Most interpretations of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP’s) victory in the recently held Haryana assembly elections are correct in highlighting that the BJP tactfully used anti-Jat views to mobilise non-Jat castes in Haryana to spring this surprise victory.
It was a surprise in two ways: one, most election observers and exit polls had predicted its defeat; and two, the calculated mobilisation of non-Jat castes was not publicly proclaimed by the BJP’ propaganda machinery during the election campaign.
The reason BJP did not publicise this election tactic is not because it did not want the anti-BJP forces to know about this underhand operation – though this may also be partially a part of the design – but because the strategic Hindutva agenda denies or downplays caste divisions in Hindu society.
Just a few days before the election results came out, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) chief Mohan Bhagwat, speaking at a ‘Swayamsevak Samagrahan’ event in Rajasthan, outlined the Hindutva project as one of building Hindu unity by overcoming internal divisions based on caste, language and region. This speech was widely reported in India’s mainstream media and circulated on social media.
It is no secret that the Hindutva project opposes caste, regional and linguistic diversities in India and the Indian diaspora. In the totalising Hindutva vision of India as a Hindu nation, these variations are seen as violative of that vision. Hindutva ideologists opposed the linguistic reorganisation of states after India’s partition. They proposed a mere geographical and administrative division of India into four parts: East, West, North, and South. Linguistically, the privileged promotion of Hindi in Devanagari script, aided by Sanskrit vocabulary as the official language of communication between the Union and state governments, inserted in the Indian constitution, was a part of this Hindutva-promoted project. Only because of the strong opposition to this Hindi imposition from non-Hindi speaking states, particularly Madras (now Tamil Nadu), was English added as the second official language of government communication.
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The Sangh parivar and the supporters of its views in the Congress party opposed the creation of Haryana as a separate state even though this opposition was an offshoot of the group opposed to creating a Punjabi-speaking state. It was due to Devi Lal and Hardwari Lal, two visionary leaders of Haryana, who supported the demand for a Punjabi-speaking state, that Haryana was created in 1966.
A substantial section of upper-caste urban Hindus, influenced by the Hindu/Hindi ideology of the Sangh, declared Hindi as their mother tongue. As a result, many Punjabi-speaking areas with such Punjabi-Hindu majority were included in Haryana. This section has remained the most loyal electoral supporter of the BJP and the selection of Manoharlal Khattar as chief minister of the last BJP-led government was a way of recognising and consolidating this section. Caste-wise, most of BJP’s successful candidates in the recent elections are upper-caste Punjabi-Hindus from this pocket of Haryana, known as the GT road pocket.
This caste electoral engineering by the BJP may exacerbate the existing, but dormant, Jat resentment against Punjabi Hindus in Haryana.
The BJP’s anti-Jat mobilisation in Haryana also has roots in the successful farmers’ struggle against the three pro-agribusiness farming laws brought in by the BJP government in 2020 which had to be repealed in 2021. This farmers’ struggle was unprecedented in the breadth and depth of its successful mobilisation of the Indian peasantry against an unjust state policy in the last several decades. Though the farmers from Punjab were leading that struggle, Haryana’s farmers enthusiastically supported them. Jat farmers from both states, supported by the Jat farmers from UP, Uttarakhand and Rajasthan, were the true backbone of the movement.
The humiliation inflicted by that successful farmers’ struggle on the BJP regime made the saffron party reckon that if there was any section in Indian society that had the strength, resources, resilience and organisational structures to oppose it, it was the Jat farming community. There is no doubt that the BJP wants to weaken this section. There are attempts in Punjab, too, to mobilise anti-Jat currents against the Jats from the same perspective of breaking farmers’ strength.
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However, a crucial distinction between Haryana and Punjab would not allow the BJP to succeed in its anti-Jat tactics in Punjab. Sociologist Shivam Mogha has drawn attention to one key aspect of this distinction. He argues that even though most were Jats by caste, Punjab’s farmers have built strong, grassroots tieswith agricultural labour organisations and even urban traders (arhtiyas) over many years. The ideological, political work by left-wing organisations and the egalitarian teachings of the Sikh faith have facilitated the building of Kisan-Mazdoor (farmer-labour) unity. This is not the case in Haryana, which allowed the BJP to broaden anti-Jat mobilisation by even including Dalit agriculture labour against them.
Thus anti-Jat mobilisation might boomerang against the BJP, even electorally, in the future if it leads to Jat consolidation. One cannot rule out Congress, Indian National Lok Dal (INLD), and Jannayak Janta Party, all with strong Jat vote bases, coming together in the future as a part of this consolidation. The INLD had built an electoral pact with the Bahujan Samaj Party in this election, perhaps learning from the experience of Punjab farmers. So, Jat-Dalit (or Kisan Mazdoor unity) might emerge in Haryana too. That will not only further weaken the Hindutva’s totalising agenda, but might also inflict electoral defeats on the BJP.
Pritam Singh is Professor Emeritus at Oxford Brookes Business School and the author of Federalism, Nationalism and Development.