Recently, while campaigning for the Karnataka assembly elections, Union home minister Amit Shah made a claim that under Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s rule a ‘new caste of beneficiaries’ has emerged which will ensure that caste arithmetic would not hamper the chances of BJP’s victory. Shah was trying to convey that the BJP’s welfare regime is so effective that it has created a new electoral bloc cutting across ascriptive identities.
If indeed Shah’s claim is true, then it begs the question: Why is Modi trying to turn the election into a referendum against the promise to ban fringe saffron groups rather than ask the electorate for a positive mandate based on his welfare record by mobilising this ‘new caste’?
However, not only is Modi shying away from asking for votes based on his economic record but he has been waging a concerted attack on the very idea of economic justice by denigrating welfare measures by calling them ‘freebies’ or revdi. This becomes all the more interesting because the BJP has promised so-called revdis in its manifesto for Karnataka.
This duplicity is not restricted to a particular state but extends across the country where the BJP-led governments – including the Union government – run extensive welfare schemes while attacking the very idea of the welfare state.
This duplicity is born out of the political and ideological compulsions of Hindutva and highlights the limits of ensuring economic justice under its framework.
Remember religion, forget class
There is a fundamental difference between most other ideological projects which populate the Indian political landscape and Hindutva. Most ideologies are based on some idea of justice, social or economic. Hindutva is the only project that is based not on the idea of justice but on ethno-religious supremacism expressed through the language of majoritarian nationalism.
In We or our Nationhood Defined, RSS ideologue M.S. Golwalkar conceptualised the nation as an organic whole which can prosper only when all body parts function harmoniously. This is why he lists Communists along with Muslims and Christians as ‘threats to the Hindu nation’ because while the Muslims and Christians unsettle the cultural uniformity of the nation, the Communists provide a powerful critique of this fictional organic unity of the nation by bringing glaring economic contradictions to the surface.
The construction of the Hindu nation requires the constant mobilisation of the people as ‘Hindus’; which means that people must privilege their religious identity above all else while making political decisions.
The construction of this Hindu subject necessitates continuous religious polarisation to sharpen his ethno-religious identity while simultaneously blunting the very real contradictions within the economy.
From rights to revdi: Delegitimising economic justice
However, in a democratic setup, and especially in the face of our woeful poverty, while economic contradictions can be temporarily swept under the carpet; they cannot be wished away and have to be addressed.
Therefore, Hindutva tackles economic demands by undertaking welfare in an ad-hoc and deinstitutionalised manner; careful not to invest it with the integrity of political discourse.
Hindutva’s approach to welfare comes out most clearly when contrasted with the approach of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA). Under the UPA, a regime of rights-based approach to welfare was developed which made the state politically and morally responsible for providing a bundle of basic social goods like work, food, education and information.
PM Modi dismantled the rights-based architecture and replaced it with ad-hoc provisions which were used to bolster his cult and personalise power. For example, the Modi government took the decision to provide 80 crore citizens with free rations at the cost of Rs 2 lakh crore through a cabinet notification without any major public deliberation.
This decision relocated the problem of hunger from the realm of rights to largesse; transforming citizens into clients dependent upon the benevolent sovereign. Moreover, the absence of any public deliberation around such an important decision performed the function of invisibilising structural economic injustice; thereby, enabling the regime to evade any responsibility for continued economic deprivation; but more importantly, preventing the possibility of the emergence of a class-based discourse which could challenge Hindutva’s hegemony.
Karnataka: Choice between justice and supremacism
This is clear in the contrasting campaigns in Karnataka as well. The Congress has anchored its campaign on the twin planks of economic justice reflected in the “five guarantees” which are a bundle of welfare schemes and social justice with the demand made by Rahul Gandhi to conduct the caste census and provide proportionate representation; whereas, the BJP under the stewardship of Modi is trying to polarise the electorate rather than mobilise this supposed ‘new caste of beneficiaries’. This is not merely a tactic but an inherent limitation of the political discourse of Hindutva because it cannot provide substantive economic or social justice without destabilising itself.
Anshul Trivedi has a PhD in political science from JNU and is currently a Congress worker. He tweets at @anshultrivedi47.