Redistribution to Fragmentation | Lohia's vision, Nitish Kumar's politics

What began as a critique of the Congress' elitism ended as a politics of patronage, fragmentation, and Hindutva accommodation

Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, kicked upstairs to the Rajya Sabha in his dotage, has been one of the biggest facilitators of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in Bihar, where it previously had no base. From opposing the ‘one-party dominance’ of the Congress, today Kumar has become the standard-bearer of the one-party dominance of the BJP.

Although Kumar’s series of flip-flops may have delayed the BJP's rise in Bihar, the broad trajectory of his politics has been to accelerate its rise rather than constrain its dominance. Now, he has paved the way for the appointment of a BJP chief minister.

Kumar’s political career has broadly followed the direction of Rammanohar Lohia’s brand of socialism — that of normalising and routinising Hindutva majoritarianism. This was earlier done in the name of ‘non-Congressism’ — meaning that any party that was opposed to the Congress should be supported to weaken its influence. Now, although Kumar is driven by the individual pursuit of power, it is pertinent to note that his roots essentially were in Lohiaite socialism. In retrospect, the broad role of Lohia socialists has been to facilitate the rise of the BJP.

Lohia’s non-Congressism rationalised alliances between diverse ideological groups ranging from socialists, Right-wingers, and regional players. It justified the socialists aligning with the BJP’s predecessor Hindutva party, the Jan Sangh. Indeed, by the mid-1960s, the Jan Sangh was portrayed by the socialists as a legitimate political partner. The socialist penchant for coalition-building, irrespective of political ideology, led to the formation of the Janata Party government of 1977, in which socialists and Jan Sangh leaders worked together. Even though the experiment was short-lived, the Jan Sangh (which later morphed into the BJP), gained administrative experience as well as legitimacy.

Lohia’s dislike of the Congress rule was visceral, and to end its dominance, he ended up creating a politics of caste-based mobilisation, regional identities, and opportunistic alliances. The resulting social fragmentation, facilitated the BJP’s ascendancy. With a strategy of OBC-outreach plus Hindutva, it was able to expand beyond its upper-caste and largely urban base, to emerge as a national force.

However, it will be wrong to conflate Lohia’s opposition to the Congress dominance with what that stands for today — the tactical search for political power. At its best, it was rooted in the critique of the elitism of the Congress — especially its urban, upper caste, and English-speaking leadership, the party’s centralised structure, and its inability to conceptualise and deliver social justice.

It is not as if Lohia did not have elite education — he wrote his PhD thesis on colonial taxation (Die Besteuerung des Salzes in Indien  or ‘Salt Taxation in India’) at Humboldt University in Berlin. His exposure to Western sociology while in Europe led him to argue that caste was the primary basis of structural exploitation in India and not class, as Karl Marx argued. He saw caste as the primary category for analysing exploitation in India, and emphasised its intersections with class, gender, and language (mostly Hindi).

Lohia believed that the Congress did not prioritise the uplift of the marginalised. He wanted the empowerment of local institutions (‘small unit democracy’), co-operative federalism, and decentralisation of power — in effect, railing against the increasingly Delhi-centric politics. He wanted competitive democracy. 

The key difference between today’s so-called socialist parties of North India and what Lohia envisaged is crucial. Lohia wanted the dismantling of caste hierarchies, and his politics was both strategic and ideological. His followers, on the contrary, have entrenched caste identities in their politics, instead of moving to dissolve them. Their politics is tactical and often a non-ideological pursuit of power.

Lohia’s socialism collapsed in the face of his followers' greed for power. His politics of redistributive social justice and broad-based emancipation of the backward castes was reduced to caste-based vote-bank politics, and run by family-led caste parties, driven by patronage. Backward caste leaders rose to power, but structural inequalities continued.

His followers did little to increase the access of the marginalised to education, healthcare, and economic opportunities. His idea of caste as the best approximation of class in India was transformed into the Mandal Commission, and its quota-based affirmative action — symbolic representation without structural transformation. Redistribution metamorphosed into fragmentation — instead of increasing access to education, resources, and political representation, the focus became caste-quotas, caste-patronage, and caste-symbolism. This deepened caste identities, and politics became about the representation of competing castes.

Eventually, hardly any of the Lohia socialists worked for redistributive justice through broadening institutional access, as they preferred caste patronage. Nitish Kumar presenting himself as Susashan Babu (good governance man) was mostly for optics, and only partly a reference to the improvement in his early term in the law-and-order situation, electricity infrastructure, and women’s empowerment. However, his record on education, health, and job creation was pretty thin.

Lohia socialists claimed to be against the dynastic politics of the Congress, and yet each one of the parties led by them quickly descended into family-run enterprises. Nitish Kumar also succumbed to it by promoting his son, Nishant Kumar, marking a break from his long-standing socialist rhetoric.

No wonder then that none of the so-called socialist leaders today has been able to evolve a different politics.  As long as caste remains the main driving force of their politics, class and economic justice will take a backseat. There will be no substantially different political agenda, while the BJP will have an additional advantage over them with welfarism, outreach to non-dominant backwards castes, and Hindutva.

In principle, Lohia’s idea of democratising local institutions could have led to stronger and democratic local institutions, and alternative ways of empowerment, obviating the need for caste patrons. However, it is unlikely that in the near future India will see the emergence of social democratic parties rooted in Lohia’s vision. The Mandalised caste parties will become a permanent feature of the Indian political landscape. With the new caste census, the process of caste-based fragmentation is likely to be further entrenched, which will suit the BJP.

Non-Congressism is no longer needed. The Congress has shrunk nationally as well as in the regions, obviating that need. If Lohia had been alive, he might have opposed the BJP not only because of its overwhelming electoral dominance but also for its deeply divisive ideology. His followers are politically illiberal, narrow-minded, and perhaps claim to be secular only for electoral reasons.

Bharat Bhushan is a New Delhi-based journalist.

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH