(The Political Line newsletter is India’s political landscape explained every week by Varghese K. George, senior editor at The Hindu. You can subscribe here to get the newsletter in your inbox every Friday.)
The Congress party has decided to reserve half of its Working Committee seats for youth, Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, women, and other disadvantaged sections. If the party actually gets to doing this, it will be a clear and wise acknowledgement of the fact that unless its net is cast wide, the party’s decline will continue.
As I have explained in a separate piece, the Nehruvian political order failed to accommodate many communities within its fold.
We are not discussing Dalits and tribal people here because there is a 15% and 7.5% reservation, respectively, for them in Parliament and Assemblies that is constitutionally guaranteed. Political parties are required to field SC/ST candidates in seats reserved for them. Other Backward Classes (OBCs) do not have reservation in Parliament and Assemblies, and they are constantly negotiating with parties and situations for political representation. The weakening of the OBC parties, the Samajwadi Party and Rashtriya Janata Dal respectively in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, has opened the field to competition for their votes. OBCs are above 50% of the population in most places. If the Congress gets active with an OBC agenda, it will be doing a catching up with the BJP under Narendra Modi, which has managed to mobilise most of those communities behind it.
Rahul Gandhi’s spirited campaign in U.P. for the 2012 Assembly elections is what opened his eyes to the basic fact that the Congress was a party of upper caste leaders, with no followers in any community. He made extra efforts to ensure that the Congress list of candidates was more representative than ever before. But the Congress party shies away from appearing to be wooing the OBCs. During the UPA-1 regime, Congress veteran Arjun Singh championed OBC reservation in education as Minister, but the party and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh saw it as a pursuit of his personal ambitions. The party or the PM never owned the OBC policy of Arjun Singh.
In Mallikarjun Kharge, the Congress now has its first Dalit president. In Sitaram Kesri and K. Kamaraj, the party had two presidents from OBC communities in the past.
Identity politics has emotional and material components. The Union Budget recently was sharply focused on welfare schemes that targeted subaltern communities. Mr. Modi plays the emotional and material angles very well, and his speeches invariably have an empowering tone. A usual pattern is to link a Dalit or bahujan icon to a familiar Hindu myth, often very specific to the locality where he speaks. He would blend this with the welfare schemes that the government runs, and without a patronising tone. The Congress party’s collective approach is economic determinism – that welfare schemes is all what the poor want. It also tends to believe that material factors will change the electoral behaviour of the people automatically. It cannot understand why the same people who walked for thousands of kilometres during the pandemic would still vote for the BJP in the U.P., Bihar elections that followed. When Congress leaders speak to the electorate on welfare schemes, the patronising tone is unmistakable.
Upper caste communities will largely stay firm with the BJP and the Muslims will largely oppose the BJP. The OBC, Dalit and tribal communities will be the swing voters in the coming elections. The Congress party’s ability to counter the BJP will largely depend on its capacity to sway the subaltern votes. That’s the Big Picture.
Federalism Tract
The many worlds of an IIT
Students from different organisations protest against the death of IIT student Darshan Solanki outside IIT Bombay, Powai. | Photo Credit: EMMANUAL YOGINI
India’s social contract with the oppressed classes of the country provides them caste-based quotas in education, jobs and political offices. A Dalit entering a premier educational institution, overcoming all her limitations, should ideally be considered a success story – of the individual and the society. But that is not at all how it turns out, as Abhinay Lakshman finds, and tells us through this reportage. IIT’s world of cut-throat merit erects new barriers for the most disadvantaged of our society, driving many of them to mental breakdown and even suicide. Meanwhile, their upper caste fellow students believe it is they who face discrimination – why should someone with a lower ‘merit’ be sharing their space? You can read it here: The Kota-quota hierarchy at IIT.
Resisting Hindi imposition
Tamil language and culture is under threat from the Central government’s attempts to impose a monoculture, according to superstar Kamal Haasan. In this article he recalls the significant uprising that broke out in the 1960s in opposition to the Centre’s attempts to make Hindi the only official language of the Union. C.N. Annadurai, the founder of the DMK in Tamil Nadu, proposed the two-language system that allowed for the use of Tamil and English while prohibiting Hindi. There has been a long and turbulent history of anti-Hindi-imposition protests in India. Tamil Nadu had the lowest proportion of speakers of general Hindi, per the 2011 language census. In the past, Maharashtra, Gujarat, and Odisha have also voiced distinct language identities, though none have protested with the same vigour as Tamil Nadu.
Gujarati in Gujarat schools
The Gujarat government declared this week that it would introduce a Bill in the upcoming Assembly session that would make teaching Gujarati mandatory in all State-run schools. With this change, these schools will be required to offer Gujarati language instruction to students in grades 1 to 8.
The State government made its decision in response to comments made by the Gujarat High Court about how it intended to protect Gujarati as the State’s mother tongue unless it was taught in schools. Interestingly enough, Gujarat is also promoting English-medium education – as the growing middle class of the State is increasingly demanding it.
Separatist surge in Punjab
Separatists are running amok in Punjab. Numerous supporters of Amritpal Singh, a self-styled Sikh preacher and advocate for Khalistan (a sovereign state for Sikhs), engaged in a brawl with Punjab police officers on Thursday in Amritsar’s Ajnala and forced the police to release his associate who was arrested on various charges.
Mr. Amritpal has consistently advocated for the independence of Punjab and the establishment of Khalistan on various platforms. He does this by speaking in terms of secession and separatism. The 29-year-old man takes “inspiration” from Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale and dresses like him. Sporadic incidents in Punjab, Haryana, and Himachal Pradesh as well as the activities of pro-Khalistan elements, including Mr. Amritpal, have raised concerns among many who are familiar with the period of violent militant movement in Punjab during the 1980s and 1990s. Khalistan operators are active among the community in the U.K., Canada, Australia and the U.S. The AAP government in Punjab is finding it difficult to manage the law-and-order situation in the State.
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