Forward and Backward

In retrospect, it would appear that the populist, peasant-based call for a kshatriya past suddenly lost its voice after the 1940s. Certainly one hears little mention today of the kshatriya antecedents of Kurmi, Yadav, and Kushvaha political identity. In fact the shift from the cultural politics of the early twentieth century to the political culture of the 1990s is not one that occurred as a sharp break at Independence in 1947 but has been much more gradual, indeed, almost imperceptible. The implications of that shift are profound, however, signaling the demise of a political culture based on an ideology of martial power and the rise of politics based on democratic, demographic realities.

Of all the reformed kshatriyas, Yadavs maintained the highest political profile after 1940. The following decades saw the increasing political engagement of such organizations as the All-India Yadav Mahasabha, the All-India Yadav Youth League, and the Bharatiya Yadav Sangh. Despite this upsurge in Yadav political activity, however, the period witnessed increasingly fewer calls for a detailed investigation of the martial history of Yadavs. Indeed, even the brief but intense pressure by Yadav leaders in the 1960s for greater representation in the Indian armed forces and the creation of a Yadav regiment was supported not by a renewed elaboration of the ancient kshatriya glories of the community but by focusing on the participation of Ahirs in the 1857 rebellion (remembered now as the first war of Indian independence), the subsequent recruitment of Ahirs/Yadavs into the British-Indian army, and the valor of Yadav soldiers during the 1965 Indo-Pakistan war.^[3] While Yadav organizations were becoming politically more active (if less avowedly kshatriya) after 1947, the analogous Kurmi bodies seemed to be in absolute decline. The All-India Kurmi Kshatriya Mahasabha, which had held twenty conferences between the years 1894 and 1933, held half as many conferences between 1934 and 1971, with a gap of over ten years between the twenty-fourth (1948) and twenty-fifth (1958) meetings. The 1971 meeting was of particular significance in that Dahya Bhai Patel, a socialist member of parliament who presided over the session, successfully advocated the deletion of the term ‘kshatriya’ from all conference announcements—a decision which engendered substantial ill-will on the part of jati elders.^[4] This same conference also saw increased ties between the Kurmi and Kushvaha communities, perhaps a spillover from the days of political cooperation in the 1930s; however, one hears almost no reference at all to Kushvaha-kshatriya organizations.

What occasioned the decline of the kshatriya political idiom among Yadav, Kurmi, and Kushvaha peasants between 1940 and the present? While this question reaches beyond the scope of this study, the answer can be found in the changing politics of India or, more precisely, in the new politics of independent India. The previous chapter ended with the three main peasant movements for kshatriya identity co-opted by the late 1930s via the Triveni Sangh into the Backward Classes Federation of the Indian National Congress and, hence, into the struggle for independence from British rule. Triveni Sangh leaders no doubt based this strategic shift on the perception that the future of Indian political patronage was to be dictated by nationalist leaders dedicated to a quasi-socialist democracy and, in that context, committed to the amelioration of social and economic injustice. For Kurmi, Yadav, and Kushvaha leaders, this would represent a sea change in Indian political culture, since a kshatriya identity only had meaning in the context of a colonial political system crafted around visions of martial grandeur. In independent India politics would be predicated instead on universal adult suffrage and a commitment to the welfare of the nation’s citizenry and would be played out by Indian party politicians seeking Indian votes. The questions for the leaders of reformed kshatriya communities were, how to conceive of themselves in the new politics? how to relate to Indian social democracy?

