We are now in the final lap of the two-and-a-half-month-long election cycle. Elections were announced on March 16 and they will come to an end with counting of votes on June 4. Fascinating that India’s biggest democratic exercise is, covering it over such a long period as part of a daily news cycle is bound to lead to fatigue. One of the perks of being on this tiring treadmill is that one gets to indulge in an occasional polemic with peers. The hope is that, in this process, one also makes a constructive contribution to the public debate on ideas and questions that matter.

We are now in the final lap of the two-and-a-half-month-long election cycle. Elections were announced on March 16 and they will come to an end with counting of votes on June 4. Fascinating that India’s biggest democratic exercise is, covering it over such a long period as part of a daily news cycle is bound to lead to fatigue. One of the perks of being on this tiring treadmill is that one gets to indulge in an occasional polemic with peers. The hope is that, in this process, one also makes a constructive contribution to the public debate on ideas and questions that matter.

One of the editions of the column did this on the question of the north-south divide in Indian politics. This edition of the column seeks to take on another such issue, namely, subaltern Hindutva.

In an opinion piece published in The Hindu on May 16, Varghese George has raised an interesting question. “The communities that were mobilised by Mr (Lalu Prasad) Yadav (and his counterparts in Uttar Pradesh such as Mulayam Singh Yadav and Kanshi Ram), the Hindu subalterns, over the decades sensed the contempt they faced in the English world, particularly when more of them were educated. They would in turn be attracted to the BJP’s pitch for honour within the Hindu society”, he says. It raises the question of whether there can be subaltern secularism in response to subaltern Hindutva, the article argues. “The real challenge before him (Rahul Gandhi) is reconciling the party’s old elitism with the inescapable turn to the subaltern terrain where the numbers are aggregated. The question is whether he can force Mr (Mani Shankar) Aiyar to meet Mr (Lalu Prasad) Yadav”, it says.

There can be many reasons why one can disagree with the essay’s prognosis. The first, and the easiest is to dismiss the bogey of Mani Shankar Aiyar to represent what has been described as Congress’s entrenched elitism. So-called secular fundamentalists like Mr Aiyar have never represented the true character of the Congress party, both in its good and bad days.

What is/was the Congress’s elitism?

To be sure, this is not to say that the Congress did not have an elite character. Its elitism, in the immediate aftermath of the independence, however, was a careful balance between three factors. A modernist and somewhat left-leaning but increasingly anti-communist worldview of Jawaharlal Nehru, support of the handful of India’s domestic capital which existed at that time, and the feudal rural elite which provided the boots on the ground to the Congress’s electoral machinery. Gradually, all of them have frittered away.

The last of these has almost completely atrophied because of mainly two reasons. The rise of OBC politics to challenge the dominance of Congress’s upper caste leadership (it happened much before the BJP even became a force to reckon with but was accelerated by its rise) and a systemic crisis in agriculture and migration of blue-collar workers to urban areas undermining the material importance of the village in India’s political economy theatre.

Domestic capital needed the state to protect it from foreign domination in a newly independent country with a very small industrial base. But it grew increasingly resentful of state control once its own prowess to make profits and raise capital started growing and the state became an agent of rent-seeking.

The marriage between the Congress and the domestic capital was saved temporarily with the party unleashing economic reforms in 1991 and then presiding over one of the best-ever boom periods before the global financial crisis of 2008. But it hit the rocks again when the Congress regime failed to protect India’s macroeconomic stability in the aftermath of the crisis. What Indian capital wanted was a pro-business regime which could manage mass discontent without tilting the scales against the larger interests of capital. Narendra Modi, first as the chief minister of Gujarat and then as the Prime Minister for ten years has provided exactly that. It is no wonder that corporate funding to the BJP has reached unprecedented levels in India today.

As far as the commitment to the ‘western secularism’ of the Congress’s top leadership is concerned, this is a cause which was betrayed by Nehru’s own descendants who were anything but not elite. The person most guilty on this charge is Rajiv Gandhi, who committed the back-to-back blunders of first succumbing to the Muslim fundamentalists in the Shah Bano case and then trying to ‘balance’ this by appeasing the Hindu right by opening the locks of the Babri mosque where idols of Lord Ram had been installed in 1949. The likes of Mr Aiyar have been apologists for Rajiv Gandhi’s mistake even if they were not active enablers of these decisions.

Later generations of the Gandhi family have been tying themselves in knots in trying to navigate the balance between politics and religion and none of them even come close to having the political clarity and conviction that Jawaharlal Nehru had on these issues.

What the Congress’s current leadership does not understand is the fact that its clever-by-half tricks on secularism cannot compensate for the loss of the other two (now gone) elite pillars which supported its political dominance.

Is BJP’s subaltern consolidation driven by some sort of self-respect movement?

