THE results of the 2014 Lok Sabha election seem to have changed not only the character and course of Indian politics, but also that of the victorious Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The BJP single-handedly won a majority of seats in the Lok Sabha, thereby bringing an end to the two-decade old political condition in which no single party managed to be in a position to form government at the Centre. It not only pushed aside the debilitated Congress from the centre stage of the political arena at the national level, but also advanced into the non-Congress and non-BJP political space hitherto occupied by the Third Front parties.

The conventional view attributes the growth of the BJP in recent decades to the party’s insidious strategy of driving a wedge between religious groups by focusing on its Hindutva doctrine and galvanizing other Sangh Parivar affiliates to polarize people along religious lines. Some others, however, attribute its success to the party moderating its ideology to win over people located between the ideological extremes. There has been considerable debate on the moderation thesis: whether and how much the BJP has moderated itself since its formation and especially since it forged the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) with a large number of political parties to seize power in 1998.¹

No doubt, the compulsions of alliance politics nudged the BJP to move away from or keep in cold storage certain issues that were central to its Hindutva agenda till the early 1990s. What needs to be emphasized here is not the BJP’s ideological moderation, but rather the transformation of its character due to a change in the social composition of the party’s electoral base. This kind of transformation may not have been to the liking of some of the old guard of the party. Circumstances often force people to choose ways that are not exactly to their liking, but they do so to realize their objectives. Any party that aspires to come to power in a competitive electoral democracy soon realizes that numbers matter for victory or defeat. In the Indian context, parties cannot hope to win an election unless they secure considerable support from the numerically large but historically low social status groups. This was what the BJP leadership had realized and slowly strived to achieve over the past two decades, a development that is likely to have far-reaching consequences for the transformation of the party as well as the character and course of Indian politics.

 

At the time of its formation in 1978, the BJP was a major player only in the northern and western states. Its support base was mainly among the Hindu upper castes. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the party sought to rise to prominence by forging political alliances and shoring up its electoral support on the basis of Hindutva ideology by taking up the issues of the Babri Masjid, uniform civil code and the special status for Kashmir. However, it was not able to penetrate deep down into Hindu society, because a majority of issues that the BJP had then raised appealed mainly to the upper castes.

The 1980s and the 1990s saw the emergence of new political formations articulating the interests of the OBCs and Dalits. The BJP realized that if it hoped to expand electorally then it too must become responsive to the leadership ambitions of the intermediate castes, the OBCs and Dalits, by accommodating them.² The BJP leader and RSS ideologue, K.N. Govindacharya, theorized the effort of promoting backward caste leaders as ‘social engineering’ and crafted the slogan chaal, charitra aur chehra (behaviour, character and face), chehra being that of the backward castes. A party that had taken an ambivalent position on reservations for the OBCs in employment (popularly known as Mandal I, 1989) only a few years ago, now began to embrace and promote backward caste leaders to the higher echelons of the party.

 

Thus, several backward caste leaders, notably Kalyan Singh in Uttar Pradesh, Uma Bharti in Madhya Pradesh, Nand Kishore Yadav in Bihar, Gopinath Munde in Maharashtra, to list a few, came to the forefront of the party. This new political strategy helped the BJP make electoral gains in many parts of the country and the party became a principal player in many states of northwest India. By 2001, Narendra Modi became the Chief Minister of Gujarat. But the backward caste upsurge in the BJP turned out to be a short-lived affair, except in Gujarat, due to the attempts at tightening the upper caste grip over the party under the leadership of Vajpayee. Several OBC leaders were eased out of power or left the party. For instance, Kalyan Singh and Uma Bharti resigned from the party in this period due to differences with the leadership, though they subsequently returned to the BJP.

The failure of the BJP to consolidate itself in the states during and immediately after the Vajpayee regime can in part be attributed to its inability to create a wider support base. It failed to provide adequate political space for the OBCs and other emerging social groups. In brief, while the party drew substantial support from the OBCs, a key factor contributing to its electoral success in the early 1990s, the leadership at the national level continued to largely remain in the hands of elite upper caste leaders.

