One of the factors fuelling the Bhartiya Janata Party’s dominance of national politics is the support it has managed to generate from the Dalit-Bahujan and Adivasi sections of society. This happened alongside the rise of the maverick leadership of Narendra Modi and the party’s innovative electoral and political strategy of providing some space to socially marginalised communities. The choice of Ram Nath Kovind and Droupadi Murmu as presidents of India is also seen as representative of the BJP’s desire to mobilise vulnerable castes and tribes. The BJP has consciously sought to promote itself as an ‘inclusive Hindutva’ party by offering greater space to subaltern social groups. It hopes this would change the party’s conventional image – that it overtly serves the social and class interests of the brahmin-bania elites.
The new parliament’s inauguration ceremony, however, stands in contrast to this turn that right-wing politics took to build a more inclusive Hindutva platform. The pedestal offered to brahmin priests and religious gurus during the event signifies the permanency of Brahmanical cultural values in the BJP’s institutional practices.
We witnessed Prime Minister Modi installing a ‘sengol’ while dozens of adheenams, monks and sadhus chanted mantras in Sanskrit and offered their blessings. More than the inauguration of the new parliament, the event looked like the grand validation of the priestly class’s authority over the parliamentary process while neglecting the need to make it more inclusive of socially marginalised communities.
The image of priestly classes within social justice movements
In elite-led nationalist literature, brahmin priests often symbolise the glory of “ancient India”, when the spheres of knowledge, art and culture were dominated by their authority. Often, Hindu religious and spiritual masters like sadhus, mahants, priests, brahmins, gurus, etc. are not seen as men interested in mundane worldly affairs but imagined as enlightened religious teachers that have supreme knowledge about the spiritual, cosmological and theological universe. On occasion, they guide the ruling elites in conducting social and political affairs on the basis of Sanatan Dharma and it was expected that under their aegis, society would stay ‘harmonious’ and ‘ethical’. On the flip side, however, they were also seen as the originators of the Hindu varnashrama dharma and the defenders of the repressive caste system that condemned a vast majority of the people to survive as shudhras and untouchables.
In the discourse of the non-brahmin movements and Dalit struggles for social justice, the priestly class was belittled as orthodox and conservative – as a section that stood against social reforms, opposed equality for women and against the idea of India as a modern, rational society. In non-brahmin narratives, sadhus and brahmin priests were not admired for their philosophical knowledge and wisdom but reviled as cunning (such as in the Dronacharya-Eklavya folklore) and exploitative (especially in the writings of Jyotiba Phule and Periyar Ramaswamy) masters who used perpetual power and prestige to trample on the human rights and social entitlements of the majority of the population.
Modern India witnessed impressive struggles by the non-brahmin communities to emancipate themselves from the thrall of Brahmanical rituals and the authority of brahmin priests. The Brahmanical Hindu caste order and its cultural values are challenged by the Buddha, Nanak, Kabir, the Bhakti saints and various other great minds in the past. In modern times, the Satyashodhak Samaj in Maharashtra, the Dravidian movement in south India, the reformist awakenings by the Arya Samaj in North India, the powerful Lingayat traditions in Karnataka, the Ravidas Pant in Punjab, etc. registered a powerful opposition against the coercive authority of the brahmins and other social elites, with an aspiration to replace them with a new learned class from the lower castes.
The social reform movements not only targeted Brahmanical domination but also challenged patriarchal control over women. For long, the majority of women had no right to education, were bonded to the system of child marriage and even pressured to follow criminal customs like Sati. Social reformers like Jyotiba and Savitribai Phule were the first to open schools for girls in India, challenging the Brahmanical-patriarchal setup. Later, Babasaheb Ambedkar emerged as an impressive voice of the social justice movement, reprimanding the brahmin elites for perpetuating the oppressive, caste-based hierarchies and legitimising the inhumane treatment of the untouchables.
The Hindu priestly class, especially the brahmins, are not known for enriching democratic and egalitarian values or for lending a supportive voice to the problems of socially marginalised groups. For the socially marginalised castes, therefore, it was not amusing or inspirational to witness the grand presence of brahmin and other priests in the new parliament, as it only reminded them of their own degraded social location and how until the recent past, the priestly class had craftily orchestrated their social marginalisation and economic exploitation.
The return of the Brahmanical core
During the spectacle that was the inauguration of the new parliament, the presence of non-Brahmin adheenam priests from Tamil Nadu may suggest that the gathering was an inclusive one. However, the Dalit-Bahujan and Adivasi groups would surely understand that this is merely a veil – probably inspired, as Amit Shah has recently shown us, by the desire for electoral gains in Tamil Nadu. The core agenda is to reinforce the Brahmanical cultural and social hierarchy and relegate the discourse of social justice and secularism to the background. The absence of Droupadi Murmu, the president of India, from such an event further confirms that the BJP’s leaders – and the state – are not interested in democratising social and political spaces for marginalised social groups but wish to consolidate the position of the priestly class.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi meets with Adheenam, in New Delhi on May 28, 2023. Photo: PIB
We know already that notwithstanding the BJP’s ‘inclusive Hindutva’ strategy, the state has not empowered the non-Brahmin communities in any meaningful sense. On multiple indicators of development, the marginalised castes are lagging. Further, within the social and religious domains, the marginalisation and discrimination of Dalits and Adivasis is overtly visible as a large majority of these communities still live in abject poverty, face caste-based humiliation and at regular intervals, the nation has witnessed brutal cases of caste violence, rape and honour killing. The deep cultural turn witnessed in the new parliament was aimed at shifting the attention of the deprived communities away from the crucial issues of representation in power and the distribution of economic assets. If priests are seen consecrating the state and prime minister, then this reinforces the belief that the inequalities they symbolise are immutable and can never be changed.
It is thus obvious that the event was designed to suggest that Hindutva politics will uphold the primacy and legitimacy of Brahmanical cultural values over state affairs. Here, the promotion of religious gurus and Brahmanical rituals helped the BJP reinforce its commitment towards Hindutva’s core ideological values, neglecting the social and political aspirations of the worst-off social groups.
The social justice and non-Brahmin movement know that the future of democracy depends crucially on the cultural and social interests of the Dalit-Bahujan castes. Modi’s religious show overtly disturbs the historic legacy of the social reform movements and harms the prospects of an inclusive, democratic society. The event was designed to assure the social elites that the BJP’s core ideological values are intact and the Modi regime will preserve and further promote their cultural and religious interests. And the party did so by enacting a spectacle that reminded the non-Brahmin castes about their degraded social location and how in the past they were excluded from Vedic traditions and religious functions.
Harish S. Wankhede is Assistant Professor, Center for Political Studies, School of Social Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.
