Kshatriya by Karma: Chirag Paswan's Inter-Caste Politics in the Age of Hindutva

Chirag’s ardent supporters have already slowly but surely started branding him as not just a kingmaker, but a potential King of Bihar.

(Photo: Kamran Akhter/The Quint)

The surprise with the bargaining power of the Lok Janshakti Party (Ram Vilas), described often as punching above its weight, is related to a mis-recognition: it is no longer a party of Dalits alone. Its leader, Chirag Paswan, is equally often mistaken to be a Dalit leader, but he is not just a Dalit leader. Even other National Democratic Alliance (NDA) one-caste parties struggle with this distinction, and see him in their own image.

The film Miley Na Miley Hum, Chirag Paswan’s debut as an actor, offers a clue as to what makes him different. In an interesting instance of what appears to be caste-blind casting, Chirag played the role of a Kshatriya boy with aspirations. As it turns out, the cast(e)-ing was by no means blind, but was rather profoundly, even if unintentionally, foresighted.

As in reel life, he is turning out to be a Kshatriya in the political theatre of Bihar politics. Given that the Dusadh community to which the Paswans belong, the second largest Scheduled Caste group in Bihar, has a history of claiming Kshatriya status, it is not surprising that Chirag Paswan is now claiming a 'Kshatriya by karma' status in the Hindutva world.

The Inter-casteness of Chirag and Nitish

Chirag Paswan is, first of all, by birth an intercaste person. His father, the tall Dalit politician Ram Vilas Paswan, divorced — or simply sidelined, as she reportedly continued to live at the Paswan ancestral home even after being “divorced” — his first wife from his own caste, Rajkumari Devi, and married Avinash Kaur (who later changed her name to Reena). Chirag was born to this second wife of Ram Vilas Paswan.

One can imagine there was some amount of step-motherly treatment towards Rajkumari and her two daughters. Says Asha, one of the Rajkumari-Ram Vilas daughters: “My father loved all his children equally … but Madam (Reena) was not keen on keeping the family united.”

A split along caste lines plagues the late Ram Vilas Paswan’s immediate family and, consequently, the Paswan dynasty: the purely Paswan side of it does not get along well with the mixed side. Chirag’s uncle and Ram Vilas’s brother, Pashupati Kumar Paras, revolted against Chirag’s leadership. This led to the breaking of Ram Vilas Paswan’s party, the Lok Janashakti Party, into the Dalit-led Rashtriya Lok Janshakti Party (RLJP) and the intercaste party of LJP(RV).

Apart from this literal inter-casteness, Chirag’s assigned function is also that of an intercaste politician. The model he has in front of him is that of Nitish Kumar, who was an intercaste politician par excellence.

His inter-casteness does not mean a total forgetting of the Dalit side of his roots. Chirag Paswan surely has a personal grudge against Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar. As a biography of Chirag’s father, Ram Vilas Paswan: The Weathervane of Indian Politics, revealed last year, Chirag was a witness to Nitish Kumar belittling him in public, even though Paswan was Kumar’s senior in age and experience. The biography narrates the episode in Chirag’s own words. The caste angle of the incident can barely be missed — an OBC leader pressing his superiority on a Dalit leader.

In spite of his understandable enmity towards Nitish Kumar, Chirag Paswan is fated to eventually play Nitish’s role in Bihar politics: that of a leader stitching together multiple lower caste groups that are opposed to a Yadav-Muslim rule. The ill-health of Nitish Kumar has all but assured the end of his era, and it is a matter of phasing him out now.

Engineering Caste Unity

The fear of Yadav-Muslim rule works differently among upper castes and lower castes. The upper castes are clearly against the assertion of those below them. But Dalits and small OBCs fear the physical dominance of the big Shudra and relatively well-off Muslims.

