Beyond Bihar, Caste Census is Meant to Woo Estranged OBCs & Dalits in UP

The somersault on caste survey may be calculated to alter a growing sense of duplicity by BJP among OBCs & Dalits.

The immediate trigger for caste census may well be the upcoming Bihar Assembly polls but the ruling party is even more worried about its prospects Uttar Pradesh.

(Photo: Aroop Mishra/The Quint)

The Narendra Modi government’s decision to concede the longstanding demand of Opposition parties and some of its own National Democratic Alliance (NDA) allies for a caste census is guided by pressing electoral compulsions. It underlines the anxiety to woo Other Backward Castes (OBC) and Scheduled Caste (SC) voters by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its ideological mentor, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), both resistant for long to the collection of caste demographic data on the plea this would divide Hindu society.  

The immediate trigger may well be the upcoming Bihar Assembly polls, to be held within a few months. But the ruling party is even more worried about its prospects in the country’s most populous and politically crucial state of Uttar Pradesh where it got a drubbing last year in national elections largely because of disenchantment among OBCs and Dalits, whose support had been critical to ensure the BJP’s remarkable winning run in the recent past.

Two Birds with One Stone

The 2024 Lok Sabha results in Uttar Pradesh stunned the ruling party, which had earlier swept the state in successive Parliamentary and Assembly polls. Since then, the top leadership in both the BJP and the RSS have been preoccupied with strategising on how to reverse its waning support among OBC and Dalit voters.

According to the usually reliable CSDS-Lokniti post-poll survey, the BJP-led NDA votes slid by 19 percent among the powerful Kurmi-Koeri backward caste and 13 percent among other non-Yadav OBCs in 2024 as compared to Lok Sabha election from five years ago. The party also lost 19 percent of the non-Jatav Dalit vote in 2024.

This is what then led to the dismal fall of the NDA from 64 to 36 out of 80 Parliamentary seats from one election to the other. 

The BJP did manage to significantly wrest back the initiative in Uttar Pradesh by choosing as many as four OBCs and one Dalit of the eight party candidates in Assembly bypolls in the state in late November, winning a majority of them.

However, considerable disquiet remains within the party and the RSS leadership with regard to reconsolidating the BJP’s shrinking OBC-Dalit voter base. Surrendering to one of its key demands of a comprehensive caste survey along with the long-delayed national census due to start this year illustrates this very fact.

In a recent article, Swarajya, a pro-BJP magazine, carried an extensive report pointing out that “without a clear strategy to regain OBC support, the BJP faces a tough challenge in the 2027 Uttar Pradesh Assembly elections. The UP unit of the BJP has much to worry about with respect to winning back the trust of OBC voters after the 2024 Lok Sabha election setback.” 

The article also added, “Moreover, the narrative of 'Thakurvaad' (favouritism for Thakur or Rajput castes) under UP Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath, who belonged to the Thakur community before joining the Gorakhnath monastic order, does not appear to be helping the BJP.” 

Although Adityanath, along with all other BJP luminaries, has publicly fallen in line with the Centre's decision to carry out a caste census, the saffron-clad monk-turned Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh had until recently been a fierce opponent of such a move.

Just a few months ago in an excusive interview with Network18 TV channel at the Mahakumbh in Prayagraj, when asked about the caste census demanded by the Congress and the Samajwadi Party, Adityanath warned “followers of Sanatan Dharma" to be cautious of “those trying to divide people".

“Dividing the society for your political interest, or in the name of caste, region, or language is nothing less than treason."

Yogi Adityanath (to Network18)

Last year, while campaigning for the Lok Sabha polls, the CM castigated the demand by Opposition parties for a caste census, calling them “jaati ke saudagar (merchants of caste)" and cautioned his audience that “such elements would trade your interests for the sake of castes and then vanish.”

OBC Leaders Close Ranks as Dalits Remain Estranged

Interestingly, in sharp contrast to Adityanath, his Deputy Chief Minister Keshav Maurya and Minister of State in the Modi government Anupriya Patel, leader of a key BJP ally in UP, Apna Dal (Soneylal), both OBC leaders, have for long demanded a caste census in defiance of the official stand of the BJP.

The two are reportedly keen to puncture the CM's all-powerful status in the state with the quiet backing of Union Home Minister Amit Shah.

Last year, Patel openly criticised the state government for outsourcing government jobs dodging reservation, which she said could become transparent after a caste census. 

A few months ago, BJP's OBC legislator and anti-cow slaughter activist Nand Lal Gurjar created a public furore about the Yogi government being full of corrupt officials led by the chief secretary Manoj Kumar Singh. He alleged that when he tried to complain about the officials, most of them upper caste, they had ordered the police to manhandle him. He has been served a notice by the party but has reportedly the private support of Keshav Maurya. 

The BJP’s caste conundrum has been compounded by its growing alienation from Dalits in the state.

Over the past decade, the ruling party had managed, apart from enlisting significant support from non-Yadav backward castes, to make significant inroads among the Dalit electorate, particularly those belonging to non-Jatav sub-castes, both providing the extra electoral ballast to consolidate support from the upper castes to ensure the BJP a comfortable victory.  

Desperate attempts by the Yogi government to woo back the estranged Dalit community by celebrating, for the first time, Babasaheb's birth anniversary with much public pomp and fanfare, badly backfired.

In fact, the widespread vandalising of BR Ambedkar's statues on his birth anniversary last month by upper caste villagers, with the open connivance of the police, has led to further alienation among Dalits from the BJP.

Both OBCs and Dalits are also getting increasingly restless about getting more advantage in the party and administration in return for their support. So far, the BJP has not obliged them, as is evident from the recent appointment of 70 new party district chiefs. In a near farcical inversion of their real numbers in the electorate, as many as 39 of the appointees were upper caste while 25 belonged to OBCs and only six were from the SCs.

The Modi government’s somersault on a caste survey is calculated to somewhat alter the growing sense of duplicity by the BJP among OBCs and Dalits. But it remains to be seen how soon the state administration and local party bosses actually act upon the vital demographic statistics of Uttar Pradesh revealed by the census. There is also the danger of a backlash from the ruling party’s core upper caste base, as well as Hindutva zealots, who may see this as a betrayal. 

(The writer is a Delhi-based senior journalist and the author of ‘Behenji: A Political Biography of Mayawati’. This is an opinion piece. The views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)