Caste versus development in Bihar

Over the last few weeks, the shouts and murmurs in the media on Bihar’s upcoming assembly elections have often made two assumptions: one is that caste has suddenly reemerged as a major factor in Bihar after being tamed during a decade of Nitish Kumar’s development-led politics. The second, often unsaid, assumption is that caste and economic development are mutually exclusive in Bihar. Both these assumptions are fatuous and misleading, and as such need to be examined more critically.

The most unique thing about Bihar’s 2015 assembly elections is that all political parties are actively competing to woo voters across all communities; to put it another way, the Lalu-era strategy of political parties strengthening bonds with certain castes by antagonising others has been discarded for good. 

Consider an example: the upper castes were miffed with Nitish after he broke his party Janata Dal (United)’s coalition with the Bharatiya Janata Party in 2013 over Narendra Modi’s ascension as the prime ministerial candidate. The older strategy dictated that Nitish focus more on consolidating his core supporters — Kurmis, extremely backward castes (EBCs) and Dalits — and avoid being seen as close to the upper castes. And yet, in April this year, Nitish addressed the ‘Vijayotsav Samaroh’ of Kunwar Singh — one of the heroes of the 1857 revolt — which was seen as a move to cajole Rajput voters, the upper-caste category that Singh belonged to.

In the same month, BJP president Amit Shah kicked off the party’s election campaigning in Patna on the day of BR Ambedkar’s birth anniversary. (BJP also celebrated nationalist poet Ramdhari Singh Dinkar’s birthday in May with great pomp, apparently to further strengthen its Bhumihar—Dinkar caste vote-base.) BJP, traditionally the party of upper castes and Banias, has been aggressively trying to attract EBCs and Dalits, as could be seen from its choice of low-caste coalition partners for the 2014 Lok Sabha elections: Ram Vilas Paswan-led Lok Janshakti Party and Upendra Kushwaha-led Rashtriya Lok Samata Party. A notable recent addition to this list is Hindustani Awam Morcha, a party launched by Nitish’s former lieutenant and Dalit leader, Jitan Ram Manjhi. 

But there could also have been a swell from the ground in support of BJP: in the last two decades, the low-caste population in Bihar has become economically empowered and sanskritised. In the process, they have also developed an affinity towards the BJP and Hindu nationalist organizations such as RSS. In the Lok Sabha elections, BJP had also successfully spread the message about the ‘Vikas Purush of Gujarat’ being a backward caste on the ground (something both the authors heard people in rural areas talking about). All of this had helped BJP consolidate Hindu votes across all castes against a common religious adversary, Muslims. 

But this strategy on caste is very different from the one employed in the 1990s by Lalu Prasad Yadav, whose popularity rested on an explicitly anti-upper caste rhetoric. (Notably, Muslims were always an important constituency in Lalu’s famed Yadav-Muslim combo.) When Nitish joined hands with Lalu last year after his much talked-about drubbing in the Lok Sabha elections, many thought the duo would work on reviving the Mandal politics of 1990s by trying to bring all the backward castes under one fold. But so far neither have given a hint of any such agenda. Nitish has, in fact, accepted some of the recommendations of the Savarna Ayog — a commission that was set up in 2011 to examine the condition of economically backward sections among upper castes — and has announced welfare programmes for them.

Bihar’s experience shows that caste and development can coexist and even thrive together. It’s true that during the assembly elections of 2005 and 2010, the JD(U)-BJP coalition led by Nitish had qualitatively changed the political discourse of Bihar by making development-related issues more prominent. That, however, didn’t mean that the coalition had started ignoring the caste dynamics. In fact, the NDA coalition of JD(U) and BJP had worked hard to bring most of the non-Yadav castes in their fold and went on to successfully build the ‘coalition of extremes’. Caste had simply gone below the surface as the JD(U)-BJP coalition matured, it became visible as soon as Nitish broke the coalition in 2013. 

We also need to understand that, given the history and persistence of caste-based discrimination and inequality in Bihari society, caste can’t be completely separated from development. Theoretically speaking, the caste-neutral development discourse based on trickle-down theory can offer very little to the marginalised castes, and the political parties in Bihar understand this reality very well; politicisation of underprivileged castes to demand a better life is not necessarily anti-development. What happened in Bihar of Lalu era of the 1990s, though, was politicisation of middle castes sans any focus on governance and other development issues. Then again, the ‘Jungle Raj’ argument to vilify Lalu also conveniently ignores that Bihar was already in bad shape in the 1980s when it was governed by mostly upper-caste Chief Ministers. Lalu delivered the final blow to the nearly-dead public institutions, even as he flaunted the success of his social justice agenda. 

Bihar in 2015, however, is different from the one in 1990. Lalu’s coalition partner Nitish recently launched a public relations campaign called ‘Bihar@2025’ aimed at ensuring public participation in policymaking and to produce a vision document on development over the next 10 years. BJP has similarly been announcing development schemes: Union transport minister Nitin Gadkari recently announced a package of Rs50,000 crore for the development of roads in Bihar; a few other schemes by the central government are in the offing to impress voters as election fever gathers momentum. Posturing apart, these announcements show that the political parties have, over time, learnt to balance the development agenda with caste. 

To sum up, we could say that while caste would continue to play an important role in Bihar, the caste-based mobilisation has undergone a qualitative change: caste politics has become more inclusive rather than being antagonistic. Caste has survived development in Bihar and it’s not a bad thing: politics that favours one need not necessarily preclude the other.

Kumar is an economist with the International Growth Centre, Patna; Choudhary is a Delhi-based journalist