Behind Narendra Modi’s surprising electoral setback last month lay years of organizing by movements against his Hindu chauvinist agenda. One of those movements is working to forge unity between Muslims and Dalits against Modi’s efforts to divide them.
Indian prime minister Narendra Modi holds a news conference at Parliament House in New Delhi, India, on Monday, July 22, 2024. (Prakash Singh / Bloomberg via Getty Images)
The results of India’s national elections, announced at the beginning of June, cast doubt on the accuracy of forecasts which had unanimously predicted that the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) — the outgoing coalition led by Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) — would come out decisively on top. In fact, it won only a fragile majority, with the BJP forced to rely on coalition partners to stay in power after previously having a majority of seats in its own right.
The opposition coalition led by Rahul Gandhi (the Indian National Development Inclusive Alliance, or INDIA), which brings together thirty-seven parties, most of them regional, emerged significantly stronger than before. Against a backdrop of virtual hegemony for the BJP (particularly at the institutional and media level), the opposition performance looked like a remarkable political victory.
Preelection polls estimated that the NDA would win between 306 and 411 of the 543 seats. Convinced of his invincibility, Modi had even adopted the campaign slogan “over 400” (“400 per” in Hindi). However, such overconfidence backfired on the prime minister and his camp. The opposition was quick to point out the threats such an ambition posed to religious minorities, to the constitutional protections of the Dalits (“untouchables”), and to the secular character of the regime.
Achieving a two-thirds majority (362 seats) would have enabled the BJP to embark on decisive constitutional reforms with a view to establishing a Hindu state. But with a result of 293 seats for the NDA (60 fewer than in 2019), of which only 240 were for the BJP (63 fewer than in 2019), the third Modi government will now have to deal with the coldness its alliance partners are expected to show toward its guiding far-right ideology, Hindutva.
Popular Disaffection
These elections have shown the extent of popular disaffection with the BJP. On the one hand, discontent is focused on socioeconomic issues. Youth unemployment is at an all-time high, as is inequality, now considered to be worse than in colonial times.
Secondly, there are concerns about the future of secularism and the constitution. During Modi’s last term in office, this opposition was already massively expressed on the streets in the mobilizations against the agricultural reforms, preceded by other major demonstrations against the introduction of an anti-Muslim bias in access to citizenship through the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA).
The discrepancy between the forecasts and the actual election results clearly shows us that electoral studies cannot fully grasp the transformations in the population’s relationship with politics. It is true that preelection polls face particular difficulties in India.
Youth unemployment is at an all-time high, as is inequality, now considered to be worse than in colonial times.
To begin with, the parliament is elected on the basis of a first-past-the-post system, with a one-round election and no requirement for parliamentary candidates to win an absolute majority. When combined with the interweaving of different social cleavages and the subtle dynamics of local alliances that are often volatile, we have a complex political landscape that varies from region to region and is subject to logics of fragmentation and recomposition.
To shed more light on the possible electoral consequences of discontent with Modi’s rule, more qualitative approaches appeared in the form of reports in the independent and critical Indian press, and even in the international media. This involved finding the time to go out and meet working-class voters and take the country’s political temperature.
The emergence of these grassroots critics, particularly in the independent media outlets which have retained a strong critical capacity in relation to the government, has thus made it possible to question the forecasts of pollsters and to highlight a current of opinion hostile to the BJP in these elections.
This questioning had a performative effect in itself, boosting the morale of the opposition and lending credence to an alternative narrative that questioned the idea of Modi’s invincibility between the various electoral phases, which took place in seven stages between April 19 and June 1.
Rethinking Caste-Based Electoral Allegiances
Despite the willingness of some psephological specialists to take more qualitative approaches into account (as with the very popular Yogendra Yadav), most of the country’s political commentators (academics included) tend to reduce the subaltern vote to questions of caste (or jati, regional endogamous groups) arithmetic, more or less weighted by other factors such as previous electoral behavior and the existence or otherwise of a “wave” of opinion.
This is an easy solution, based on an approach to jati that is inherited from colonial ethnography and often reflects a profound ignorance of the groups branded as such. This reifying, static understanding of the popular vote is therefore disconnected from complex, shifting forms of mass consciousness and the stakes of protest. It is unable to account for the development of subjectivities that may be at work, often underground, and that can easily thwart predictions.
