Walsh J.E. A Brief History of India

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A BRIEF HISTORY OF INDIA

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the restricted list in what was probably intended as a bid for communal

Hindu support.

“Pop” Diversiﬁ cation

Over the decades since independence, India became not only a more

populous society but a more urbanized one. Indian popular culture

developed along with and as a result of city life and a new consum-

ing middle class. Initially the popularity of ﬁ lms and ﬁ lm songs gave

Bollywood a monopoly over Indian audiences and guaranteed that its

version of popular culture would dominate. Television, as ﬁ rst devel-

oped through the government-controlled Doordarshan, also seemed to

offer another medium for the transmission of a centrally produced pop-

ular culture. But in the 1980s and 1990s, cheap cassette tapes and new

satellite networks broke Bollywood’s and Doordarshan’s control over

popular culture. Indian music now ranges from ﬁ lm songs to religious

tapes, and from regional bawdy songs to virulent communalist propa-

ganda. Television also now offers regional channels in the vernacular

for the discussion and display of local issues and culture. Urban Indian

culture still dominates India, and with 20 percent of villagers now own-

ing TV sets, rural areas have grown increasingly conscious of the many

forms of popular culture produced in the cities.

Village Indians, as it turned out in the elections of 2004, have also

become more aware of other aspects of urban life. Not only have rural

residents participated in the religious and political movements of the

past 15 years, they have also made clear that they are aware, as perhaps

never before, of the vast economic gulf that still separates urban and

village ways of life.

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293

India in the

Twenty-ﬁrst Century

(1996–2010)

Anger. The major feeling is anger. You can call one chapter “anger.”

The middle classes are 2 percent of the population and they are not being

represented. There is no representation. The interests of the

middle classes are not being represented by politicians.

Mumbai journalist in interview (Fernandez 2006, 186)

My own assessment is that Indian democracy is working quite well,

and is moving towards being more participative and giving power to

the lower caste. And it is through this movement that the lower caste

is asserting themselves. So I think it is within our reach through democracy

only to upset that hegemony of the upper caste.

Jawaharlal Nehru University Dalit student (Jaffrelot 2008, 48)

he rise of a Hindu majoritarian party in the 1980s and 1990s again

highlighted the difﬁculties of democratic majority rule in a country

with distinct minority populations and multiple religious communities.

this had been an issue in debates over seat reservations and separate

electorates before 1947. in the 1990s it reemerged as the VHP and BJP

provoked riots over the Babri Masjid and as the BJP came to power in

1998 and 1999 at the head of coalition governments.

By 1999 observers had agreed that the BJP’s main supporters were

urban, upper-caste Hindus and those from the growing middle and/or

upper classes. But, while Hindu nationalism was, in theory, an ideology

that could appeal to the 80 percent of indians who were Hindus, an elec-

tion reversal in 2004 demonstrated that majoritarian politics might just as

A BRIEF HISTORY OF INDIA

294

BJP poster, New Delhi, 1996. An unofﬁ cial poster for the BJP urges (in Hindi) “Time for a

Change—Your Decision” and “Come! Let’s go with Bhajpa” (a colloquial name for the BJP).

The lotus, the election symbol for the BJP, is the central image of the poster.

(courtesy of

Philip Oldenburg)

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295

INDIA IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

easily be deﬁ ned along caste (or class) lines—and that in such divisions,

the majority among voters could lie with rural voters, with the poor, and

with the communities of OBCs and Untouchables. A second, and almost

equally unexpected, national election in 2009 saw further victories for the

Congress and a further erosion of BJP support. Analysts were left wonder-

ing if the Congress Party had managed to reassert its earlier dominance

over Indian politics or if, alternatively, the golden bird of India’s prosper-

ous, globalized economy trumped the saffron identity of Hindutva.

Fragmented National Power

In the aftermath of the Babri Masjid demolition and violence, the BJP

dropped its emphasis on Ayodhya and attempted to widen its constitu-

ency by focusing on an economic and social agenda. In 1996 the party

won 161 seats in Parliament and tried for 13 days to form a government

with Vajpayee as prime minister but failed to ﬁ nd coalition partners

because of its aggressive Hindutva stand. Janata Dal politician H. D. Deve

Gowda (1933– ) became prime minister instead, heading a new coali-

tion government, the United Front, made up of 13 leftist, regional, and

low-caste parties and supported from outside the coalition by Congress

(I) seats.

Gowda was the ﬁ rst regionally based prime minister in India’s his-

tory. He came from a peasant proprietor background and had been chief

minister of Karnataka. He spoke Kannada, the regional language of

Karnataka, and was reputed to know little English or Hindi. Within 10

months of Gowda’s becoming prime minister, Congress (I) had forced

his resignation, replacing him with Inder Kumar Gujral (1919– ),

a relatively obscure Janata Dal member who had served in Congress

governments during the 1960s and ’70s before joining the Janata Dal

in the 1980s. Gujral headed the fourth coalition government to be

formed within the year. In November, however, when a government

commission identiﬁ ed the DMK party from Tamil Nadu (one of Gujral’s

coalition partners) as secret funders of the Tamil group responsible for

Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination, Congress withdrew its support from the

coalition, and Gujral’s government fell.

The BJP Takes Power

National elections in 1998 gave the BJP the largest block of votes in

Parliament—182 seats and 25.5 percent of the popular vote—and the

BJP successfully formed a coalition government with 20 other parties,

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A Brief History of indiA

296

including the tamil non-Brahman dMK and the tiny Bahujan samaj

Party (BsP). the BJP gained these coalition partners, however, only by

abandoning substantial sections of its Hindutva agenda. the party’s 1998

national Agenda for Governance dropped several long-standing goals:

the building of the ram temple in Ayodhya, a uniform civil code (a covert

attack on the separate Muslim personal law), and ending the special con-

stitutional status of the Muslim majority state of Jammu and Kashmir.

the BJP coalition remained in power with Vajpayee as prime min-

ister for 13 months, until April 1999. Violent attacks against indian

Christians during 1998–99 raised fears that such violence would be

tolerated by a Hindu nationalist government, but the BJP’s fall in 1999

was caused by internal coalition politics. squabbling led to the defec-

tion of both the dMK and the BsP. in the general elections of 1999,

the BJP emerged with the same number of Lok sabha seats (182) but

with a much stronger coalition (294 seats out of the Lok sabha’s 543).

Congress (i), now under the presidency of sonia Gandhi (the italian-

born wife of rajiv Gandhi), won only 114 seats. Vajpayee’s return as

prime minister marked the ﬁrst time in 27 years an incumbent prime

minister had been voted back into ofﬁce.

Analysts from Frontline, a national english-language newsmagazine,

declared at the time that the BJP (and its allies) had created “a new

social block” in election politics (yadav et al. 1999). this was not the

creation of a “simple Hindu majoritarianism,” for the BJP had gained its

new allies only by abandoning much of its explicitly Hindutva agenda.

rather, it was the creation of a voting bloc in which caste hierarchy and

class hierarchy reinforced each other in supporting the BJP coalition.

Poll data collected by the Center for the study of developing societies

(Csds) indicated that the BJP and its allies had secured 60 percent

of the votes of upper-caste Hindus and 52 percent of the votes of

Economic Class in the Elections of 1999

(as a percentage of each party’s total votes)

All Votes

Congress BJP Regional in 1999

(I) BJP allies Left BSP Parties Election

Upper strata 34 69 49 28 13 39 45

Lower strata 66 31 51 72 87 61 55

source: Csds poll data as summarized in yadav et al. 1999.

297

INDIA IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

dominant (non-OBC) Hindu peasant castes. Looked at in class terms—

through a simple division of the electorate into an “upper strata” and a

“lower strata”—the BJP drew 69 percent of its votes from the 45 percent

of Indian voters in the upper strata. Thus, the BJP might be said (with

only some exaggeration) to represent “the rebellion of the elite” or, at

least “the emergence of a new social group that is deﬁ ned by an overlap

of social and economic privileges” (Yadav et al. 1999).

Upward Caste Mobility

Frontline’s 1999 analysis of the elections concluded with the ques-

tion: “. . . if the privileged can form a bloc, why not the underprivi-

leged?” In the 1980s and 1990s a new type of upward caste mobility

had appeared in the North Indian Hindi belt region. This mobility

had appeared ﬁ rst in South India during the late 19th and early 20th

centuries: Non-Brahman castes changed their social status through

ethnicization, that is, by moving outside narrow, endogamous jati def-

initions to establish broader ethnic identities. The caste associations

of the 1880s–1930s were often the vehicles for such new identities in

south India. Some associations even replaced Sanskrit varna classiﬁ ca-

tions with the regional and ethnic identity of Dravidians. In the 1920s

and ’30s, the Tamil leader Periyar had used the idea of Dravidian iden-

tity to organize his Self-Respect Movement. Even before 1947 a strong

non-Brahman movement in Tamil Nadu had forced its members into

the region’s English-language schools and had gained control of the

regional Congress movement.

