Lower castes gain an upper hand

NEW DELHI — As Laloo Prasad Yadav, the low-caste head of the opposition Rashtriya Janata Dal party in northern India’s Bihar state, reclined in a lawn chair outside his mansion and aired his shirtless potbelly in the evening breeze, a villager of the traditionally dominant Rajput caste approached meekly and touched his feet in a Hindu gesture of obeisance.

“He’s come to tell me that I have the support of half of the Rajputs in his village,” Mr. Yadav explains, ignoring his visitor, whose presence was intended to gain favor before India’s parliamentary elections.

The upside-down hierarchy of the encounter surely pleases Mr. Yadav, a firebrand socialist who led a political takeover of Bihar in the early 1990s. Before that, Rajputs and other upper castes, a small fraction of Bihar’s population that long dominated its government, would address low-caste members like him with contempt and only by caste name, Biharis say.

As this phase of polling enters its second week, with the world’s largest voting constituency of 670 million casting ballots in five phases ending May 10, the political emergence of India’s downtrodden promises to make a deep imprint on its outcome.

“They are gradually, and more or less surreptitiously, taking over North India,” said French scholar Christophe Jaffrelot, author of the book “India’s Silent Revolution.”

Many here see the elections as a critical step on the way to a new era. They believe that nuclear-armed India could soon don the garb of superpower after the globalization of labor has given it a growing role in the world economy, and Pakistan appears ready to put aside the aging conflict over Kashmir, a state both countries complain has been a drain on their defense budgets for over a half-century.

Unlike past contests waged under the shadow of religious violence, the two main parties — the incumbent Bharatiya Janata Party and the Congress party — are campaigning on promises of growth and development. A coalition led by the BJP was expected to win by a large margin, but with exit polls now in for more than half the country, the coalition has only a narrow lead.

Both alliances have wooed a newly arrived class of politicians that is seeking to upend the country’s 2-millennia-old social hierarchy.

They come from the margins of India’s Hindu system of caste, a now-discredited philosophy that sorted individuals by birth into a ladder of occupational groups. On the top rung were Brahmins, a priestly class, while untouchables, or Dalits, were so reviled that they existed outside the scheme altogether. Together, low castes and Dalits, who still suffer widespread cruelty, make up about two-thirds of the country’s billion people.

Their political entrance was prompted by an upheaval that began in the 1980s with the ouster of the Congress party, which had governed practically unchallenged since independence from the British in 1947. With its fall amid popular anger at its growing authoritarianism, low castes and Dalits organized for the first time to put their own in power.

In the state elections of India’s federal system, they rose steadily in several key states along the northern Hindi belt, an agricultural region that holds nearly half of the 543 seats being contested in the current elections. Where socialist agitation, spawned by a legacy of landlord-peasant conflict in the north, failed in the past, the appeal to caste and Dalit identity succeeded in overturning power in several of the states.

While the divisions among them prevent a united effort to take control of government, their support has become essential to the major parties, say experts here.

Before the rise of low castes and Dalits, “Congress couldn’t think in terms of sharing power,” said Shaibal Gupta, a Bihari political scholar. “Now they are talking in terms of coalition.”

The BJP and Congress — now led by Sonia Gandhi, the Italian-born widow of assassinated Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi who took over the party in 1998 and was elected to Parliament the following year — have lately tried to dispel their reputations as upper-caste clubs.

The Congress party could once rely on herding in the votes of India’s largely illiterate low-caste and Dalit voters. But over its long tenure, it neglected to bring a fair proportion of them into politics.

Despite its pretensions as a party of the people, the mainly Brahmin top leadership of the Congress party actually revered the system that granted them their superiority. Mahatma Gandhi, the Congress pacifist who led the overthrow of British rule in India, defended the caste system.

Gandhi wrote in the journal Young India in 1920 that the system is “fundamental, natural, and essential.” He also defended restrictions on dining with or marrying people outside one’s caste.

