New strand to India's identity politics

Bihar has opened up Indian politics again with its caste survey. How it plays out will show how Indian society has changed, or not changed, in the past three decades

- Prashant Jha

Here is what Bihar's caste survey does not do. It does not tell us, yet, what will happen in 2024 and how the H heartland's political coalitions will get shaped and reshaped. 

But here is what the survey does do. For the ruling alliance in Bihar, and the opposition Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance (INDIA) nationally, it offers an opportunity to attack and fracture the BJP's umbrella social coalition in north and central India, stitched carefully by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and home minister Amit Shah over the past decade, by playing up the plank of the unity of the marginalised.

For the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), it offers a test, probably the biggest in its period of hegemony, of whether the party can continue to manage social contradictions, sustain what the late political scientist from Bihar Saibal Gupta termed as its "coalition of the extremes", play up the plank of Hindu social unity while catering to its diversity, and continue its political project of "inclusive Hindutva".

For both sides, while the disclosure of data in itself has created both opportunities and threats, how it will pan out will depend, first, on the interplay of the demand for a caste census on the national stage made by the national Opposition, with the possibility of sub-categorisation of Other Backward Classes (OBCs) embedded in the Rohini commission report (a trick tha remains up the BJP's sleeve).

It will also depend on the question of political messaging for different social groups, organisational outreach on the ground, and how both the BJP and the INDIA bloc translate the new arithmetic into chemistry.

And till that happens, it would be premature to say that this is a new Mandal moment with the same kind of dramatic and transformative impact that the implementation of the recommendations of the BP Mandal commission had on Indian politics. After all, 2023 is not 1989-1990.