Mandal, essentially speaking, seeks to broaden the affirmative action umbrella originally provided to the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes in the constitution for OBCs, an umbrella group, who account for more than half of India’s population. Politics notwithstanding, the basic idea has been upheld in principle by the courts. To be sure, it remains to be seen whether demands for increasing OBC reservations to make them concomitant to share of OBC population – this is what is driving the demand for a caste census – passes constitutional muster. Kamandal seeks to correct and avenge alleged historical wrongs committed by India’s Muslim rulers, sometimes by violence against buildings and persons and sometimes by changing the law, which Hindutva’s present-day proponents argue is flawed for conscious minority appeasement. While both Mandal and Kamandal are projects aimed at consolidating a large majority, one of SC-ST-OBCs and the other majority Hindus, the former often deploys tactical fragmentations too by creating categories within categories to carve out or re-engineer political loyalties.

Also Read: Mandal reins in Kamandal

To be sure, both communalism and caste are far from imaginary fault lines in India. They have had a manifestation in democratic politics even before the country became independent. However, the Mandal-Kamandal conflict, and the championing of this binary as a battle between the regressive and the progressive (for anti-Hindutva forces) or appeasement versus majority assertion (for pro-Hindutva forces), was not as central as it became in the post-1990 period.

Congress party, which was the hegemonic political group when India attained independence, successfully accommodated various competing ideological strands, including caste and communalism, within its broad-spectrum politics in the first few decades of independence. However, these contradictions eventually overwhelmed its politics leading to a two-way loss of ground to both Kamandal and Mandal. If Rahul Gandhi’s current rhetoric is any indication, the Congress, it seems, has made up its mind to make itself a Mandal party to fight Kamandal, the current political hegemon in the country.

Around the time the Mandal-Kamandal conflict became central to Indian politics, India also had a trend break in its economic policy after it embraced a pro-market regime in 1991 and gradually started diluting state’s control on the economy. The world too embraced globalisation at a level never seen before after this period. Liberalisation was sold on the promise of a radical turnaround in Indian economy’s fortunes. But its fruits have largely uplifted the relatively well-off white-collar segment of the Indian population even as a large majority continues to be extremely precarious, if not technically poor.

Also read: When Mandal 2.0 gets to confront Hindutva

All this however did not become a major point of contention in the Indian political discourse. To be sure, revenues and demand from the rich played an important role in supporting the poor in the post-reform period. This, especially using revenue to enhance welfare is a strategy which has been deployed by governments of all political parties in both the centre and the states. There is good reason to believe that the status quo might not be tenable anymore.

Now that the biggest proponent of globalisation, the US, has become its biggest adversary and critique, these gains will likely stall if not reverse. This also means that the ability of the Indian state to use the revenues generated from the relatively well off to offer palliatives to the poor will increasingly come under squeeze.

The world will be forced to reckon with the systemic disruption of the global economic order by Donald Trump. Implications will vary for different countries. Chinese will have to find new markets to compensate for loss of export markets in the US. This is bound to increase the temptation for China dumping its cheap products elsewhere. Europe will try and balance the growing tension between security and economic implications by rejigging its relation with the US and China. These strategic readjustments will entail real economic costs which will include, to name a few, things such as slowdown in global growth and investments, realignment of trade flows, changing terms of trade across and within countries.

How should India deal with this turmoil? Should we prioritise a deal with the US over every other country? This could at least insulate India’s relative lead in service exports. Will this deal still be palatable if it came at the cost of our farm and dairy sectors which employ some of the poorest people in the country? What about dealing with the Chinese? Should India try and strike a deal which tries to offer the Chinese market access in relatively high-tech goods in return for some sort of anti-dumping understanding in labour intensive low-tech goods which India can make at home with an employment generation potential. Should such a deal with complemented with aggressive reforms in factor markets contingent on strict import substitution production of such goods in the domestic economy? Will a larger federal understanding on segregation of high-tech investments to manufacturing success story states and nudging low-tech investment to low-manufacturing states allow us to better exploit our comparative advantage in cheap labour? Or should India shun the US-China binary altogether and try and cultivate a larger block of nations which are not a part of either block and try to champion the principle of just, if not free trade, for the rest of the world?

Also Read: BJP today has both ‘Mandal’ and ‘Kamandal’: Sushil Modi

These might sound like technocratic hypotheticals at the moment. But they will become more and more critical, given the direction in which the world is headed. Answering or even navigating these questions is going to be anything but easy.

Is the Indian political class even interested in a genuine debate on these questions? Is the lack of a serious debate on these issues the result of a larger ideological disagreement among political parties or because of their cynical reluctance to sincerely engage with each other because they would rather trade in polemics while ignoring the larger challenges? One could very well argue that realpolitik is not interested in these nuanced debates because are unlikely to animate a significant number of voters, most of whom were anyway struggling to meet their basic needs even before Trump set fire to the global economic order.

This kind of an explanation, however, raises a basic philosophical critique of democracy. If democratic politics reneges on its vanguardist role of seeking progress and debating what is the best way to achieve it and is instead occupied with questions that offer a route to power via social polarisation, even if aimed at promoting equality or undoing historical wrongs, as Mandal and Kamandal like to claim, is it really doing service to the long-term interest of the people and the country at large?

To say this is not to cancel or denigrate democracy but to invoke the spirit of a Gramscian critique which is inspired by a pessimism of the intellect (about politics resurrecting fault lines of the past) but optimism of the will (where it should be engaging more with challenges of the future).

Also Read: A realpolitik appraisal of the ‘Mandal-Kamandal’ fight in UP

Some critiques might argue that the arguments in this column reek of economic determinism while dismissing critical social contradictions in Indian society. History shows that caste oppression and communalism have been important factors in shaping the predicament India faces today. But will it help our future if our politics is preoccupied with the social and takes the economic for granted or keeps it outside the purview of the democratic discourse.

This question ought to be answered with another question in mind. Will our fight against sectarian politics be easier or more difficult if our economic fortunes were to improve or deteriorate? Should we not be paying more attention to economic policy at a time when the global economic order is faced with what is likely an existential threat?

Roshan Kishore, HT’s Data and Political Economy Editor, writes a weekly column on the state of the country’s economy and its political fallout, and vice-versa.