‘Hindu nation’: Religion trumps caste in India vote

AGRA (India) – Voters born at the bottom of the Hindu faith’s rigid caste system will determine whether Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi returns to power in June.

More than two-thirds of India’s 1.4 billion people are estimated to be on the lower rungs of a millennia-old social hierarchy that divides Hindus by function and social standing.

Politicians of all stripes have courted lower-caste Indians with affirmative action programmes and job guarantees as well as special subsidies to mitigate long-standing discrimination and disadvantage.

But Mr Modi’s Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has established itself as India’s dominant political force with a different pitch: Think of your religion first and caste second.

“There are no economic opportunities and business has never been so bad for me,” said Mr Anil Sonkar, a 55-year-old fishmonger and a member of the Dalit castes, once disparagingly known as “untouchables”.

“But under this government, we feel safe and proud as Hindus,” he said in the tourist city of Agra, home of the Taj Mahal.

“That is why, despite everything, I voted for Modi,” he added.

Mr Modi’s party is expected to easily win the 2024

national election once it concludes in June,

in large part due to his government’s positioning of the Hindu faith at the centre of its politics.

His government has been accused in turn of marginalising the country’s 200-million-plus Muslims, leaving many among them fearful for their future in India.

But its strategy of appealing to pan-Hindu unity and directing the faith’s internal frictions outwards has reaped political dividends.

“The BJP’s base among the marginalised has grown over every election since 2014,” said political scientist and author Sudha Pai.

The party, she added, had successfully forged a new pan-Hindu political coalition by showing respect to the “cultural symbols, icons and history” of low-caste voters, and in the process furthering its goal of building a “Hindu nation”.

Station in life

Caste remains a crucial determinant of one’s station in life from birth, with higher castes the beneficiaries of ingrained cultural privileges, lower castes suffering entrenched discrimination, and a rigid divide between both.

Mr Modi belongs to a low caste, but the elite worlds of politics, business and culture are largely dominated by high-caste Indians.

Less than 6 per cent of Indians married outside their caste, according to the country’s most recent census in 2011.

Mr Modi’s political coalition has managed to bridge this internal divide by trumpeting a vision of a resurgent and assertive Hindu faith.

He began the year by inaugurating a grand temple to the Hindu deity Ram, built on the site of a centuries-old mosque razed by Hindu zealots decades earlier.

Construction of the temple fulfilled a long-standing demand of Hindu activists and was widely celebrated by Hindu voters, whatever their caste group.

Mr Modi’s rise also coincided with the declining fortunes of caste-based political parties that had dominated politics for decades in Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state with more people than Nigeria and its most important electoral battleground.

Many in the state accused these parties of directing welfare programmes and other benefits of political power to their own caste groups, a situation they say changed when Mr Modi came to power and made them available for all disadvantaged voters.

“The soles of my slippers wore off as I ran around trying to get a card for free rations,” homemaker Munni Devi, 62, said at a BJP campaign rally over the din of frenzied drum beats and music.

“But Modi gave me one immediately after coming to power,” she added.

‘Demons of those contradictions’

The BJP has been able to unite a broad array of caste groups into a single bloc of support, but caste discrimination remains a fact of life both in politics and society at large.

Despite Mr Modi’s own low-caste origins, the senior ranks of his ministry and party as well as the civil service remain overwhelmingly dominated by upper-caste functionaries.

“Our lawmaker is from our caste and from the BJP,” said farmer Patiram Kushwaha, a Modi supporter who is reconsidering his allegiance.

“He cannot do anything for us because those sitting at the top don’t listen to him.”

More than two dozen opposition parties in the 2024 poll have campaigned on a joint pledge to address the structural causes of discrimination by staging a caste-based national census and redirecting resources to the most disadvantaged.

Nonetheless, analysts expect Mr Modi to triumph convincingly over the opposition bloc.

But the BJP faces a monumental challenge in holding its coalition together over the long term, said Mr Neelanjan Sircar from the Centre for Policy Research think-tank in New Delhi.

“This balancing act of keeping together groups which don’t really get along with one another is extremely tough in the long run,” he said.

“At some point, you have to face the demons of those contradictions.” AFP