In retrospect, the first indication that the prospect of an independent, social-democratic India would have a measurable effect on the Yadav, Kurmi, and Kushvaha identities could be seen in the nationalist conception of these peasant communities as components of a federation of “backward classes.” This would lead to constitutional safeguards in the form of reserved legislative seats, administrative and educational appointments, and other protective discriminations adopted by the first parliament on behalf of untouchables (“scheduled castes”), tribals (“scheduled tribes”), and “other depressed sections” of society.^[5] Specific clauses in articles fifteen and sixteen (entitled “Prohibition of Discrimination on the Grounds of Religion, Race, Caste, Sex, or Place of Birth” and “Equality of Opportunity in Matters of Public Employment,” respectively) of the Constitution gave the government of India the power to legislate in favor of “the advancement of any socially and educationally backward classes of citizens or for the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes.” To throw moral and political weight behind these clauses, Prime Minister Nehru included in the “Objectives Resolution” (a memorandum outlining the philosophy behind the Constitution) the assurance that “adequate safeguards shall be provided for minorities, backward and tribal areas, and depressed and other backward classes.”^[6] But while the question of identifying scheduled castes and scheduled tribes was settled before 1947 (in large part due to the efforts of B. R. Ambedkar, the author of the constitution), exactly who composed the backward classes—or, as Nehru put it, the “other backward classes”—was a question left for subsequent generations.^[7] This constitutional uncertainty, and the mixed record of government attempts to resolve it, would fuel the backward-classes movement after 1950.

The first attempt to identify the backward classes emerged in 1953, with the appointment of the Backward Classes Commission by the president of India. The commission, in a report submitted after two years of deliberation, indicated that caste was an important measure of “backwardness” and, as such, drew up a list of 2,399 castes they believed to be backward. However, five of the eleven members of the commission—including the head of the commission itself, the widely respected legal scholar Kakasaheb Kalelkar—voiced strong objections on philosophical grounds. In a dissent attached to the report, Kalelkar expressed his frustration that while “the caste system is the greatest hindrance in the way of our progress towards an egalitarian society, . . . the recognition of the specified castes as backward may serve to maintain and even perpetuate the existing distinctions on the basis of caste.”^[8] Thus, for many educated Indians, applying caste as a delimiting tool in the struggle to eradicate the inequalities of caste represented a philosophically self-defeating exercise. Their critics would charge that this philosophical dilemma was simply a convenient (and typically Gandhian) upper-caste ploy to delay indefinitely the pressing need to redress the millennia-old social injustices of caste. With this dilemma in mind, not to mention other more pressing political factors, the central government rejected the 1955 report on the grounds that the commission had not applied more objective criteria, such as income, education, and literacy, to determine backward status.

In the following decades, numerous state commissions were formed to devise methods of identifying “backward” on the basis of a regional caste list combined with a battery of social, educational, and economic litmus tests. In 1978 a new central government Backward Classes Commission was created, headed by B. P. Mandal. According to the Mandal Commission report, submitted at the end of 1980, fully 3,743 castes representing over 52 percent of the population of India were identified as “backward”; the commission therefore recommended additional reservations of 27 percent (so as to keep the combined total reservations for scheduled castes, scheduled tribes, and “other backward classes” under the constitutional limit of 50 percent).^[9] The central and state governments would deal with the backward classes issue in a variety of ways, some more aggressive than others. Even the Congress Party, since the 1970s viewed as a bastion of brahman conservatism on the backward classes issue, would gradually inch toward a grudging recognition of the political necessity of granting reservations according to their own reading of the Mandal Commission recommendations. If a turning point can be discerned, it was the announcement in August 1990 by then Prime Minister V. P. Singh that his government would begin implementing the Mandal recommendations. This act set off a firestorm of vigorous “forward-caste” protests, including a rash of self-immolation attempts by university students, and even brought down V. P. Singh’s National Front government. However, it effectively ensured that every major party would have to address the issue directly, not simply make gratuitous reference to it in campaign manifestos.

If reform on behalf of the backward classes posed a set of philosophical and logistical problems for the administrative and political elite, it posed an entirely different sort of dilemma for communities within the backward classes movement itself. The dominance of the “backward” rhetoric has meant, for members of many newly designated “backward” castes, that communities long engaged in sophisticated campaigns to garner self-respect as kshatriyas—reformed, educated, and socially advanced—had now to begin representing themselves as disadvantaged. While one object of jati mahasabha relations with government—whether British or Indian—remained the same, namely, the agitation for greater job opportunities, the entire tone of the relationship with government changed. No longer would caste leaders dispatch memorials to government bureaucracies elaborating the proud histories and extensive abilities of their communities as a justification for increased employment; the post-1947 leaders of the same communities have agitated for the passage of backward classes legislation—and hence symbolically important reservations for jobs, university admissions, and seats in legislatures—as a political and social obligation of government, so that the beneficiaries of that legislation, conceived as the downtrodden members of an oppressive society, can lead their brothers and sisters out of the abyss of institutionalized inequality.^[10]