In contrast with this superficial approach to voting according to jati affiliation, we need to look at the profound transformations of these subaltern milieus due to the impact of changes in India’s political economy. The neoliberalism that has swept through Indian society over the past three decades has had consequences for political entrepreneurship in the petty bourgeoisie and for the militancy of the educated layers of these jati communities. Although it has sometimes created opportunities, the new type of economic development is also generating greater disparities in incomes and lifestyles not only between jati groups (such as Brahmins, Dalits, Other Backward Castes or OBCs, etc.) but within each of these groups as well.
Those suffering from different forms of vulnerability can sometimes converge in opposition rather than clash and compete with one another.
The neoliberal economic model promoted under Modi also gives rise to a persistent level of poverty and increases the precarity of life for the most vulnerable social groups. This is particularly true of the Dalits, who comprise one-sixth of India’s population. Their opportunities for social mobility thanks to quotas have been negatively impacted by the decline in accessible forms of public employment. The point also holds for Muslim craftsmen, shopkeepers, and small entrepreneurs, who suffer increased insecurity and ghettoization.
In the Gangetic Plain state of Uttar Pradesh (UP), for example, Dalits and Muslims compromise about two-fifths of the entire population. In cases like this, those suffering from different forms of vulnerability can sometimes converge in opposition rather than clash and compete with one another, as the dominant Hindutva (and neoliberal) ideology would have it. With its 241 million inhabitants and eighty constituencies, this provincial state, which plays a decisive role at national level, has just inflicted a major defeat on the BJP. UP therefore warrants a closer look.
A Laboratory for Subaltern Politics
This is not the first time that the subalterns of this impoverished agricultural province have defied predictions and created a significant political event. In December 1993, the formation of a regional government that included the Samajwadi Party (SP) and the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), a coalition of Dalits, Muslims, and OBCs, constituted an upheaval in the history of Indian democracy and a landmark for the Dalit movement.
At a time when election polls were still a rarity in India, these results took political journalists and researchers by surprise. The election was held a year after the destruction of the Ayodhya Mosque in UP by Hindu nationalists, which was followed by serious clashes between Hindus and Muslims that were expected to polarize the electorate in favor of the BJP. Commentators had only anticipated a close contest between the incumbent BJP and the Congress.
Yet for over ten years, the BSP (and previous organizations founded by its founder Kanshi Ram) had been mobilizing Dalits in a relatively discreet, underground manner. Although a few major rallies and electoral results had already attracted the attention of media outlets, the latter had generally confined themselves to a moral condemnation of this movement on account of its communitarianism. The movement was based on the militant involvement of many Dalit civil servants who had benefited from quotas and returned to their communities of origin with a message of emancipation and democratic capture of power.
In the 2020s, the Dalits of Uttar Pradesh found themselves deprived of effective leadership and even of representation.
Conceived and led by Kanshi Ram (1931–2006), a Dalit who gave up his career as a government engineer to devote himself to social mobilization, this movement for the political affirmation of lower castes and minorities had a strong ideological content at odds with official secularism (whose hypocrisy and blindness to caste issues it criticized). Indeed, it revived the criticism of Hinduism by B. R. Ambedkar (1891–56), the anti-Brahmanism of Jyotiba Phule (1827–90), the deviser of the Bahujan identity, who advocated the unity of the subaltern castes, and the thought of E. V. R Periyar (1879–1973), the anti-Brahmin Dravidian ideologue.
This first victory in December 1993 reaped the fruits of a vast operation of politicization from below initiated by Kanshi Ram. However, under the regional leadership of Kumari Mayawati, who served as chief minister of Uttar Pradesh several times, the UP BSP rapidly turned into a party of autocratic power. This was accompanied by tactical compromises in alliance with the BJP, as well as ideological reversals in a second attempt to free itself from the BJP and gain the direct support of the Brahmins, the highest Hindu castes.
In recent times, the BSP has been neutralized by the BJP’s central government. The Central Bureau of Investigation is threatening at any moment to initiate proceedings against its leader, Mayawati, who is at risk of imprisonment in view of the charges of massive corruption already brought against her by the investigation.
Since then, to avoid the triggering of this delayed process at the whim of the central government, Mayawati has refrained from joining opposition coalitions and has censored her own party’s leaders. One example was the dismissal of her own nephew, Akash Anand, who became too critical of the BJP for her liking in the recent campaign.
