Both the BJP and the Congress have tried to reach out to other parties, which are dominantly regional in character. There is an implicit acceptance of the theory of coalition politics. 2019 is going to be an election of numbers, not of ideologies. The only ideological trend feasible so far is the attempted pre-election alliance of BSP and SP.
This is having its ramifications in the gathbandhans that are developing. It has now taken the BJP’s tolerance level to swallow the “chowkidar” expression for Narendra Modi coming from the mouth of Shiv Sena leaders. Regional balances have been worked out with the numbers in mind. The BJP seems in a hurry to conclude its alliances.
The Congress is more cautious after the experience in UP. As we head towards general elections, there are some marginal changes in the readjustments. The likeminded-party-theory has assumed a wider net and more pliable meaning.
It is interesting to scan the changing political landscape before the campaign for the Lok Sabha gets underway for changes in the ‘politics of othering’ that has so far defined most Indian parties. In other words, are non-BJP and non-Congress parties adopting a form of Congressism?
The enumeration exercise by the colonial ethnographic state since the late 19th century brought to the fore the politics of ‘numbers’, thereby reshaping the society into the binary of ‘minority-majority’ along caste, religion and ethnic lines. By the 1920s, the political discourse, barring that of the Indian National Congress, inhaled the politics of ‘numbers’. This took various forms under parties like the All-India Muslim League, the Akhil Bharat Hindu Mahasabha, the Justice Party, etc.
By the 1950s, against the backdrop of the domineering discourse of Congressism, which was a politics without ‘othering’, India witnessed the emergence of four dominant political threads: Lohiaite, Ambedkarite, Hindutva and Dravidian, championing the fault-lines of caste, religion and ethnicity, thereby practicing the politics of ‘numbers and othering’.
The constitution of the ‘other’ happened at three levels: First, at the symbolic level, wherein the founding fathers were pitted against each other; Second, at the societal level, wherein the socioeconomic interest of one section was shown as being unaligned with that of sections signifying the ‘other’; and Third, at the political level, wherein idiom, metaphor, popular slogan and appeal were deliberately sectarian, exhibiting a ‘friend-enemy’ smile.
It was argued that popular politics was about speaking for different shades of subalterns, who constituted the majority, thereby projecting the politics of ‘numbers and othering’ as necessary to serve the ideals of equality and freedom. However, this mode of politics infused a great deal of bitterness in the societal realm by treating the ideals of ‘fraternity’ as subservient to ‘equality and freedom’.
This threefold manifestation was seen in the political culture across India since the 1990s in an entrenched manner. The popularity of slogans in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, emanating from Ambedkarite and Lohiaite discourses, while championing an egalitarian quest took recourse to caste-based ‘othering’ that competed with the religions ‘othering’ of Hindutva. This entrenchment of ‘othering’ could be seen most clearly in post-2000 Uttar Pradesh when the acidic political rivalry between the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) and the Samajwadi Party (SP) manifested itself in their governments’ policies as they pitted two social justice icons, RM Lohia and BR Ambedkar, against each other. For instance, the BSP Government by 2012 had brought almost 19,000 most backward villages under an Ambedkar Village Scheme for special developmental funds.
However, when an SP Government came to power in 2012, it selected another set of villages under a new scheme, Ram Manohar Lohia Samagra Gram Vikas Yojana, and officially labelled them as ‘Lohia villages’. The replacing of Ambedkar by Lohia had another dimension. While the Ambedkar villages were inhabited by significantly large numbers of Dalits, the Lohia villages had a majority of non-Dalits, particularly the OBCs. This three-fold othering had its parallel in the southern and northern States, which was reflected in the BJP’s slogan ‘Jati-Mati-Veti’ (identity, land and resource) in 2016 during the Assam Assembly elections, privileging ethnic identity, and in the controversy over the separate flag during the Karnataka election in 2018.
Besides, going against the ideals of fraternity, the fact that any politics of ‘othering’ becomes a politics of exclusion by default underlines the need for a politics with ‘othering’ becomes a politics of exclusion by default underlines the need for a politics without ‘othering’. Therefore, the question is: Can India witness a ‘politics of numbers’ (pragmatic electoral compulsions) that doesn’t necessarily metamorphose into a ‘politics of othering? Something may be changing. The frequency of ‘othering’ in the political discourses of Lohiaite, Ambedkarite and Dravidian politics is declining and is now at the most episodic. In fact, the tone and tenor of the Mahagathbandhan in UP, particularly regarding the SP (Lohiaite) and the BSP (Ambedkarite), signify the beginning of a phase of ‘politics without othering’ at the normative level. In their Press conferences announcing the grant alliance, both Mayawati and Akhilesh Yadav referred overwhelmingly to class and occupational identities, and only a passing reference was made to OBC and Dalit identities. In a marked contrast to their position during the Mandal phase of the early 1990s, they welcomed the 10%-reservation announced for economically weaker sections. Whether these shifts indicate the return of Congressism, a mode of politics without any ‘othering’, is yet to be seen, but certainly it indicates a process wherein the Congress does not seem to be the only claimant of the discourse of Congressism. Rather, more and more parties which rose on the plank of anti-Congressism are adopting the discourse of ‘non-othering’.
However, there is a radical contrast to this emerging trend. While Lohiaite, Ambedkarite and Dravidian politics are embracing the framework of “non-othering”, the Hindutva discourse led by the BJP is still caught in the old mode of ‘othering’ even though its electoral slogan appears to be all-inclusive. In fact, it is the BJP that has taken the politics of ‘othering’ from the old episodic level to the incessant level. By dint of a disproportionate investment in an army of dedicated team pollsters indulging in hair-splitting profiling of the electorate contingent to pre-existing prejudice, anxiety and aspirations, the party has seamlessly employed multiple modes of ‘othering’ simultaneously to trounce its political rivals. The BJP has singlehandedly taken the politics of “othering” from the episodic to incessant level wherein the everyday life of the people is systematically fused with the constitution of the ‘other’ and its perpetuation. This has taken the form of communalisation of everyday lives, as reflected in the instances of cow-vigilantism and mob-lynching. At a time when the emerging centrality of agrarian issues has led to the shrinking cultural space for privileging religious identity in southern, western, central and some parts of northern India, the BJP as a compensatory move is shifting its politics of othering eastward to West Bengal and Northeastern States. In essence, this is an attempt to shift the core space for communal othering to east and northeast as seen, for instance, with the politics over the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill. This explains why a party that championed the ethnic sentiment of “Jati-Mati-Veti” in Assam was desperate to pass the Citizenship Bill that privileges a religious identity.
A liberal democracy requires competing and contesting politics amongst varied socioeconomic interests. However, the situation is not permitted to give way or preeminence to the “politics of othering”. The attempt at the spread out effect is to influence other smaller fragments of public opinion. This results in two things. One is an apparent lack of concern on the part of the larger national party. Second is the identity crisis of the respective parties in asserting their respective interests. The forthcoming general elections will put many things to test and most of them concern us. But in any case, it is apparent that the trends of 2019 are going to be different from what history has hitherto served us.
(The writer, a Senior Advocate, is a former All India Service officer, a former diplomat, a former editor, a former President of Orissa High Court Bar Association and a former Advocate General of Odisha. jayantdas@hotmail.com )