The demise of kshatriya reform politics does not mean, however, that the religiously potent politics of kshatriyatva (martial valor) are no longer to be seen in north India. That political idiom still survives, but has been taken up by what is generally referred to as the “Hindu right,” manifest in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar as the Sangh Parivar (the family of the Sangh): the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. Consequently, we still hear a great deal about the martial qualities of Ramchandra and, increasingly, Krishna, though they are not articulated in terms of the genealogical antecedents of the communities that have come to be known as “backward,” but as the basis for a new moral politics and a utopian social vision centered in particular on the birthplaces of those divine personages. Given the political topography of north India, it is generally assumed that the “backwards” keep the Hindu right at arm’s length. This is due to the quasi-socialist leanings of most backward-class leaders as opposed to the generally procapitalist leanings of the BJP (which has in the past, collective wisdom tells us, relied upon the financial contributions of small urban shopkeepers and the occasional major financial concern). It is also often held that cadre support for the BJP is drawn largely from the upper castes who inhabit the burgeoning economic middle classes in the cities, a social composition that would alienate the backwards. However, BJP leaders make no secret of their desire to attract a greater peasant following, and to do this they would naturally seek to exploit the by now near-forgotten claims to kshatriya status by Yadavs, Kurmis, and Kushvahas of yesteryear. It is in this context that the Yadav identity of Bihar’s chief minister, Laloo Yadav, was called into question after his jailing of the BJP leader Lal Kishan Advani, during the latter’s “chariot ride” through north India to “liberate” the birthplace of Ram (Ramjanambhumi) in 1989.^[11] The implication is that if Laloo Yadav had been true to the Vaishnava dimensions of his Yadav-kshatriya roots, he would have supported the Ramjanambhumi movement and allowed Advani’s procession to make a grand entrance into eastern Uttar Pradesh from Bihar. As yet it is unclear how “backwards” are responding to such rhetoric, though the successes of the Hindu right at the polls in the past decade and the support the Ramjanambhumi movement attracted in the rural areas indicate that the new articulation of kshatriyatva is resonating with more than just the urban middle class and the rural elite.

The emergence of backward and kshatriyatva politics reflects not only the changing nature of politics but the changing political culture of India. In ideological terms 1947 represented a clear break with the past, a watershed in terms of how individuals perceived themselves as part of the Indian body politic. Fundamental to this ideological change is the fact—explicit in the constitution with reference to universal equalities and implicit in any political system organized around democratic processes—that from the point of view of government (as distinct from politicians, political parties, and voters themselves), caste no longer constituted the basis of an individual’s political and legal being, as it had in British India. However, moving from a political culture based firmly on caste to one that repudiates casteism is easier said than done. Scholars will be left to speculate on the effect of such legal reorientations on mass politics and individual people; there can be no doubt, however, that the effects on both were interconnected and, as yet, are unresolved. The backward class movement was connected to the rise of a socialist-democratic state and reflected the popular perception that that state would respond to those who portrayed themselves as sufficiently needy. The new politics of kshatriyatva reflect, by contrast, a broad-based frustration with the nature of the moral order (or lack thereof) implicit to that state. The slow abandonment of the socialist components of the Indian state that now seems to be taking place is a process that of necessity reduces the extent to which the state can provide what it may have deemed in the past socially desirable employment, representation, and education. The issue that faces Yadavs, Kurmis, Kushvahas as the twentieth century draws to a close is whether they should relinquish the politics of “backwardness” altogether in favor of a return to their kshatriya reformist roots. If they were to do so, it would be natural for them to articulate kshatriya reform politically as kshatriyatva.