Acceding to the demand for caste census now is akin to BJP's earlier retreats in order to become acceptable to the Indian electorate. The present retreat is unlikely to be temporary
Fading appeal?
Sourced by the Telegraph
Parakala Prabhakar
Published 01.06.25, 06:42 AM
When the noise is cancelled out, the signal is unmistakable: the unravelling of the Hindutva majoritarian dispensation is underway. The latest pointer to this is the Union government conceding to the demand for a caste census. This unambiguously signals secular, diverse and tolerant India shrugging off the toxic majoritarian creed that dominated it for more than a decade. It is the moment of truth for Hindutva’s understanding of India’s socioeconomic and political reality.
The Hindutva episteme stands on two pillars. The first one is schismogenetic, an outgrowth of its adversarial relation to everything Islamic. V.D. Savarkar, its foremost ideologue, framed Hindutva as an outcome of the “year to year, decade to decade, century to century” conflict between Muslim invaders and Hindu resistors. In his formulation, the invasion of Hindusthan and the resistance offered to it gave birth to Hindutva.
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Its second pillar is the understanding of Hindu society as uniform, even homogenous. In this understanding, varna, jati or caste divisions in the Hindu society are of little significance. Caste divisions and hierarchies are merely functional, flexible and are, indeed, benevolent. The oppressive maladies, if any, are either concoctions of hostile historians or distortions that had crept into the millennia-old, pristine, Hindu civilisation as a consequence of mlechcha invasions.
The praxis that emanates from the first pillar is the loud, violent, headline-grabbing and overt subversion of the idea of India as a modern, secular, tolerant State and society. The manifestations of the elements of this praxis are gross. They are well documented too. An extreme example of this element is a 2021 Haridwar Dharma Sansad calling for Muslim genocide.
The praxis that emanates from the second pillar, however, is subtle. Yet it is troublingly potent and contains mind-altering elements. It rewires the cognitive apparatus of the people and reshapes their world view. Crucially, it masks the existence of caste as well as gender oppression and discrimination in our society or dials down
their salience. It celebrates the hierarchical Varnashrama Dharma as the ideal principle for organising our society.
This last element is the foundation on which the Hindutva ideology’s justification for its project of ‘return to the pristine past’ rests. Caste census shells this foundation and guts the edifice raised on it. The objective of both these strands of the Hindutva episteme is homogenisation. The first one aspires to realise it by eliminating the presence of Muslims from the country’s collective life, making them second-class residents of the country. The second one aims to realise it by obliterating the diversity that exists within Hindu society. Hindutva believes that unity could only be based on uniformity, not justice.
Hindutva’s votaries viewed the demands for caste census as inimical to their mission of homogenising Hindu society. They feared that it will foreground the divisions within Hindu society. Divisions thus foregrounded would eventually upend their project to re-enthrone the hierarchical organisation of society.
The current dispensation’s bid to power rests on its electoral strategy of turning Hindus into a monolith on the basis of religion while, at the same time, breaking the Muslim monolith on the basis of gender, sect, and caste. Caste census renders this strategy fruitless as the enumeration will highlight not only the population count of various castes in Hindu society but also the educational and the occupational disparities among them. It has the potential to undo the kamandal project and resuscitate the Mandal plot.
Full-blooded Hindutva never found purchase in India’s electoral democracy. Immediately after Partition, when communal passions ran high, the leaders who championed Hindutva were much taller than the ones who strut on the political stage today. Even during those times, when the ground in the country was fertile and the conditions most propitious for communal hate to thrive, India’s electorate rejected the exclusionary Hindutva creed. The various political and ‘cultural’ outfits that championed Hindu majoritarianism had to reckon with the reality of India’s innate secular mind that accepted diversity. Therefore, those outfits had to fall in line to survive by pretending to be secular — even ‘genuinely’ secular — but secular, nevertheless.
The Bharatiya Janata Party’s bid for power in 2014, it is important to recall, was based on an economic agenda, not on a majoritarian ticket. Historically, whenever the BJP or its earlier avatar, the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, have gone into general elections on a purely majoritarian platform, they have never been able to garner a respectable vote share. The BJS could just cross 9% of the popular vote. Even with the frenzied Ayodhya platform in 1991 and 1996, the BJP barely crossed 20% of the vote. Only when the BJP disavowed its divisive agenda could it become acceptable, garner allies, increase vote share and come to power.
Acceding to the demand for caste census now is akin to its earlier retreats in order to become acceptable to the Indian electorate. The present retreat is unlikely to be temporary or be given up after the Bihar polls. This is because the retreat is a result of the realisation among Hindutva’s forces that the Indian voter had rejected the toxic ‘Muslims as infiltrators’ ‘mujra-mangalsutra-machili’, ‘roti, beti, maati cheenlenge’ pitches of their 2024 campaign. Its 2024 numbers in the Lok Sabha dwindled.
The dispensation that smuggled itself into power in 2014 on economic development and anti-corruption platform learnt to stay in power while pursuing a majoritarian agenda by compromising constitutional institutions, including, allegedly, the Election Commission. There have been serious and substantive questions raised about the integrity of the recent electoral outcomes. Voter suppression, vote hike, manipulation of electoral rolls, the very manner in which the poll body was constituted, are some of the serious issues that have been raised. The dispensation has, as yet, been unable to offer credible responses to these charges. This has deepened the suspicion that the regime is now able to insulate itself from the electorate’s rejection by compromising the integrity of the electoral process. But this way of staying in power may not be feasible for long in the face of rising communal toxicity and increasing economic distress. A strong push for restoring electoral integrity can put the dispensation’s continuance and re-election prospects in jeopardy.
In the event, it has to abandon its communal positions and make itself acceptable to the Indian secular ethos. In other words, it must return to the Vajpayee paradigm. In all probability, the Narendra Modi act has now run its course. Only the final curtain call and a bow are awaited. The period of India-Pakistan tensions and the Operation Sindoor rhetoric can only give it a temporary reprieve.
The danger to the diverse and secular idea of India does not, however, vanish with this final act when it happens. The task of taming the communal forces that were unleashed during the last decade is not an easy one. It could take several decades to excise the communal virus from the country’s body politic. Sadly, no political party seems ready for this daunting task. Civil-society action is the only hope.
No virus is ever fully expunged from a body. It lies dormant in some nook or corner. When the body’s defences are low, it could strike again. In our country, the communal virus patiently waited for a hundred years before overwhelming the body politic. Hence the retreat of the virus now will not be the end of the danger. Dr Rieux, the protagonist in Albert Camus’s novel, The Plague, did not celebrate the end of the plague in the city of Oran because he knew it could strike back. Similarly, one cannot celebrate the present unravelling of the Hindutva majoritarian dispensation in India. For it could return when the defences are weak.
Parakala Prabhakar is a political economist and the author of The Crooked Timber of New India
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