The BJP, too, has been under the firm grip of upper castes. Its backbone philosophy, known as Hindutva, relies in part on the view that social harmony is achieved through the division of labor provided in the caste system.

With the growing strength of low-caste and Dalit politicians, though, the proportion of upper castes in both parties has slowly eroded in recent years. During the 1990s, the upper-caste share of BJP parliamentary seats in the Hindi belt dropped 14 percent; for Congress it dropped 18 percent.

Notably, last year the BJP tapped a Dalit woman, Uma Bharti, to head its government in the middle state of Madhya Pradesh.

Both parties, neither of which hopes realistically to win a clear majority, have aggressively courted several low-caste and Dalit parties in their coalition-building for the current elections.

In India’s most populous state, Uttar Pradesh, the BJP and Congress each sought an alliance with the Bahujan Samaj Party — a Dalit-led party that made its electoral debut in 1984 and ascended rapidly in the 1990s.

In a telling display of confidence though, the BSP leader Mayawati, who like some Indians uses only one name, spurned the advances of both parties. She said the BSP would run alone and extend its grip throughout the Hindi belt.

“Both [the BJP and Congress] are not sincere in improving the lot of poor, backward people who constitute the majority in the country,” she was quoted as telling the daily Asian Age.

The low-caste and Dalit parties tend to have a socialist outlook. But while socialist thinking also held sway for most of the post-independence period, India has been steadily opening its economy over the past decade.

Most national politicians have welcomed the new orientation: In the first quarter of 2004, GDP growth was a remarkable 10.4 percent.

While the influence of low castes and Dalits is not expected to put the brakes on the march to economic liberalization, it is reflected in the populist tone of the major parties’ campaign.

They have appealed to the poorest voters — promising guaranteed employment for all, college scholarships for the poor, credit to struggling farmers, increased education spending and economic growth that stays forever above 8 percent.

“Parties today are largely power machines,” observed Subhash C. Kashyap, a political analyst with the New Delhi-based Center for Policy Research. “Each party just tries to see what would sell.”

The low-caste and Dalit parties have joined wholeheartedly in this effort. Most have partnered with either of the major national parties in a coalition-building process that seems to have scant logic beyond the quest for power.

“It’s only about winning,” said Mr. Kashyap, who adds that the ideological bankruptcy of this year’s politicking has been “like no other election before.”

Indian voters are generally cynical. With several politicians hopping parties for more fruitful constituencies, and scores of celebrities and known criminals now joining the fray, most view their representatives as opportunists and scoundrels. More than 70 percent believe politicians seek office solely for financial gain, according to an AC Nielsen poll this month.

The low-caste and Dalit parties have not so far provided an antidote to ailing voter confidence. Their tenures in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar have been marred by the usual corruption scandals of Indian politics as well as a seeming disinterest in development.

“People from lower castes have been given prestige,” said Mr. Gupta, the political analyst. But their “vision has been very small.”

In Bihar, Mr. Yadav has made little effort to improve the plight of the poor, say several analysts in that state. In 14 years at its helm, he has adopted a dictatorial tone and remained fixated on caste politics while largely ignoring Bihar’s status as the poorest, most illiterate state in India, they add.

“[Laloo Prasad Yadav] has been very poor on development,” said Prabhat P. Ghosh, director of the Asian Development Research Center in Bihar. While Mr. Yadav should be admired for his role in reshaping the state’s social hierarchy, he added, “caste doesn’t mean you forget everything else.”

Caste-scripted voting patterns in the state though, assure that Mr. Yadav won’t be removed anytime soon. Members of his own caste — the Yadavs, or cow herders — have benefited richly from official favoritism. They vote consistently in favor of their own.

Meanwhile, Mr. Yadav explains such criticism as part of a conspiracy of “fascist” upper castes and news media who resent his rise to prominence. “The ruling class is weeping,” he said. “They have only hatred for the minority community.”