The Hindu Business Line : How BJP successfully wooed Adivasis

For many years, opponents of the Bharatiya Janata Party have claimed that the party is dominated by banias (traders) and those belonging to the upper castes. In recent years, however, the BJP has made concerted attempts to woo the underprivile ged sections, especially the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes. The party has achieved a measure of success in winning tribals to its side in northern and central India.

Will they dance to his tune? The Prime Minister blows a tribal instrument at an election meeting in Maharashtra, as BJP leader Mr Gopinath Munde, looks on.

THE moderate sections of the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Sangh Parivar have for quite some time now been making strenuous efforts to rid the party and the ideological fraternity of their exclusivist image by actively wooing tribals and lower caste Hindus. This has been achieved with varying degrees of success.

In December 1999, within a few months of being re-elected Prime Minister, Mr Atal Bihari Vajpayee had announced that his government was committed to amending the laws relating to job reservations for those belonging to the Scheduled Castes (SCs) and the Scheduled Tribes (STs).

Under the existing legal provisions, while 22 per cent of all government jobs at the entry level are reserved for these categories, promotions are "merit-based". Various SC/ST organisations have for long been demanding that the 22 per cent reservation be extended to promotions as well.

Merit as a criterion, they have argued, is "used" by upper caste superiors to deny the SC/ST employees promotion. The courts, however, have ruled that promotions done without using merit as a criterion were violative of the law as it stands. Mr Vajpayee's assurance was that the laws would be suitably amended to ensure that merit is no longer a necessary criterion for promotion.

This move was evidently out of character with the BJP's traditionally perceived apathy towards low caste Hindus. In fact, it was the perception that the BJP was essentially a party anaemic to the lower rungs of Hindu caste society that helped the party make the most of the upper caste backlash against the implementation of the Mandal Commission's report in the Hindi belt. Though not in tune with the BJP's track record, Mr Vajpayee's attempt to woo the SC/ST sections is a response to the imperatives of the times.

In Uttar Pradesh, in particular, the expulsion of Mr Kalyan Singh from the BJP after the 1998 Lok Sabha elections led to apparent erosion in the party's support base among the intermediate castes.

This was sought to be countered by Mr Rajnath Singh, who later became the Chief Minister of UP, by a concerted effort before the February 2002 Assembly elections in the State to woo the so-called "most backward castes" by reserving government jobs for them within the quota reserved for the "other backward classes" (OBCs).

The BJP justified its strategy by arguing that the relatively advanced sections of the OBCs had cornered most of the jobs that had been reserved for this section. While there is certainly considerable merit in this argument, the party's detractors are also not wrong in claiming that this marked an attempt by the BJP to create a rift within the ranks of the OBCs, a substantial proportion of which section of the population in the state is aligned to either the Samajwadi Party or the Bahujan Samaj Party in India's most populous State.

What is interesting here is that in UP the BJP had attempted to cobble together a caste alliance very similar to what the Congress had in the 1970s and the 1980s. After 1967, the Congress had lost the support of substantial sections of the intermediate castes, who saw in Charan Singh a leader of their own, but retained its hold over power thanks to the support of the upper most and lower most castes of the Hindu hierarchy.

Yet, the BJP remains a long way from replicating the situation despite the fact that Mr Kalyan Singh recently returned to the fold of the party. For one, the party, unlike the Congress of yore, has virtually no support among the sizeable Muslim population. Moreover, given the consolidation of the BSP, it seems unlikely that the BJP will be able to win over large sections of the Dalits to its fold, at least in UP.

Among the tribals of the North, on the other hand, the BJP has made impressive inroads in the last few years. Seats reserved for candidates from the STs — whether in Parliament or in the State legislatures — have traditionally been the bastion of the Congress since Independence.

This was true more or less across the length and breadth of India, except in some pockets where local groups specifically espousing the cause of tribals challenged the dominance of the Congress. Thus, groups such as the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM) in Jharkhand (earlier the southern districts of Bihar) or the Mizo National Front in Mizoram were the only serious challenge the Congress faced in tribal-dominated areas.

Today, that situation has undergone a dramatic change in a wide swathe of northern India stretching from Gujarat in the west to Orissa and Jharkhand in the east. In this band cutting across the heart of India, it is the BJP that now dominates tribal seats, with the Congress struggling to catch up.

Here are some telling statistics: In the elections to the State Assembly in Bihar (which then included Jharkhand) held in 2000, the BJP won 14 of the 28 seats reserved for STs, the Congress and the JMM could do not better than six each. In neighbouring Orissa, where elections were held at the same time, the BJP contested 23 of the 34 ST seats, leaving its partner the Biju Janata Dal (BJD) to contest the remaining 11. The BJP won 13 seats and the BJD won eight, the same number as the Congress.

Two-and-a-half years later, the same trend was visible in the December 2002 Gujarat Assembly elections. The BJP won 13 of the State's 26 ST seats, the Congress 11. Fast forward another year to December 2003 and move to Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh — the trend is if anything even clearer.

In Madhya Pradesh, the BJP won 37 of the 41 ST seats, the Congress just two. In Chattisgarh, the 34 ST seats were split 25-9 in favour of the BJP and in Rajasthan the Congress won five of the state's 24 ST seats against the BJP's 15. In these six states put together, therefore, the BJP holds 117 of the 187 assembly seats reserved for tribal candidates. The second biggest party, the Congress, holds a mere 41 seats by comparison.

What explains this dramatic turnaround in the political allegiance of the tribals of north and central India? Much of the credit for this impressive performance by the BJP must go to work done by the Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram (VKA), a front organisation of the Rashtriya Swayamseval Sangh (RSS), the party's ideological parent of the BJP.

For the record, the VKA conducts various activities for the benefit of the tribals, including setting up schools and health centres. The cutting edge of its activities, however, remains its campaign against tribals being converted to Christianity.

The VKA has been quite successful in polarising tribals along communal lines, pitting the "Hindu" tribals (many of whom are actually followers of animist religions) against Christians. The VKA has been partly helped by the fact that successive Congress governments were quite content to pay lip service to developing tribal areas, while doing precious little.

The fact that tribals who have converted to Christianity also typically have better access to education and hence to jobs has also helped the VKA in its attempts to drive a wedge among tribals belonging to different religions.

There are many who believe, somewhat simplistically, that the BJP has succeeded in government by becoming increasingly like the Congress, a centrist political party that had attempted to reconcile the interests of different sections of society. In the early-1990s, BJP insiders who were sympathetic to the more hardline sections within the Sangh Parivar, would jocularly remark that Mr Vajpayee was the best known Congressman in the BJP.

Little could these BJP "hardliners" have realised — as they did in June 1996 after the first 13-day Vajpayee government fell — that they would have to eat their words, that the BJP would have to shed its exclusivist stance and compromise with its erstwhile political opponents to remain in power.

The BJP has subsequently had to justify these political compromises as a choice between "lesser evils". But the party has had to woo sections of Indian society it had earlier not paid much attention to in order to occupy the centrist space in the country's polity vacated by the Congress.

(The author is Director, School of Convergence, International Management Institute, New Delhi. This article is based on a section of a book co-authored by him and Shankar Raghuraman entitled: "A Time of Coalitions: Divided We Stand" published by Sage Publications. He can be contacted at paranjoy@yahoo.com.)