The Yadav-Muslim rule has historically used muscle power in politics in these parts of the country. Generally, physicality re-enters politics when OBC parties rule, and for Dalits, this means a renewed threat of violence. There is thus a strongly grounded interest among non-Yadav Hindu OBCs to align with any force that opposes the Yadav-Muslim coalition. This is the scaffold for intercaste politics in Bihar, which Nitish Kumar skilfully developed through his stitching together of small castes with less demographic weight.

Chirag’s brother-in-law and LJP(RV) leader, Arun Bharti, identified this intercaste potential explicitly. “Chirag Paswan is a Bahujan leader and LJP (RV) is a Bahujan party”, he said. But the Ambedkarite concept of Bahujan includes minorities and professes a critique of Hinduism and Hindu majoritarianism. LJP(RV) possesses neither. A more apt descriptor for Chirag Paswan’s inter-casteness is the category of Hindu Dalit. What he is making is a multi-lower-caste Hindu outfit led by Hindu Dalits.

This rise of intercaste politics has gone unnoticed by almost all. It is in this context that the BJP-LJP(RV) alliance has formed, and the Dalit-only RLJP has been forced out of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA). The alliance has a short-term incentive and a long-term goal. The immediate incentive is that Chirag Paswan is being primed to occupy the Nitish Kumar position in Bihari politics as the BJP’s proxy for small caste politics and against the Bahujan caste politics of RJD.

The telos of the alliance, though, is the goal of turning Dalits into Hindu Dalits against the threat of their Bahujanisation.

Hindu Dalits in Society and Politics

Most Dalit leaders, especially Ambedkarites, have a difficult relationship with Hinduism. But not Chirag Paswan. He is from a quintessentially Hindu Dalit background on his father’s side. Not all Dalit communities share the same attitude towards religion and religiosity, but the Dusadh caste identifies strongly with Hinduism and is known for high levels of religiosity.

Ashok Kumar Singh, in a chapter titled Socio-cultural Characteristics of ‘Dusadh’: A case study of North Bihar villages, writes that the Dusadhs “are the descendants of the great Kaurava king, Dusshasan.” They claim to be Chandrabansi Kshatriya.

In another version of their origin story, they are Gahlot Rajputs through ancestry. Singh notes that both the young and the old are equally religious in this caste. The Dusadhs have a tradition of male-hero-worshipping, of martial figures like Sahlesh and Chauharmal. They are, in their own account, a fallen Kshatriya caste.

In keeping with this heroic tradition, Chirag has begun to exude Kshatriya vibes. This self-presentation became gradually more evident since the death of Ram Vilas, after which Chirag ritually tonsured his head, setting in motion a rebranding which evolved over the years to make use of the tilak and the Sherwani. Ram Vilas Paswan always looked like a nouveau riche lower caste leader; Chirag Paswan plays the role of a Kshatriya prince, a valiant heir to the political throne.

The grand promise of Hindutva, also its mantra against the perversions of the caste system, is to turn every Hindu into a Kshatriya by karma, the possibility of Hindus awakening into a martial race. This is a derivative of the Arya Samaji promise of Brahminhood for all, but it is also starkly different.

Recognition as Brahmin is tied to ritualism and belief, a state of mind; recognition as Kshatriya is tied to deeply social and political acts, of a confrontational kind. It thus entails fierce politicisation and the inculcation of a very different habitus, one that Chirag Paswan embodies. In a consummation of his intercaste life, the half-Dalit, half-Savarna political prodigy fulfills his mythical Kshatriya heritage.

It was apparently Chirag Paswan who alerted Ram Vilas Paswan in 2014 to the coming hegemony of Hindutva and engineered a defection of the LJP from the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA). Ram Vilas had allied with the BJP before, but had been staunchly opposed to Narendra Modi since the Gujarat riots.

Dalit parties generally find it easier to co-exist with ideologically opposed central governments than with any kind of caste-Hindu-led state governments. It is the structural vulnerability of lower caste parties and their social base that they cannot stay away from power for too long, and the intelligent leaders of such castes understood early that the Indian centre was an ally for them against the dominance of regional upper castes. It was this consideration that made Ram Vilas waver from his anti-Hindutva convictions.

