MP follows in Bihar's footsteps

NK SINGH

• ·        Sadhna Singh, wife of MP chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan, was recently elected president of All India Kirar Kshatriya Mahasabha, an organisation that represents the caste the Chouhans belong to. Shivraj Singh also attended the conference at Kota last month where his wife was elected president. “She agreed to become the president because the samaj leaders told us that it was necessary to avoid a split,” said Shivraj Singh.

• ·         Former chief minister and senior BJP leader Babulal Gaur gave his blessings to newly-elected Congress MLA from Kolaras, Mahendra Singh Yadav last week when the latter touched his feet before taking oath of office in MP assembly. “You are the honour of the community," said Gaur, adding, “may you win ten more times!” Both politicians, although in opposite political camps, are Yadavs.

• ·        Kartikey Singh Chouhan, the chief minister’s 23-year-old son, preferred a caste rally for his political launch. He addressed recently a rally of Kirar-Dhakad community at Kolaras, shortly before the area went to polls. Subsequently, he revealed that he had informed his father before heading for the caste conference.

 A prominent feature of the recent assembly by elections in Mungaoli and Kolaras was blatant display of caste politics. Both the ruling BJP and the opposition Congress openly tried to mine caste loyalty. The BJP’s poll strategy, especially, hinged around organising caste conferences.

In the run up to the by-elections, BJP organised scores of conferences of different castes, hoping to win their loyalty.  The BJP government also inducted three ministers belonging to three backward castes on the eve of polling, hoping to win their support.  Babulal Gaur, who has an uncanny sense of ground realities, said the by-elections had changed dynamics of politics in MP, making caste its most important component.

BJP’s political strategy seems to have undergone a metamorphosis in MP. When Shivraj Singh worked his way around 2008 and 2013 assembly elections, he focussed on farmers, women and urban poor – part of Congress vote bank – to win electorates’ support.

But since 2013 MP BJP, under his tutelage, is micro tuning its winning frequency. Now it is focusing more and more on caste and community groups for votes. Not long ago the then BJP state chief Prabhat Jha had suggested that Gaur should start using his caste surname, Yadav, as a political strategy.

If BJP is there, can Congress be far behind! The grand old party has also entered narrow, stinky by lanes of caste politics. It has imported caste leaders like Hardik Patel and Jingesh Mewani for the electoral battle the coming winter.

Caste no longer a dirty word

Caste is no longer a dirty word in politics. However, its practitioners have changed the nomenclature. Castes are described as communities – Rajput samaj, Brahmin samaj, Lodhi samaj, Gurjar samaj and so on – in an effort to provide a fig leaf of respectability to caste politics.

The ground reality in MP has been, till now, a little different from other Hindi speaking states, where caste rules the roost. There is a reason behind it. 

Christophe Jaffrelot points out in his brilliant study of caste politics, “besides the demographic weight of the upper castes (12 per cent), Madhya Pradesh is marked by a fragmentation of the lower castes.” The scheduled castes are equally fragmented.

In addition to these factors, says Jaffrelot, “the intermediate (and locally dominant) castes who could have acted as the spearhead of anti-establishment movements are neither prosperous nor large or assertive enough.”

It was Arjun Singh who tried to sow seeds of caste politics in MP by roping in OBCs as a whole. As chief minister, he formed a commission for backward castes, who constituted about 48 per cent of total population in unified Madhya Pradesh. He believed that Ramji Mahajan commission, formed ahead of the 1984 election, helped Congress win rich electoral dividends.

His disciple, Digvijay Singh, also experimented with his famous Dalit Agenda, convinced that it was the only way to counter BSP’s growing influence in the state and retain the 15 per cent scheduled caste population with Congress. It proved disastrous.

Recalls a former chief secretary: “A distraught Laxman Singh (Diggi’s brother) came to see me once. He said he had lost Rajput votes in the area because fines were imposed on entire villages after any reported act of atrocity against a Dalit.”

BJP, earlier, scoffed at such attempts to garner votes, although its opponents dubbed it as upper caste Brahmin-Bania party. It was, no doubt, due to influence of RSS whose credo is uniting the already fragmented Hindu society. But Uma Bharti changed the matrix in 2003, projecting herself as an OBC leader and garnering their support.

Shivraj Singh Chouhan has fine tuned caste politics. His government has made it official by forming many commissions, committees, boards and corporations for ‘welfare’ of different castes. There is a board for barbers and another for tailors and so on. If our politicians had had their way, Madhya Pradesh will soon be following in the footsteps of Bihar.

Powers That Be, my column in DB Post of 17 March 2018

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