Disaggregate the OBC Category to Understand BJP's Haryana Win

CM Nayab Singh Saini with supporters after the election win.

(Photo: X/@NayabSainiBJP)

As the BJP returns to power for the third consecutive time, a historical feat in Haryana’s electoral history, hundreds and thousands of Haryanvis, on both sides of the electoral divide, are suspended in disbelief. On one hand, those siding with the Congress are struggling to digest their leaders’ losses, and on the other hand, the BJP’s supporters are breathing a sigh of relief, scarcely believing their good fortune.  

Besides making sense of the impact of the BJP’s victory on Haryana’s politics, these election results also have national implications. Though PM Modi limited his participation in Haryana’s election to four rallies, the BJP’s victory will indeed strengthen his overall political stature, both within the party and the Sangh Parivar.

On the other hand, the Haryana defeat has lent a big blow to the Congress. Its leaders entered this contest on a political high, sparked after winning five Lok Sabha seats in the recently concluded Lok Sabha elections. Consequently, the Congress was widely expected to win Haryana.

Among other things, at the national level, the Haryana defeat puts a question mark on Rahul Gandhi’s command over his party, especially his inability to control in-fighting among regional satraps. After Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh, Haryana is the third state in the Congress’s recent past, where its prospects of winning were weakened by internal factionalism among its state-level leaders.  

One must also reflect on news media channels (both TV and YouTube), whose daily debates and discussions closely shape how much of India understands its politics. By winning the Haryana elections, the BJP has defied all analyses conducted by various number-crunching pollsters, nearly all of whose exit polls predicted a comfortable victory for the Congress.  

In response to the BJP’s victory, political analysts are now busy revising their pre-poll analyses. The analytical shift taking place in news media debates is indeed striking. For instance, in pre-poll analyses, Bhupinder Singh Hooda, the most prominent face of the Congress unit in Haryana, was projected as the imminent victor, fighting the electoral battle against the lethargic BJP. Now that the election results are out, he is being described as a despot, who sidelined non-Jat politicians within the Congress, such as, Selja Kumari.

Likewise, the BJP, along with its support base, is now being described in radically different terms. The BJP’s victory, for instance, is being attributed to its ‘silent voter,’ i.e., the voter who may not appear in front of the camera, but nonetheless votes for the party. Instead of shedding light on Haryana's politics, such revisions made by political analysts reveal how fickle-minded the craft of electoral analysis can be, compelling its practitioners to oscillate like a pendulum from one position to another within a matter of a few hours.    

Fortunately, or unfortunately, there are no immediate answers to the mystery of how the BJP eked out a victory in Haryana. My endeavour here is not to offer a missing piece of the wider puzzle, as it were, which will result in a eureka moment of clarity. Instead, I highlight some key political coordinates that may guide us to understand the BJP’s victory.  

OBC Consolidation

Though many pollsters and analysts cite the consolidation of the OBC vote bank as the primary reason behind the BJP’s victory, not much is known about the composition of this category in Haryana. A widely-held assumption is that groups constituting the OBC category in Haryana are homogeneous, best captured through the Hindi descriptor pichade (“those lagging behind”). This projects the OBC as a sociological category, which, unfortunately, it is not. It is thus essential to disaggregate the OBC category in light of these election results. 

In Haryana, the OBC category is split into two sub-categories – Block A and Block B. Block A comprises landless castes like the Barbers (Nai), Potters (Kumhar), Blacksmiths (Lohars), among others. Though these castes have never been subjected to the practice of untouchability, a feature that distinguishes them from the Dalit castes, they are socially, politically and economically deprived. In stark contrast, Block B consists of several landowning agricultural castes, or what in anthropological parlance are known as dominant castes. They include the Ahirs (Yadav), Gujars, Sainis, and Meos, among others.

Much like the Jats, these groups too have had a dominant position in Haryana’s agricultural structure. For these reasons, their inclusion in the reservations policy does not sit well with the formal objective behind constituting the OBC category, which was originally meant to uplift India’s non-Dalit backward castes. Given this anomaly in Haryana’s OBC category, it does not come as a surprise to note that leaders representing Block B (i.e., the OBC agricultural castes) dominate Block A (i.e., the landless OBC groups). This explains why Haryana’s OBC category is not a sociological category, but a governmental one.   

In the context of Haryana’s electoral politics, in 2016-17, the BJP’s social engineering designs included stitching an alliance between the two OBC groups, i.e., Block A and B, by pitting them against the most dominant Jats, who were then seeking entry in the OBC category. This political division came to a head in February 2016, when pro-reservations Jat protestors clashed with the so-called “OBC Brigade,” an ad-hoc group formed by the former BJP MP, Raj Kumar Saini. More recently, the BJP government in Haryana has consolidated its OBC vote bank, comprising 78 castes and about 40 percent of the state’s population, by increasing the creamy layer ceiling for OBCs from an annual income of Rs six lakh to Rs eight lakh.

In addition, the BJP also announced a five percent quota for the Block B sub-category in Panchayati Raj Institutions and Municipalities. That these announcements were made by the Home Minister, Amit Shah, during a ‘Backward Class Samman Sameelan,’ indexes how closely the BJP has aligned itself with Haryana’s OBC category. Lastly, by making Nayab Singh Saini, an OBC politician, as Haryana’s CM in March 2024, the BJP gained a firm grip over the total OBC votes.   

