolishing untouchability or caste with the landlords and monopolists dominating the economy and bourgeois landlord government in power”, it said, in a way articulating that the struggle against caste inequality had to be a subset of the one against class inequality.

Is the RSS’s success and the communists’ failure in advancing their political fortunes just a reflection of their ability to sell their “line” on caste within their rank and file and the desired target base? Certain facts make it very tempting to answer this question in affirmative.

The Babri mosque in Ayodhya was demolished under the watch of a BJP chief minister who came from an OBC sub-caste. Narendra Modi, who is by far the most popular leader the BJP has ever had, is himself an OBC. Most electoral surveys and, more importantly, legislative representation data show that BJP enjoys considerable support among the ranks of the non-upper castes in large parts of the country. It is no longer the Baniya-Brahmin party of yesteryears.

The communists, on the other hand, first lost to caste-based parties in North India and then lost their biggest bastion of West Bengal where their regime was seen as a clique of upper caste Hindu Bengalis. To be sure, both the long-term and immediate triggers for their loss in Bengal were rooted more in class than caste. That they have survived in Kerala, where the second-generation leadership of the party were OBCs rather than upper castes is yet another fact in support of this argument.

To jump to a caste-explains-it-all thesis on the basic of such evidence, however, would be a mistake. The category of class continues to be relevant in Indian political competition and you can only ignore it at your own risk. The biggest argument in support of such skepticism is that there is a widespread convergence in terms of caste-agnostic class-palliatives across political parties in India today. They include not just caste-agnostic cash transfer or income support schemes but even a dilution of caste-based reservations to extend affirmative action to the poor among so-called upper castes. In fact, the loss in BJP’s parliamentary strength in 2024 elections could very well be attributed to a lack of class rather than identity items in its electoral pitch. This column has often described this vulnerability of the BJP as hegemony without dominance.

There is a more interesting and difficult to answer question vis-à-vis these two political projects in India, which is the following. Is there a fundamental asymmetry between the efficacy and adaptability of political praxis of these two political ideologies in the country?

The RSS and its political arm BJP can usurp the electoral democracy version of class struggle by offering economic palliatives along with their core identity politics. But the Communists are unable to strike this balance vis-a-vis identity while trying to further class struggle, either in its revisionist or radical forms. Unless the Communists can come up with an out-of-the-box solution to this constraint, one cannot but surmise that the future of Indian political competition will basically reconfigure itself on the lines of conservative and not-so-conservative social democratic poles where fiscal palliatives will be the common factor and identity the differentiating one. The RSS’s political project will represent the former and enjoy an advantage because of its ability to marry class and caste with its majoritarian identity project.

Roshan Kishore, HT's Data and Political Economy Editor, writes a weekly column on the state of the country's economy and its political fall out, and vice-versa