Mayawati is thus trying to prevent the Dalit vote, which she still partly controls, from joining up with the opposition. Her efforts benefit the BJP, which is thus able to neutralize an electorate traditionally unfavorable to its ideology. In the 2020s, UP’s Dalits found themselves deprived of effective leadership and even of representation (in the 2022 regional elections, the BSP obtained just one elected representative, compared with 206 in 2007, its highest score ever).
Dalits Turn Against the BJP
On the eve of the 2024 elections, the Dalit vote in UP seemed to be increasingly turning in favor of the BJP, which flattered Dalits by appealing to them as Hindus and gave them access to the distribution of basic necessities on account of their poverty. However, the 2024 results require us to analyze the reconstruction of a strand of opinion hostile to the BJP among Dalits.
The election polls for UP predicted that the NDA alliance would win between sixty-seven and seventy-five seats out of eighty, confirming the state’s image as a BJP bastion. In fact, the alliance won only thirty-six seats, half of what had been predicted. The 1993 model of an anti-BJP alliance of Dalits, OBCs, and Muslims thus seems to have been repeated, this time to the benefit of the INDIA alliance and its main representative in UP, the SP, which has reactivated this model under the name of Pichle-Dalit-Alpsankhyak (“OBC-Dalits-minorities”).
For the second time, the BJP failed to capitalize electorally on the Ayodhya symbol.
The impression that this was a repeat of December 1993’s historic outcome is all the more justified since, for the second time, the BJP failed to capitalize electorally on the Ayodhya symbol. The opposition’s victory in the Faizabad constituency was seen as a humiliation for the BJP. Taking advantage of a favorable Supreme Court ruling at the start of his second term in 2019, Modi had kicked off his campaign there ahead of schedule with the inauguration in January 2024 of the new Ayodhya temple on the site of the mosque that was destroyed by the mob in 1992.
In a spectacular turnaround, Faizabad now became emblematic of the popular rejection of Hindutva. The BJP’s upper-caste candidate, a longtime activist of the Ayodhya movement who had been accused of personally participating in the demolition of the mosque before he was acquitted in 2020, had also publicly raised the idea of amending India’s constitution. Hindutva has thus been rejected in one of its most symbolic sites, in the name of a defense of secularism and the Constitution.
This rejection was all the more destabilizing for the BJP as it was an opposition Dalit candidate who won this nonreserved constituency — Dalit candidates are usually nominated by parties exclusively in the constituencies reserved for Scheduled Castes, the official category for Dalits. Awadhesh Prasad is a veteran activist who was involved in the opposition to Indira Gandhi’s Emergency during the 1970s and a founding member of the Samajwadi Party.
The Case of Chandra Shekhar Azad
While the symbolic dimension of Hindutva’s defeat in Faizabad has been amply highlighted and commented on in the Indian media, the victory of a Dalit activist in another constituency deserves as much attention as what happened in Faizabad. Despite its isolated and singular nature, this result illustrates an ongoing process of recomposition of the Ambedkarist movement, which could give rise to political upheavals in Uttar Pradesh, and perhaps more widely.
Chandra Shekhar Azad is a thirty-six-year-old Dalit with a law degree who is the son of a schoolteacher. Azad heads the Bhim Army, a radical organization he founded in 2015 in the small UP town of Saharanpur with other Dalit students in reaction to the increasingly threatening arrogance of upper-caste youngsters under Modi.
Initially confined to western UP, this street-level political organization is now well established in several Indian states. It has made a name for itself and rapidly spread among Dalit youth via social networks, thanks to a number of challenges it directed against personalities representing the most extreme fringe of the BJP, such as UP chief minister Adityanath Yogi and Home Minister Amit Shah, Modi’s main confidant.
Chandra Shekhar Azad directly challenged the Home Minister Amit Shah in front of the cameras, saying he was ready to sacrifice his life in order to stand up for Muslims.
The Bhim Army is mainly made up of young men who proclaim a virile image through actions such as cultivation of the handlebar moustache traditionally associated with the Thakurs, Adityanath Yogi’s landowning upper-caste group. This organization includes many unemployed or underemployed graduates — young, overqualified workers who are ready for confrontation to defend the dignity and security of their Dalit community.
In this way, they intend to counter head-on the conservative reaction of the upper castes that has been enabled by Adityanath Yogi’s local government. This reactionary wave is in line with the hegemonic theory of the “double engine sarkar” (twin-engine government), which seeks to reinforce at provincial level the effects of Modi’s presence at the national level.