 

The 2014 election saw a renewal of the BJP’s strategy to expand its electoral support among the OBCs and Dalits, fuelled by a determination to secure a clear victory on its own. This was epitomized by the rise of Modi in the party on the eve of elections to become first, its chief campaigner and, then, its prime ministerial candidate. Modi not only had all the characteristics of a plebian rising to the high level of chief minister of an important state, he had also shown his mettle by successfully running the government and winning the electoral mandate three times consecutively.

In the 2014 election campaign, Modi was very strident about caste inequalities and the need for social change. He repeatedly said that the BJP was no longer an upper caste party.³ In South India, inaugurating the centenary meet organized by the Kerala Pulayar Maha Sabha in Kochi, Modi again said, ‘The coming decade will be the decade of the marginalized sections of society.’⁴ Speaking at a rally in Muzaffarpur in Bihar in March 2014, Narendra Modi emphasized his own lower caste origins, and declared: ‘The next decade will belong to the Dalits and the backwards.’

The success of the BJP in the 2014 Lok Sabha election reflects the social transformation that India has experienced due to the vibrant nature of democratic politics.⁵ At the same time, it also reflects the changed character of the BJP and the course it had followed over the past two decades which reached a critical point in 2014. The election marked a significant expansion of the party’s electoral support base. It was built on stitching together an unprecedented coalition of social groups.⁶ The party not only consolidated its traditional support among the upper castes but also managed to attract a large number of voters from the OBCs, Dalits and Adivasis. The largest chunk, about a third, of the OBC vote went to the BJP. The party also received substantial support from the Scheduled Castes (SC) and the Scheduled Tribes (ST). About one-fourth of the SC voters and nearly 40 per cent of ST voters preferred the BJP. For a party that was long known as the party of the twice-born upper castes (Brahmin-Thakur-Bania), this was a very significant development.

 

If we look at the pattern of class voting, the BJP before 2014 invariably trailed behind the Congress among the economically weaker sections of Indian society. This time, however, it won greater support among the poor than the Congress, which seemed to have lost its natural advantage among the poor and lower middle classes (see Table 1). The BJP, in the post-2014 period, seems to be making further gains – both expanding geographically (by making inroads in states where it did not have a substantial presence such as Assam and Manipur) and winning a larger proportion of votes among all sections of society, as evident from the Mood of the Nation (MoTN) Survey conducted by Lokniti-CSDS in May 2017.⁷

Amidst this electoral upswing in the BJP’s vote base, it is also important to note the changes that are taking place within the party’s social composition. First, as is evident from Figure 1, the share of upper caste vote within BJP’s Hindu social coalition has continuously declined over the past two decades. It also becomes evident that the BJP is undergoing a process of mandalization. The OBC vote constituted the largest component within the total vote secured by the party. In fact, the share of OBC votes has surpassed the vote from the upper castes. The share of SC and ST votes within BJP’s social coalition too has increased. To put it simply, of every 100 votes that the BJP now receives among Hindus, 44 belong to OBCs, 31 to upper castes and 25 to SCs and STs. This ratio was very different two decades ago, when of every 100 votes among Hindus, 45 came from upper castes, 35 from OBCs and only 20 from SCs and STs.

 

We further disaggregated the OBC vote for the BJP, since this is a large umbrella category that includes diverse groups traditionally engaged in occupations raging from agriculture, artisanal groups to various service castes. Moreover, many political commentators have stressed that the BJP’s strategy was to focus on the non-dominant OBC groups as the dominant OBC groups were already under the sway of one or the other of the regional parties. Table 2 provides the disaggregated view of two groups within the OBCs, namely the peasant OBCs (upper OBCs) and the artisanal and service groups (lower OBCs).

The artisanal and service groups are considered more backward compared to the members of peasant OBCs. While the difference in the vote for the BJP between the two sub-categories was not significant in the 2004 and 2009 elections, support from the more backward groups was significantly higher in 2014. This distinction in propensity to vote for BJP among various OBC castes (except Yadavs) may be getting blurred as evident from the MoTN data, where both groups are equally likely to vote for the party. The BJP’s increasing popularity among OBCs certainly puts electoral survival of many regional parties in danger (especially the smaller ones) in the short run, thus suggesting a possible change in party competition structure.