Additions to BJP’s Hindutva politics  

The BJP’s core electoral base comprises the traditionally elite Hindu castes like the Brahmans, Banias, and Punjabis. Its OBC outreach strategy has attracted more Hindu caste groups towards its Hindutva project. Much against the oft-repeated hypothesis, the BJP remains a popular electoral choice among Haryana’s Dalits castes too. While the Congress is believed to have a good hold over the Jatav votes through leaders like Selja Kumari and Udai Bhan, the BJP is said to be popular among the Valmikis and Dhanaks.

Also, the recent Supreme Court decision permitting state governments to create sub-classifications within the SC and ST categories was exploited by the BJP. In Haryana, the non-dominant Dalit castes like the Valmikis and Dhanaks are gravitating towards the BJP, as many of them believe that most reservation benefits are being availed disproportionately by the Jatavs. 

Also, for many political observers and scholars, one of the outcomes of the 2020-21 farmer’s protests has been the petering out of the Hindutva politics among Haryana’s agricultural castes. The underlying assumption is that one can either be an adherent of Hindutva politics, or of farmer’s politics. In simple words, Hindutva politics is assumed to lose traction with the expansion of farmer’s politics.

While this formulation sounds convincing in theory, I suggest it has limited purchase in understanding real-life situations. From my fieldwork experience in Haryana, I have learned that one can be both, i.e., a farmer may protest against agricultural policies of the state, and still have Hindutva leanings. In fact, as agricultural families (both Jat and non-Jat) move closer to urban middle-class status, their Hindutva sentiments become more pronounced. This may shed light on how the BJP was able to win four out of six seats in Sonipat, and four out of five seats in Jind, and made similar inroads in other fast-urbanizing Jat-dominated districts of Haryana.  

Lastly, ten years of the BJP government in Haryana have also resulted in the expansion of formal structures of other Hindutva organizations in the state. Their newly-opened offices, for instance, serve as bases for organising both political and non-political events disseminating the fundamentals of Hindutva politics.  

Political Management

The BJP is also famous for its organisational strength, which links the highest levels of the party’s formal apparatus with the grassroots, exemplified by the proverbial panna-pramukh. In political discussions transpiring on news media channels, this robust organisational structure, and the advantage it lends to the BJP on the polling day, is termed as ‘political management.’

Each time the BJP wins elections, its political management skills are appreciated, and the opposition’s organisational weaknesses are highlighted. Something similar is happening in the aftermath of Haryana’s election results. The Congress is being severely criticised for poor political management. In this regard, three points are being emphasised.

Firstly, various rebel candidates of the Congress who ran as independents are said to have directly resulted in losses of 17 seats. Secondly, Bhupinder Singh Hooda’s in-fighting with Randeep Surjewala and Selja Kumari has come into focus. Thirdly, many analysts are now suggesting that the Congress should have contested the Haryana elections under the wider framework of the INDIA alliance.  

What Happened to Farmers and the Unemployed?

Given the surprising election results, one wonders whether issues like widespread youth unemployment and the stagnant farming economy have any electoral purchase or not. By limiting all electoral analysis to the question of caste, i.e., the political craftsmanship of putting together the most electorally efficacious multi-caste coalition, one risks projecting caste as the all-explaining analytical category. The 2024 Lok Sabha elections have shown that economic issues like inflation, youth unemployment, and the flagging farm economy profoundly influence electoral outcomes.

Their precise impact on this election, and how they commingled with questions of caste, requires a deeper reflection. Nonetheless, if recent findings of scholars of caste and politics are anything to go by, then economic issues are becoming very critical in shaping Indian politics. I suggest that a recent talking point in the scholarship on caste, more specifically, the declining powers of the dominant caste, may serve as a useful point of departure while approaching these questions. 

In post-liberalisation Haryana, the social, economic and political powers of middling agricultural castes (both Jat and non-Jat) have reduced drastically. Their members no longer wield what M.N. Srinivas, the doyen of Indian sociology, once called “decisive dominance.” They are grappling with the shrinking of their ancestral landholdings, declining agricultural incomes, and the ongoing neoliberal restructuring of the agricultural economy. No longer wanting to be farmers, their children pursue higher education, enhancing their chances of finding salaried jobs, a feat only a handful achieve.

This has put members of middling castes in a cruel predicament. On one hand, they are being pushed out of agriculture, and on the other hand, they find it difficult to find non-farm salaried employment. To make ends meet, several young and middle-aged men from agricultural families now earn seasonal incomes by taking off-farm, insecure jobs like working as waiters at local wedding parties. Their precarious economic statuses are far removed from the historical image of strength and power cultivated by their ancestors who until recently lorded their status over weaker castes.

With no promising exit routes from agriculture, young men from agricultural castes suffer from a ‘crisis of masculinity,’ leading to a greater incidence of gender and anti-Dalit caste violence in the countryside. To this strand of scholarship, I would add that the question of education and salaried employment, or the lack thereof, are equally important to members of all caste groups, albeit not in an identical fashion.    

How do these ongoing realities characterising the farm economy interact with the BJP’s social engineering designs? What do young men from the Ahir and Gujar castes, the two most powerful Block B agricultural OBC groups widely viewed as aligning with the BJP, think about their unemployed status? Who did these young men vote for in Haryana? And why? What about the young unemployed Dalit men, a demographic segment ignored by all political parties? Do Dalit politicians like Selja Kumari, Ashok Tanwar, and Chandra Shekhar Azad, among others, catch the political imagination of the Dalit youth? If so, then on what terms? Are they demanding salaried jobs from their leaders? These are a few critical questions that deserve further inquiry.   

(Vineet Rathee has a PhD in Anthropology from McGill University, where he currently works as a course lecturer. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)