Caste to Muslims, BJP is changing orthodoxies

Khalid Anis Ansari writes: While Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany were the inspirations for RSS-BJP ideological ancestors, Lee Kuan Yew’s Singapore, a development State with no Opposition and significant un-freedoms, seems to be an aspiration for the New India project.

Khalid Anis Ansari writes: In popular perception, the BJP is more socially representative than other political parties today. (Express/File)

Written by: Khalid Anis Ansari

5 min readJul 13, 2022 10:28 PM IST First published on: Jul 10, 2022 at 03:49 AM IST

The RSS-BJP’s ‘New India’ project is a regional incarnation of the neoliberal-plutocratic world order whose key coordinates are unaccountable deep States, populist social polarisation, and narrative management through psychoanalytic propaganda. The novelty of New India lies not only in restructuring the cultural, economic and political spheres in favour of the new elites, but also in its capacity for innovative articulation when confronted with unforeseen events and situations. New India is a colossal learning machine steered by the RSS-BJP combine.

Let us consider the long-standing image of the BJP as an elite, upper caste / class party. The BJP responded by symbolising PM Narendra Modi as an OBC with vernacular, lower-class roots. When the term “identity politics” was used originally by Black feminists, it referred to a broader, structural change. However, the political successors of Ambedkar and Lohia reduced identity politics to narrow electoral calculus, representation, and the interests of the upwardly mobile classes within lowered castes.

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The BJP drew strength against the Bahujan political parties by actively reaching out to the aspirational political class within the neglected caste groups. Further, developmental victims, mostly Dalit, Backward and Adivasi communities, are managed through targeted welfarism.

While the Left liberal critics have worked with the Hinduism-as-moderate and Hindutva-as-extremist framework, the anti-caste commentators have rejected the distinction as an expression of Brahmanism. But another logic is sometimes missed. Hinduism is theologically pagan and tolerant of propositional truths but also socially hierarchical. On the other hand, Hindutva has mirrored itself after the Abrahamic-Semitic traditions: with core revealed truths and a definitionally monolithic, egalitarian community as reflected in the RSS’s slogan of “Ek Mandir, Ek Kuan aur Ek Shamshaan”.

In popular perception, the BJP is more socially representative than other political parties today. The choice of an Adivasi presidential candidate and the preference of the ‘Maratha’ Eknath Shinde over the ‘Brahmin’ Devendra Fadnavis in Maharashtra reflect its strategic depth.

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The RSS-BJP has a persistent image as being against Islam and Muslims. However, in the last decade, the RSS-BJP has engaged with Islam and the Muslim community with a more nuanced strategy. At the intellectual level, in-house Muslim intellectuals were deployed to attack the clerics and madrasas. These Muslim intellectuals characterised Islam as theologically intolerant and culturally regressive while silent on similar trajectories within Hinduism.

On the grassroots level, the Sangh Parivar reached out to the most marginalised sections within the Muslim community: the Pasmanda Muslims. PM Modi’s call to carry out “sneh yatras” and reach out to the Pasmanda Muslims during the recently concluded Hyderabad enclave elaborates the approach further.

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One could speculatively attribute this shift to the recent diplomatic humiliation India has faced from West Asian countries over the Nupur Sharma fiasco. The high-caste Ashraf Muslim elite, owing to their West Asian connections, have probably been identified as active interlocutors against Delhi. The BJP has hit many birds with one stone. It has advanced a language of healing through the Sneh Yatras to hypothetically expand the electoral base. At the same time, it has signalled a containment strategy for the Ashraf intelligentsia.

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While Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany were the inspirations for RSS-BJP ideological ancestors, Lee Kuan Yew’s Singapore, a development State with no Opposition and significant un-freedoms, seems to be an aspiration for the New India project. The RSS-BJP combine has reinvented itself to manage the socio-religious diversity through a carrot and stick policy, a mix of policy change and strategic social coercion. For the Opposition political parties and progressive sections not seduced by such a future, this may be the apt time to shed their dated political orthodoxies and learn from their adversary.

The author is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the School of Arts & Sciences, Azim Premji University. His views are personal. Suraj Yengde, the author of Caste Matters, curates the fortnightly ‘Dalitality’ column.