 

Second, in the past two decades or so, especially after 1991, the size of the Indian middle class has been expanding. Some estimates suggest that the size of middle class has increased at least three-fold since then. Today’s middle class (including the lower middle class) is much more socially diverse than before. In particular, the share of OBCs in the middle class is sizeable.⁸ This increasing collapse between middle class economic status and backward sociological location means that a party which is ready to speak the language of OBC power and also accommodate the interests of a rising middle class, would gain support from this new social formation – a group that is made up of traditionally backward and economically upwardly mobile sections of the society. The BJP did exactly that. It appealed to and drew support from two overlapping social groups – the OBCs and the new middle class. The data presented above (in Tables 1 & 2 and Figure 1) shows that the BJP, in terms of its class base, is a less upper class party than perhaps it was a few decades ago. It also receives support from a larger share of backward castes. Thus, the social base of the party is getting secularized and democratized, i.e. reflective of the country’s social composition.

Since its victory in the 2014 election, the BJP has emerged as the largest political party in terms of membership, if we go by the numbers claimed by the party leadership; 100 million is a truly massive figure for any party. It controls governments in 13 states, including some of the largest ones such as Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan, and shares power with other parties as a junior ally in the ruling alliance in five other states, which include Bihar and Andhra Pradesh.

Several decades ago, India had moved away from a one-dominant party system wherein the Congress could win successive elections and remain the sole ruling party against which major opposition parties had to fight either individually or in alliance without much hope of coming to power. All such parties were collectively known as the ‘non-Congress opposition parties’. With the evaporation of Congress dominance and the emergence of the BJP as the major party at the national level and in several states, political commentators are beginning to assess whether the Indian polity has entered a phase of second one-dominant party system, this time with the BJP at the helm.⁹

 

Since the Congress shows no sign of recovery in a manner suggesting that it could pose a serious challenge to Modi’s leadership, and the left and regional parties remain in a state of disarray, it seems likely that the BJP’s dominance will continue in the coming years. The real question, however, is whether this political dominance of the BJP is a transient phenomenon or whether the party can entrench itself as a strong contender for power by consolidating itself in the ideational realm as a party that can articulate an attractive vision for the future of India, and as a party in which people will repose faith.

The biggest challenge before the BJP, therefore, is the mismatch between the altered electoral support base of the party consisting largely of the OBCs, Dalits and Adivasis on the one hand, and the largely unchanging social character of its leadership on the other. We earlier observed that the social base of the BJP was being democratized. Today it is no longer the same party that it was once, but the social background of its leaders remains unchanged. This could become a major source of tension within the party in the coming years and a cause of worry for the leadership. Unless this tension/ contradiction is resolved satisfactorily, the party is unlikely to retain the present levels of support among the lower social status groups and lower classes.

 

While the vote share of the party and the profile of the typical BJP voter has changed dramatically between 2009 and 2014, the proportion of the BJP representatives who belong to the upper castes in the Lok Sabha has remained unchanged (see Table 3). The percentage of representatives who belong to the OBC groups has increased, but remains much below their population proportion. Even at the state level, the BJP’s victory has not been accompanied by any significant increase in lower caste representatives and a decrease in upper caste representatives. For instance, in Uttar Pradesh, where the BJP won a landslide in the 2017 assembly elections, there has been a substantial increase in the proportion of upper caste legislators. More than four out of ten (44.3%) legislators in the new assembly are from the upper castes, the highest in three decades, although this increase can largely be attributed to a decline in the proportion of Muslim MLAs – from 17% in 2012 to just 6% in 2017. The proportion of OBCs in the assembly has remained almost the same though.

Similarly, of the 27 cabinet ministers in the Union Council of Ministers (excluding the prime minister) only five belong to the OBC, two Dalit, one Muslim, one Sikh and one Christian/Tribal.¹⁰ So, two-thirds of the cabinet ministers belong to the upper castes, which is highly asymmetrical to the extent of support the party receives from these social sections. Moreover, almost half of the non-upper caste cabinet ministers belong to BJP allies, and not the BJP. When we look at the situation in the states controlled by the BJP, we find that of the 13 BJP chief ministers, eight are from the upper castes, two from the Scheduled Tribes (but both states that are predominantly tribal – Assam and Arunachal Pradesh), only two belong to the OBCs and none are from the Scheduled Castes (Table 4).

This leadership profile of the BJP has to change if the party wants to retain the extensive support it has received from the OBCs and other social groups and further consolidate itself as an enduring political force. During the 1960s and later, one reason why the Congress party lost its position of dominance was its failure to accommodate the aspiring leadership among various non-upper caste communities. The representational blockage in the party and the government impelled the leaders from the emergent intermediate and lower castes to leave the party. They had to either form new parties, mostly regional in character, or join other parties in search of power and position. If the BJP leadership continues to remain the preserve of the upper castes and does not align with the democratization of its support base, the tension between the two are likely to get exacerbated.

 

The question before the BJP, therefore, is whether the democratization of the party’s support base will lead to democratization of its leadership structures at various levels or whether the upper caste interests will continue to remain entrenched in positions of power. Parties that adapt to the changing situation are more likely to survive and flourish. If not, they get stunted and are likely to fade away. This law applies to all parties, especially in multi-ethnic electoral democracies based on open party competition, and perhaps much more in countries that follow the first-past-the post system.

The first attempt to transform the party leadership via social engineering met with great enthusiasm from the OBCs and other marginalized sections. But the process was not carried to its logical end and was largely aborted. The rise of Narendra Modi, his promise that the next decade would belong to the backwards and Dalits, and the further democratization of the support base marks a second transformation of the BJP. But whether it will once again become a short-lived affair or mark the beginning of a long-term process leading to the consolidation of a new democratized BJP, is something to watch out for in the coming years.

 

Footnotes:

1. See, Subrata K. Mitra, ‘The Ambivalent Moderation of Hindu Nationalism in India’, Australian Journal of Political Science 48(3), 2013, pp. 269-285; Subrata K. Mitra, ‘Encapsulation Without Integration? Electoral Democracy and the Ambivalent Moderation of Hindu Nationalism in India’, Studies in Indian Politics 4(1), 2016, pp. 90-101; Christophe Jaffrelot, ‘Refining the Moderation Thesis. Two Religious Parties and Indian Democracy: the Jana Sangh and the BJP Between Hindutva Radicalism and Coalition Politics’, Democratization 20(5), 2013, pp. 876-894. Sanjay Ruparelia, ‘Rethinking Institutional Theories of Political Moderation: The Case of Hindu Nationalism in India, 1996-2004’, Comparative Politics 38(3), 2006, pp. 317-336; and Ashutosh Varshney, ‘Modi, the Moderate’, The Indian Express, 27 March 2014.

2. Thachil argues that the BJP won electoral support among historically marginalized communities – namely, the Scheduled Castes (SCs) and Scheduled Tribes (STs) – despite its long-standing association with Hindu upper castes through the provision of low-cost social services by its organizational affiliates. See, Tariq Thachil, Elite Parties, Poor Voters: How Social Services Win Votes in India. Cambridge University Press, Delhi, 2014.

3. Virendra Pandit, ‘BJP’s Social Engineering’, The Hindu Business Line, 21 March 2004.

4. Varghese K. George, ‘In 2014, Hindutva Versus Caste’, The Hindu, 26 March 2014.

5. Suhas Palshikar and K.C. Suri, ‘India’s 2014 Lok Sabha Elections: Critical Shifts in the Long Term, Caution in the Short Term’, Economic and Political Weekly 49(39), 2014, pp. 39-49.

6. Pradeep Chhibber and Rahul Verma, ‘The BJP’s 2014 "Modi Wave": An Ideological Consolidation of the Right’, Economic and Political Weekly 49(39), 2014, pp. 50-56.

7.One must be cautious while interpreting MoTN data as in India incumbents tend to receive higher approval ratings in surveys conducted during the first three years of a government.

8. D.L. Sheth, ‘Secularisation of Caste and Making of New Middle Class’, Economic and Political Weekly, 1999, pp. 2502-2510.

9. Suhas Palshikar, ‘India’s Second Dominant Party System’, Economic and Political Weekly 52(11), 18 March 2017.

10. This includes only cabinet minister and not ministers of state (MoS) or MoS with independent charge.