The optics of Lutyens Delhi in the last decade would suggest that it is. From the Padma awards to the biggest constitutional posts, the BJP has empowered people who represent a stratum of the social pyramid which was never a part of the political core under the old regime. But the picture changes drastically when one gets out of Delhi.

What explains the BJP’s ability to install a Thakur chief minister in Uttar Pradesh which, not very long ago, became India’s only state to have a Dalit chief minister who completed a full term in office?

The BJP’s hegemonic status in Indian politics today is the result of the triumph of Kamandal over Mandal in the northern part of the country, especially Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. The politics of Mandal, as has been discussed above, came into being by dealing a body blow to the Congress in these regions. If Mandal was about self-respect and undoing Congress’s elite anti-subaltern ways, why did it succumb to the BJP’s Kamandal?

Answering this question requires admitting the fact that the so-called Hindu subaltern is anything but a monolithic political entity and its primary contradiction lies within and not outside.

The rise of the subaltern Mandal parties was a result of their ability to reach a threshold which allowed them to game the then extremely fragmented first-past-the-post system. The biggest proof of this is the fact that no subaltern Mandal party has even come close to the 40% vote share mark in even a state election. The fact that commentators like to describe almost 80% of the country’s population as subaltern, makes this an extremely poor exercise in consolidating their supposedly natural base.

What the BJP has successfully done is to perfect a second-order othering game to achieve a bigger consolidation of the electorate than these Mandal parties. The first othering exercise is vis-à-vis the Muslims, which appeals to a larger Hindu base and what follows this is an othering of the dominant OBC castes which monopolised the realpolitik gains of the first subaltern assertion in Indian politics. The lower OBCs have been drawn to this game on the promise of the second order othering and making them the stakeholders of political power. This is a gift which has been given to the BJP by the leadership of the Mandal parties and not the so-called secular elite of the Congress.

To be sure, the BJP’s current generation of leaders must to grateful to their predecessors for having the pragmatism to realise that the political project of building a Hindu society which was wedded to the codes of Manu Smriti had to be buried quietly to make it more socially representative and politically viable. A 1974 speech by Balasaheb Deoras shows that this course correction within the BJP/RSS came much earlier than what most people think. Of course, there is a section of dogmatists within the left-liberal eco-system which is unwilling to even accept that the BJP/RSS has had this course correction.

To be sure, the Mandal parties are realising this mistake and trying to make their politics more inclusive to expand its subaltern appeal. But this is more an effort to regain lost territory than a vanguardist movement leading subalterns against their numerically insignificant oppressors. This is exactly why it is a more difficult battle to win. Also, the BJP can always be more inclusive of OBCs because it does not have to accommodate Muslims within its ranks.

Secularism’s crisis is a broken economic dialogue, not a social one

This is exactly what most political commentators tend to miss. A lot of the realpolitik churn in Indian society and politics is primarily an endeavour to seek entry into the elite enclave of economic and political power. This is what explains things such as the rise of even individual caste-based parties using their electoral salience to negotiate deals with larger political formations. Political promiscuity, for these players, is a badge of honour rather than a harbinger of shame for betraying ideology.

The reason such promiscuity is appreciated rather than criticized is that no political formation in the country is seen as even trying to achieve a radical change in the existing economic order. This is despite the fact that India’s post-reform economic regime has generated massive economic inequalities and fallen drastically short of giving all Indians a life of economic security and dignity. The political response to this crisis has been an opportunism which vacillates between fiscal profligacy and responsibility depending on whether one is in our outside power.

It is this atrophying of economic vision which has led to the likes of Mani Shankar Aiyar becoming the subject of ridicule rather than a useful hand on the deck for parties such as the Congress. Mr. Aiyar is actually a less important victim of this economic disarming of the progressive politicians in India. The biggest casualties have been his ideological fellow-travellers in the ranks of the leadership of communist parties, who have absolutely no salience left when it comes to the national debate on political economy.

And it is exactly this which differentiates India’s current elite seculars from their historical predecessors. Jyoti Basu, who is among the most successful secular leaders of India, came from a family of landlords and studied law in England. He first got attracted to communist ideology thanks to the communist party in Britain rather than India. However, it was the clarity of an economic programme of militant class struggle which made him an asset rather than a liability when he came to work among the poor in an extremely communally turbulent Bengal. The demise of his political project was primarily a result of his successors making a mess of class politics rather than social equations.

A secularism which cannot offer a clearly charted path of class struggle to its targeted audience in a poor country is doomed to fall to politics of schadenfreude and cynical promiscuity. This is exactly what has brought down India’s secular experiment which began in the 1990s. Both the elite and the subaltern leadership of the secular camp are guilty of this crime. Unless they decide to talk about this economic problem, things are not going to change.

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