How the BJP is using the 10% quota to win back its upper caste voters

The party's core support base has been upset with the Modi govt's wooing OBCs and dalits

Despite the several lacunae in the law's enactment, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)'s move to provide 10 per cent reservation to “economically weaker sections” among Hindu upper castes in jobs and education seeks to mollify its core support base, which had been upset with the Narendra Modi government’s courting of the Other Backward Classes, or OBCs, and dalits.

The move could fall foul of judicial scrutiny since it lacks empirical evidence, but it could help BJP neutralize the call among its upper caste supporters in the Hindi heartland to either boycott the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, or press the NOTA, or the none-of-the-above button on polling day.

As evident from recent Assembly polls, especially in Madhya Pradesh, upper castes are upset with the Modi government for getting Parliament to overturn the Supreme Court verdict that had diluted the provisions of the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes prevention of atrocities law. Significantly, the quota move comes in the backdrop of Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) and Samajwadi Party alliance for 80 Lok Sabha seats of Uttar Pradesh. The Congress has been kept out of the alliance. The Grand Old Party believes it received sizeable upper caste votes, including in urban areas in the recent Assembly polls in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, and is hopeful of not merely eating into BJP’s upper caste support base in UP, but of a shift of upper caste votes that would help it revive in the Hindi heartland.

This has been enough to give the BJP leadership the nightmares of a repeat of 2004, when its seats in Uttar Pradesh had reduced to 10, contributing significantly to its failure to emerge as the single largest party, and paving the way for 10 years of Congress-led UPA rule at the Centre. In 2004 and 2009, BJP also lost heavily in urban areas.

In 2009, Congress' seat share in Uttar Pradesh was better than that of the BJP in UP, as several of its upper caste candidates were successful. In both, the 1998 and 1999 Lok Sabha polls, when the BJP led coalition governments at the Centre, the BJP’s vote share was 24-25 per cent, and it won 182 seats. Unlike 1998 and 1999, the BJP this time is faced with a more united opposition, particularly in UP.

Therefore, the quota move is BJP’s desperate attempt to arrest erosion of its upper caste support base to the Congress in states such as Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh.

Those arguing that the quota is for any youth from a general category household -– including Muslims, Sikhs, Christians and others -–  that earns less than Rs 8 lakh a year or has agricultural land less than 5 acres, should read the party’s resolutions passed at its two-day national convention in New Delhi last week. The BJP’s political resolution released on Saturday at its national convention in New Delhi was unambiguous that the quota was for Hindu “upper castes”. In his speech on Friday, BJP chief Amit Shah also said the quota was for ‘agade’, which is a term used to describe Hindu “forward” castes.

Upper castes, as data from Centre for Studies of Developing Societies (CSDS) surveys has shown, comprise the main support base of the BJP since the early 1990s. Forward castes gravitated from the Congress in the Hindi heartland to the BJP, while the BSP and various factions of the socialists consolidated their dalit and OBC support bases, respectively.

In some regions, peasant castes, which do not fall in the OBC list, have flirted with both the BJP and Congress and regional parties, including the Jats (in Haryana, Rajasthan and Western Uttar Pradesh), Marathas (in Maharashtra) and Patidars (in Gujarat). The BJP would now need to reach out to these caste groups, who have their own demands for quotas in jobs and education.

BJP’s political rivals have long pilloried it as a ‘brahmin-baniya’ party, and the quota move has again triggered a subterranean campaign that the Modi government is not just a ‘suit-boot sarkar, but BJP is essentially a party of, and for, Hindu upper castes. The BJP, therefore, also runs the risk of greater consolidation of dalit and OBC votes against the party in 2019.

Possibly apocryphal, there is an interesting anecdote about an Atal Bihari Vajpayee retort to Indira Gandhi when she described the Jana Sangh, the earlier avatar of the BJP, as a baniya party, or a party of traders, when it opposed her policies of abolishing privy purses and bank nationalisation. Vajpayee, with typical disarming humour, said that his party’s slogan after all was Jan Sangh ke sadasya ‘baniye’.

In the aftermath of the rise of Mandal politics, K N Govindacharya set about changing the stripes of the BJP, and the party promoted such OBC leaders as Kalyan Singh and Uma Bharti. This trend reached its zenith when Modi identified himself as a picchda, or belonging to OBCs, and helped his party to a majority in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls.

Since May 2014, the BJP, the Modi government and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) set about consolidating the newfound support base among dalit and OBC communities. The RSS tried to appropriate dalit icon B R Ambedkar, even marking 125 years of his birth with much fanfare in 2015.

However, the Sangh Parivar could not grapple with the contradictions on the ground after repeated instances of atrocities on dalits. Other castes struggled to find representation both, in the BJP hierarchy and in Modi’s cabinet. For example, Modi's cabinet committee on security consists only of upper castes, and most of BJP's chief ministers are from this segment.

The 10 per cent quota, therefore, could help BJP retain its upper caste vote base, but in the absence of other measures to address rural distress, could also reduce the party to its 1998/99 levels of 24-25 per cent vote share, instead of the 31 per cent it received in 2014.

Clearly, the BJP is no longer confident of Modi’s charisma alone winning it 2019. It is looking at 2019, but also beyond. The threat facing BJP is not so much the BSP and other caste based parties, but the Congress attempts at recapturing its upper caste support of yore.