Strength in Numbers

As next year’s Uttar Pradesh assembly election draws closer, we will be faced with much analytical commentary that speaks with certainty about many things that are far from certain. Perhaps the most perplexing will be the ease with which any support for the Bharatiya Janata Party among the Extremely Backward Classes will be labelled “communal.” Such laziness, indicative of an upper-caste lens, is the reason why so much analysis gets elections wrong.

During the 2019 general election, Scroll spoke to voters from the non-Yadav Other Backward Classes in eastern Uttar Pradesh. A member of the Maurya community said that they saw no viable alternative among opposition leaders, while another said that non-Yadav OBCs “have no option but to support the BJP,” because Yadavs tended to dominate the government machinery whenever the Samajwadi Party was in power. Chandra Bhushan, a professor of history at Gorakhpur University at the time, had a different take—albeit one that is fairly common in election analysis. Only Kurmis and Mauryas had the political heft to take on Yadavs, he said, while Nishads and Rajbhars were getting there. “The rest of these castes are still mostly illiterate and very much within the Hindutva fold,” Bhushan added. “For them, voting for the BJP is like voting for Hinduism.”

If anything, the truth points in the opposite direction. The upper castes have long formed a traditional and relatively stable support base for the BJP and its politics of Hindutva, and continue to do so. The EBCs’ movement towards the party has been much more recent, yet their support for the BJP is so easily labelled communal whereas upper castes are seen to be making a political choice. Why are Brahmins, Thakurs and Banias not dismissed as communal groups, given their long record of voting for the BJP? If EBCs distance themselves from the party, does that then make these communities “secular”?

Political commentary often describes EBCs who back the BJP as “silent voters” or “foot soldiers” of the party. Such language can present these communities as an instrument of someone else’s politics rather than as an autonomous political force. If a community is making a place for itself in a power structure, it is not enough to view its members simply as illiterate people who have been misled or used—we must ask whether the group itself is making political choices and what it expects in return. Similarly, instead of identifying political parties with a single caste or community, or using a negative term such as “vote cutter,” it is necessary to see which social groups it represents and what its role in participation, partnership and power distribution has been. EBCs might support the BJP today, but the party did not create the discontent that brought them there. It moved into a space left open by political parties that had failed to give many EBC communities a real share in power, and their support is something that the BJP has to continuously hold together.