The Bhim Army became famous thanks to media reporting of its actions and the repression it faced, including numerous jailings, such as that of Chandra Shekhar Azad himself, who was imprisoned for fifteen months without trial after intercaste violence in Saharanpur. When Muslims contested the Citizenship Amendment Act in the winter of 2019–20, Azad joined the crowd of worshippers at Delhi’s Grand Mosque despite the ban on the demonstration.
Azad directly challenged the Home Minister Amit Shah in front of the cameras, saying he was ready to sacrifice his life in order to stand up for Muslims. After being arrested and tried, he founded a political party on his release, the Azad Samaj Party–Kanshi Ram (ASP-KR). In 2021, he was included in Time Magazine’s list of the world’s one hundred most influential personalities, paradoxically taking his place alongside figures such as Narendra Modi and Donald Trump.
While reappropriating the Bahujan ideology advocated by BSP founder Kanshi Ram, Azad’s explicit aim is to replace the BSP’s leadership as the representative of not only Dalits but also UP Muslims. In the ASP, the substitution of the B of the BSP by the A of Azad (which means “freedom” in Hindi/Urdu) is a mischievous allusion to this desire to free itself from Mayawati’s decaying leadership.
The party name thus reflects the Dalit movement’s generational renewal. In June 2023, a murder attempt in which Azad was shot in the abdomen — which he attributed to the BJP, although his assailants simply claimed to be engaged in casteist revenge without a political sponsor — showed just how disruptive his emerging leadership could be to the social order.
An Exemplary Alliance
A year later, Azad has now been declared winner of the Nagina constituency, which was considered easily winnable by the opposition due to its high proportion of Muslim voters. Rather than fielding candidates in a large number of constituencies and scattering his forces, Azad’s strategy was to field candidates in just two constituencies and stake everything on his own election, relying on a door-to-door campaign to ensure that his leadership of the Dalit community triumphed in the first instance.
Azad also preferred to remain outside the INDIA coalition so as to be able to run in this symbolic constituency where Mayawati was first elected in 1989. The Samajwadi Party, which dominates the coalition in UP, had refused to allow him to run there as an INDIA candidate, which would have been an ideal platform for his elevation.
Azad’s remarkable triumph means that he can now credibly claim to replace the leadership of Mayawati, discredited among Muslims by her past alliances with the BJP.
It has to be said that the Samajwadi Party emanates from a caste of OBC farmers, the Yadavs, whose members are often hostile to the emancipation of Dalit day laborers in the villages. The party itself seems to look with disfavor at the emergence of the radical and charismatic Dalit leadership embodied by Azad, which could thwart its own plan to lead Dalits and Muslims.
Azad succeeded in getting himself elected against the BJP, against the official opposition INDIA alliance, and against the BSP, which was reduced to almost nothing in this constituency (1.33 percent of the vote) as well as being severely weakened in Uttar Pradesh as a whole (9.39 percent of the vote compared with 30.4 percent in the 2007 regional elections, its high point).
Azad’s performance thus succeeded in embodying the unity between Dalits and Muslims on which the BSP’s first successes in December 1993 were based, and which had already been the formula for the first political successes of Ambedkarism in Western UP during the 1960s. With an enviable victory margin of 150,000 votes, Azad’s remarkable triumph means that he can now credibly claim to replace the leadership of Mayawati, discredited among Muslims by her past alliances with the BJP.
As the new rebel figure of Dalit youth, Azad’s breakthrough at the ballot box has created a significant breach in the social and political order. His supporters have pointed out that after leaving the Grand Mosque in handcuffs in December 2019, before finding himself banned from Delhi for a month on his release from prison, Azad has now made a triumphant return to the capital through the front door of Parliament.
With a message of social unity that aspires to go beyond a casual electoral alliance, this solidarity across India’s internal frontiers of communalism could make it possible to counter the ideological schemes of Hindutva from below. The latter force sees the Dalits as a component of the Hindu community that must be integrated through reforms, all the better to put them in opposition to Muslims, whom Modi did not hesitate to describe as “infiltrators” during his campaign.
Across the entire country, the political battle is fought on many regional fronts and is built on diverse ideological foundations. Yet the regional alliance of these two disadvantaged and stigmatized minorities, one social (the Dalits) and the other religious (the Muslims), possesses an exemplary subversive force in the context of Modi’s India.
This article was first published in French by the Conversation.