Hindutva Platform Politics

Chirag Paswan, as a budding political entrepreneur, saw a different future. He was one of the first to spot the potential of a long Hindutva hegemony in India, and to identify the emerging rules of ‘Platform Politics’ under Hindutva with state power.

Like the platform economy in capitalism, platform politics offers political entrepreneurs market freedom under basic constraints. As long as a vendor agrees to the baseline requirements of the platform — such as Amazon or Flipkart — they are free to market, sell, and advertise their product in any way they see fit. Platform politics works similarly: one agrees to a few non-negotiable rules and acquires the freedom to use one’s political capital as they see fit within the platform that ensures sellability.

The fall of what Rajni Kothari called the ‘Congress system’ was followed by the rise of Hindutva Platform Politics. It had only two inviolable rules — one had to accept the supremacy of Hindutva and the supremacy of Modi. An attack of either led to de-platforming.

The entrepreneurial instincts of Chirag Paswan — he founded a startup called ‘Chirag ka Rojgar’, with an intercaste management — played the game within Hindutva platform rules. He advised his father to align with NDA for the long term, a move that gave good returns. Even as Ram Vilas died and the BJP left out Chirag until he proved himself, he was careful not to break the baseline rules of the NDA platform. He insisted that he was an ardent supporter of both Modi and Hindutva. Over time, he has presented himself as a devotee of Shabari, the untouchable figure in Ramayana, and as “Modi’s Hanuman.” In neither case could he directly compare himself to Ram; an unwritten prohibition seemingly prevents him.

Playing by these rules, though, enables Chirag Paswan to bargain harder than his fellow NDA allies. He is certainly a notch higher in standing than parties like Hindustani Awam Morcha (Secular). Unlike Dalit-only and single-caste parties, LJP(RV) already shows signs of a wider reach — it got 6 percent of the popular vote, even though the entire Dusadh community only weighs less than 6 percent of Bihar’s population.

Ram Vilas Paswan could not harbour much hope of being a Chief Minister. As he publicly revealed in his late life, he prefers his son to break that glass ceiling. Chirag Paswan can do so because he is no longer merely a Dalit politician, perhaps the first of his kind. If there were a Guinness World Record for it, he could have won it.

A Mutually Exploitative Relationship

Chirag’s ardent supporters have already slowly but surely started branding him as not just a kingmaker, but a potential King of Bihar. On his long path to Chief Minister candidature, Chirag Paswan might set himself two goals:

1. He has to win from a general seat.

2. He has to expand his base substantially further beyond Dusadhs, which is looking more and more possible. This is his imperative to bargain for JD(U) bastions, where he can begin filling in the structural role of Nitish Kumar in Bihar politics.

Bihar is one state where the BJP resigned somewhat to the status quo of a tyranny of caste-demography in politics. Hence, it was not uncomfortable with the leadership of Nitish Kumar, albeit suspicious of his frequent flip-flops. As far as the BJP is concerned, Chirag Paswan promises to be a better Nitish Kumar than Nitish Kumar himself. They were always in search of a Hindu Dalit leader who could represent all Dalits as Hindu Dalits. In Chirag, they have found the messiah of this Hindutva mission.

This has helped both enter into a mutually exploitative relationship. The BJP makes use of Chirag’s status as a small-caste unifier from a Dalit caste, and Chirag uses the Hindutva platform to recruit supporters from the Hindus to advance his political career and his mission to be a great Kshatriya by karma.

Barring an unlikely spurt in the growth of the BJP in Bihar, which could make such allies unnecessary, this alliance with benefits has the symptoms of becoming a chronic feature of Bihar’s politics.

(Kuriakose Mathew teaches politics and international relations at the School of Liberal Arts and Management Studies, PP Savani University, Surat. His research focuses on democratic forces in transitional polities. Arjun Ramachandran is a research scholar at the Department of Communication, University of Hyderabad. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed are the author's. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)