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It’s a familiar narrative: the Bharatiya Janata Party’s Hindutva agenda has overridden caste as the main factor of Indian politics, many claim.

At first glance, that assertion does seem to hold. Since the 1967 general elections, caste has been an explicit factor in Indian politics. Before this, upper castes controlled almost all the levers of politics. However, starting in the 1960s, many backward castes stepped up to claim power. By the 1990s, this process had included even Dalits.

Winning an election began to seem like a simple maths problem. Add up the required castes and cross the finishing line.

Under the hood

The rise of Modi in 2014 gave the impression that a new equation was now operating. The BJP spoke in public of Hindu nationalism. It was apparent that the prime minister’s personal appeal did bring in a lot of votes – much like Nehru and Indira Gandhi did for the Congress.

Under the hood, however, caste continued to play a role. The BJP’s Hindutva rhetoric, for example, was rarely an end in itself. Instead, it provided the gel for various Hindu castes to come together in an electoral coalition. The party has, for example, carefully pushed caste-specific myths to further the cause of Hindutva. Suhaldev, a mythical king who is supposed to have killed a Ghaznavid general in 1034 AD, is often used to attract certain caste groups that claim him.

The election results for Haryana cement this truth. The voters threw up a surprise. Contrary to all exit polls and ground reporting, the BJP won the state. The Congress lost. How did this happen in spite of the clear unpopularity of the BJP-led state government?

As my colleague, Vineet Bhalla, wrote on Tuesday, the answer is clear: caste.

Jat vs the rest

Haryana’s politics is unique in the sense that a single caste dominates the state politically: the Jats. Making up around a fifth of the population and having a high social status in the state’s rural society, most Haryana chief ministers have been from this land-owning caste.

The BJP in 2014 cleverly turned this dominance on its head. It stitched together a coalition of small castes that resented the dominance of the Jats. It is this coalition that won the election for the Hindutva party. Remarkably, it held in spite of the government itself being very unpopular. We can see this from the fact that most ministers either did not stand or if they did, they did not win. Moreover, the BJP replaced its chief minister in March, as a way to counter anti-incumbency sentiment.

As a mirror image, the Congress seemed to be associated too closely with Jats. “There was a perception that the Hoodas [the Congress’s probable chief minister] would form a Jat-partisan government if the Congress were to return to power,” Bhalla wrote in his analysis.

This caused panic among members of other castes, who feared Jat domination. As late as 2016, for example, the state had seen widespread violence by Jats demanding reservations in educational institutions and government jobs. The incident had strengthened the BJP’s non-Jat platform and fears of the 2016 chaos still drive voting even today.

Silver lining

The Haryana result is an obvious disappointment for the Opposition. A win here would have continued the momentum gained from the Lok Sabha election results and further weakened Modi. However, the fact that caste continues to play such a salient role in voting should also embolden the Opposition. The Congress, for example, has placed great emphasis on caste as a way to push social justice. The party has championed a caste census, with the implicit promise of greater redistribution to members of the backward and Dalit castes.

The BJP has been caught on the wrong foot with this politics. After initially opposing the idea of a caste census, it has guardedly supported it in Bihar. Similarly, in August, ​​it rolled back a move to appoint senior bureaucrats using a lateral entry process that would have bypassed caste-based reservations.

The BJP’s wariness of caste-based mobilisation outside its Hindutva umbrella is clear. In the 2024 elections, its main reverses came from backward castes and Dalits in the heartland state of Uttar Pradesh. Like in Haryana, the party will be hoping that its Hindutva caste calculus can beat the Opposition’s social justice caste politics.

Either way, caste is here to stay in Indian politics.