The swing castes of the 2024 LS elections

Gehlot's elevation to the top post as the Congress president is a clear sign that Congress will increasingly lean on intermediary backward castes

In politics, events and alignments are planned well in advance. Media, on most occasions, is called in to cover the denouement.

Last month, when Nitish Kumar and Tejashwi Yadav decided to bury the hatchet and joined hands to form the government in Bihar, this author sought to decipher the contours of 'the Bihar Accord'.

The crux of the argument was that the re-alignment in Bihar was stitched with a larger objective of forming a credible opposition front against the BJP in the 2024 Lok Sabha polls. And the Congress was a third yet critical piece in the agreement between the Mandal outfits from the heartland state and the grand old party.

Political narratives for the Lok Sabha elections in a diverse country like India are built like a jigsaw puzzle. For opposition parties seeking to build an alternative to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Bihar is the first piece in place.

The numbers staked up in the last two Lok Sabha tell the story. To take on the BJP, the Opposition has to whittle down the BJP's strength in north, west and central India.

In the 120 Lok Sabha seats in UP and Bihar, the BJP is challenged by the Samajwadi Party and Rashtriya Janata Dal. The BJP has done exceedingly well here in the last two elections adding 80 or more seats to its kitty both in the 2014 and 2019 polls. If one were to add 14 seats from Jharkhand to this, the figure touches 90. That's almost one-third of the numbers required to get a simple majority in the lower house with 540 odd seats.

The BJP's massive political mobilisation in the three Hindi heartland states is built around two key social groups: the upper castes and numerically small and less dominant other backward classes (OBCs) who have thrown in their lot behind the BJP as a reaction to the hegemony of the dominant Mandal castes like the Yadavs within the OBC blocks.

The message from the last two assembly elections in UP and Bihar was clear. In UP, Akhilesh Yadav's Samajwadi Party did well only in pockets where it could add smaller intermediary castes to its kitty as in sections of western UP (where Jayant Choudhary's Rashtriya Lok Dal held fort) and in the eastern belt where some most backward castes voted for the Opposition along with party's traditional Muslim-Yadav voters.

Whereas in the adjoining Bihar, Nitish Kumar's Janata Dal (United), with a support base among non-Yadav OBCs and a section of Dalits, has carved a swing constituency which holds the levers of powers firmly in its hands. These communities led by a non-Yadav leader (Nitish Kumar is a Kurmi by caste) have demonstrated their ability to swing the elections in favour of either of the dominant poles in state politics - the RJD and BJP.

Non-BJP parties will seek to build a more extensive OBC mobilisation outside Bihar in 2024, especially in other heartland states like UP and Jharkhand, where Kurmis are dominant OBC communities like Yadavs. This is why we see waters being tested in Uttar Pradesh to see if Nitish Kumar can contest from Phulpur, just 120 km upstream from Varanasi, on the other side of the Ganges across Prayagraj.

It is a constituency represented by Jawahar Lal Nehru and later by his sister Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit. The Kurmi consolidation here can be gauged from the fact that Bahujan Samaj Party founder Kanshi Ram was defeated here by his once protégé, Jang Bahadur Patel, a Kurmi leader, in the 1996 elections.

The Akhilesh Yadav-Mayawati alliance for the 2019 Lok Sabha polls was firmed up in Phulpur when the SP candidate defeated BJP in the 2018 by-polls necessitated by the resignation of UP deputy CM Keshav Prasad Maurya.

That this larger OBC mobilisation is being framed around Nitish Kumar is evident with two Yadav-dominated parties, the RJD and SP, making tactical concessions. Whether Kumar will be formally anointed as the face of this grouping will depend on how the narrative shapes in the months ahead. Lalu Yadav and Nitish Kumar's meeting with Congress chief Sonia Gandhi is the second step towards that end.

The other major battleground states which may determine the final tally and government formation in 2024 would be states in the north, central and west where the Congress and BJP are in a direct contest - Gujarat, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Haryana, Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh. The BJP has exhibited a fairly high strike rate in all these states in the last two general elections.

But the results have been surprisingly different wherever the Congress has sought to project local leadership, especially from the intermediary castes. In the 2018 assembly polls, the Congress could form governments in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh. Campaigns in two out of these three states were led by strong OBC faces - Ashok Gehlot in Rajasthan and Bhupesh Baghel in Chhattisgarh.

The impressive Congress performance in the 2017 assembly elections in Gujarat was underpinned by backward communities in the rural parts of that state. Now, Gehlot's elevation to the top post as the Congress president is a clear sign that the Congress will increasingly lean on intermediary backward castes to strengthen its position in the north and west.

The party could seamlessly make this transition down south in the 1970s and 80s and hence survived the Mandal rupture. The three-time Rajasthan CM belongs to a backward community which has traditionally been associated with commercial gardening.

The Bihar Accord and the Congress' presidential polls are tactically coupled. It is hardly surprising that Sonia Gandhi has asked Nitish Kumar to continue work towards building opposition unity and take matters up with the new Congress president. Nitish Kumar's subtle projection is a part of messaging to not just the Kurmis of Bihar and Jharkhand but the Patidars of Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh and Kunbis of Maharashtra.

In Gehlot's selection, too, Congress is trying to send across a message to the intermediary castes who, by all conservative estimates, constitute more than half of the total electorate in the country.

The BJP's vote share within this section has been steadily on the rise in the last two decades. This mobilisation was given further impetus with Prime Minister Narendra Modi's decision to contest the 2014 elections from UP, combined with BJP's tactical re-calibration in subtly projecting him as a leader who belongs to a backward community.

After two comprehensive defeats in the Lok Sabha polls and many more in various assembly elections in the last eight years, opposition parties have been forced to return to the drawing board.

(Sumit Pande is a senior journalist)

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