The exceptional minds who participated in the debates that preceded the final design of the Indian Constitution were amply aware of the challenge of building a unified nation on the base of a fractured social system. What has been happening in Uttar Pradesh ahead of the assembly elections shows that issues such as caste, religion and ethnicity continue to dominate our political system; in fact, their power has increased since the early years after independence.
Jayachandran/Mint
Every political formation in the state has been unashamedly behaving as if Indian society is nothing more than a coalition of caste interests that can be held together through social engineering rather than national vision.
Traditional Uttar Pradesh politicians such as Mayawati and Mulayam Singh Yadav have successfully built their political careers on caste politics.
The Congress campaign led by Rahul Gandhi has clearly decided to walk down the same path, despite the airy statements about a new politics of development. Hence, the description of Sam Pitroda as a success story from the carpenter caste, the demand for a Muslim sub-quota within the larger quota for other backward classes and the attack on Uma Bharti as an outsider. The decision of the Bharatiya Janata Party to induct tainted Bahujan Samaj Party minister Babu Singh Kushwaha was partly because of his caste.
The rise of caste politics in India has deep roots going back to the rise of the peasant castes after the success of the Green Revolution. Many of the political leaders who came into prominence after the 1970s borrowed their ideological firepower from the brilliant Ram Manohar Lohia, both in terms of his search for opportunistic coalitions to stand up to the Congress and his insistence that caste rather than class is the central reality of Indian politics. The Congress under Indira Gandhi also learnt to play the game fairly quickly, though it was behind the curve in states such as Uttar Pradesh and Bihar.
Caste politics has become even more important in recent decades, especially after the collapse of mass movements based on class that represented the interests of farmers, workers and the middle class. That this has happened at the same time as the huge surge in economic growth on the one hand and urbanization on the other, is a paradox that calls for inspired national leadership. Till then, the modernist hope that rapid economic development, technological change and urbanization would make the caste calculus irrelevant will continue to lie in a shambles, especially in politically important states such as Uttar Pradesh.
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