In contrast, in northern India Sanskritization had long been the pre-

ferred method for upward caste mobility. Even as late as 1947, the English-

educated elite of North India came mostly from the upper castes, and these

upper-caste members provided the leadership for most of the North’s social

and political movements. In the 1980s and ’90s, however, North Indian

social and political groups began to organize low castes and Untouchables

outside the rituals, customs, and practices of Brahmanic Hinduism and

into politicized ethnic identities analogous to those of the south.

Rising Power of Lower Castes

That upper-caste mobilizations against the Mandal Commission

reforms had produced counter-organization among low-caste and

Dalit (Untouchable) communities became clear in Lok Sabha and

state elections in the 1990s. The two parties that beneﬁ ted most

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A BRIEF HISTORY OF INDIA

298

from this politicization were the Samajwadi (Socialist) Party, an

organization founded in 1992 that focused on OBCs in Bihar and

Uttar Pradesh, and the Bahujan Samaj Party (Party of the Majority,

or BSP), an Untouchable party that had worked on organizing coali-

tions of low castes and Dalits since its founding in 1984. Two OBC

leaders from the regional, low-caste Yadav community—Mulayam

Singh Yadav (1939– ) in Uttar Pradesh and Laloo Prasad Yadav in

Bihar—used the Mandal reservations and the more politicized lower-

caste climate for the beneﬁ t of their own OBC Yadav community in

these states.

The BSP was founded by Kanshi Ram (1932–2006), a Punjabi from

a low-caste family. During the late 1960s Kanshi Ram had cut himself

THE BANDIT QUEEN

he dramatic life of Phoolan Devi (1963–2001) made Indian news-

paper headlines in the 1980s and 1990s, offering Indian readers

an illustration of rural low-caste women’s lives and of the growing vis-

ibility of the Other Backward Classes (OBCs). Phoolan Devi was the

second daughter of a lower-caste peasant in a small Uttar Pradesh vil-

lage. By age 20 she had became the mistress of Vikram Mallah, leader

of a local dacoit (bandit) gang. When Mallah was killed by a treacherous

friend, Phoolan Devi was kidnapped, raped, and humiliated by high-

caste thakur men from the village of Behmai. In revenge, on Valentine’s

Day 1981, she and her dacoits massacred 22 thakur men from Behmai,

later said to be the same men who had raped her. She escaped capture

for two years, becoming famous as one of India’s most hunted dacoits,

before surrendering under a plea agreement in 1983.

During her 11-year imprisonment Phoolan Devi was befriended

by a journalist who published her story as India’s Bandit Queen, a

best-selling book and then a Bollywood ﬁ lm of the same name. After

release from prison in 1994, Phoolan Devi married and converted to

Buddhism; in 1996 she ran for Parliament as a Samajwadi Party can-

didate in Uttar Pradesh, defeating an upper-caste candidate for the

Lok Sabha seat, part of the rise to power of OBCs in that state. In

2001 Phoolan Devi was killed outside her New Delhi home by three

masked gunmen. The man accused of her murder, Sher Singh Rana,

claimed he had killed her to avenge the death of high-caste Uttar

Pradesh men, but other reports suggested Phoolan Devi’s husband

had been involved in her murder.

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INDIA IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

MAYAWATI

The elephant (BSP logo) is really the wise Ganesh, the trinity of

gods (Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva) rolled into one. (BSP campaign

slogan, 2007)

n 1995 a BSP coalition took control of the state government of

Uttar Pradesh, and Mayawati (1956– ), an Untouchable convert

to Buddhism, became the state’s chief minister. Mayawati was born

into a Jatav (Untouchable) community in the Uttar Pradesh district of

Bulandsahar and grew up in New Delhi where her father was a clerk

in a government ofﬁ ce. She graduated from college in New Delhi and

has bachelor degrees in both law and education. She initially worked as

a teacher in New Delhi until 1977 when she met Kanshi Ram and gave

up plans to study for the Indian

Administrative Service to join him

in political work. “You won’t even

become a local municipal corpo-

rator,” her father is said to have

warned, “if you hang around los-

ers like Kanshi Ram” (Bose 2008).

In 2001, Kanshi Ram named

Mayawati as his successor in the

BSP organization.

Her ﬁ rst appointment as chief

minister in Uttar Pradesh lasted

less than ