Modi 3.0: No Longer the Intransigent Prime Minister We Knew

The first year of Narendra Modi’s third term was marked by his single-biggest ideological switch. Even as he faced troubling questions around intelligence failure on the heels of Pahalgam terror attack, his government sprung a surprise by agreeing to conduct a caste enumeration along with the decadal census.

Caste census had been the opposition’s primary agenda for over two years, with not only socialist leaders like Akhilesh Yadav or Tejashwi Yadav but also Congress leader Rahul Gandhi presenting the demand at every fora consistently. They argued that an enumeration of castes could help the government identify social and financial vulnerabilities of marginalised groups in a better manner, which in turn would enable it to channel welfare measures more efficiently.

Such a demand was met with both derision and ridicule from the Bharatiya Janata Party. None other than the prime minister attacked the opposition for taking Bharat back to primitive times by raking up caste politics. He asserted that he could only see four caste groups in the country, and they were the “poor, women, youth and farmers”. On one instance, he termed the demand for a caste census as an “urban Naxal” thought. Many other BJP senior leaders rushed to call a caste census a divisive demand.

However, the 2024 Lok Sabha polls permanently changed the contours of such wanton polarisation around the caste census. Having to depend on his allies – Nitish Kumar, Chirag Paswan, and N. Chandrababu Naidu – for whom the caste census was as significant as Hindutva is to the BJP, Prime Minister Narendra Modi could no longer be the leader who could dictate the course of Indian politics.

His ideological turnaround began when, merely two months after his re-election, his government relented under pressure from its allies and opposition parties and asked the Union Public Service Commission (UPSC) to withdraw its advertisement for recruiting 45 lateral entry positions in the bureaucracy. The lateral entries had often come under scanner not only for alleged undemocratic decisions but also for evading reservations in appointments. While pulling back its advertisement, a senior minister Jitendra Singh acknowledged that the decision was taken with the Modi government’s commitment to “social justice and empowerment” in mind.

This was the first move of Modi 3.0 that appeared to be an admission of a key fact – that the Hindutva brand of politics, seen against the backdrop of BJP's campaign around the consecration ceremony of the newly-built Ram Temple at Ayodhya, may have alienated a large section of OBCs and Dalits in the BJP’s fold.

Caste talk

The Modi regime is marked by its long strides in gaining the confidence of non-dominant caste groups since 2014. However, the 2024 Lok Sabha results indicated a strong reversal of the trend.

Although the Modi-led BJP had been brushing off caste-based social justice talk as  opportunistic vote bank politics of the opposition, it has often depended on it for electoral victories, although by giving it an entirely different colour. The two political forces have a distinctly different approach towards caste-based mobilisation.

Socialist parties like Samajwadi Party or Rashtriya Janata Dal, and more recently the Congress, have spoken about caste-based welfare measures as the necessary long road for democratisation and equitable distribution of resources. But the BJP has merely mobilised marginalised groups among OBCs and Dalits by increasing their representation in political and constitutional offices, while unabashedly pursuing market-driven growth and weakening government’s institutions from which marginalised groups directly benefited in the past.

Also Read: Caste Census Move Is a Win For Opposition, Forces Modi Govt to Support Its Key Demand

At the same time, the saffron party has often pitted one OBC or Dalit group against countless others in different parts of India as a polarising tactic to build its own numerical majority in elections. As a consequence, it has engineered disunity among OBCs and Dalits, even when it has projected itself as a party of the poor. 

However, the manufactured hysteria generated by the BJP around the Ayodhya temple in the run-up to the 2024 Lok Sabha elections and coinciding speeches by certain “upper caste” saffron leaders that threatened constitutional guarantees to OBCs and Dalits undid many of the saffron party’s political gains. This reflected in the way that Modi surprisingly lost his majority in the Lok Sabha.

The outcome was a steep fall after the BJP’s repeated claims of crossing the 400-mark in the Lok Sabha polls – and also a strong enough indication of the diminishing returns of Hindutva and muscular nationalism.

The consistent show of its commitment to the constitution and attacks on the opposition for carrying out a “false narrative” after the Lok Sabha polls signalled not only BJP’s confusion but also its helplessness as it failed to evade social justice politics.

Reservation

By announcing that it will conduct a caste census, Modi has finally and officially acknowledged the relevance of caste as a political vantage point. He had excoriated the demand for a caste census at every occasion before, but has now realised that he can’t be at the helm of a diverse Bharat by running it down any more. His surrender on this front is perhaps the second big occasion when Modi was forced to withdraw his step, the first being his decision to reverse the contentious agrarian laws after a year-long farmers’ agitation in 2020-2021.

However, unlike the time when he withdrew those agrarian laws, Modi may have opened a much tougher battlefront for himself in this case. By agreeing to conduct a caste census, he has made himself vulnerable to the pressure of giving his nod to a more concrete demand that the opposition has raised – that of removing the 50% cap on reservations. Rahul Gandhi and other opposition leaders have openly called the 50% cap artificial and unrepresentative.

At a time, when Modi is facing severe diplomatic isolation in the aftermath of Operation Sindoor and a possibly united assertion by Muslim groups against the contentious Waqf (Amendment) Act, will he be able to handle the demand to remove the 50% cap on reservations? Both a yes or a no in this case will have a long lasting impact on his political career, as it will have seismic impacts on Indian polity.

Historically, populist leaders across the world have fallen when they overestimate their manoeuvring skills and open up too many battlefronts to handle. The remaining four years in Modi’s third term will surely be his biggest test as a leader, even as the BJP has been beating his drum on the occasion of his eleventh year as the prime minister.

This piece was first published on The India Cable – a premium newsletter from The Wire & Galileo Ideas – and has been updated and republished here. To subscribe to The India Cable, click here.

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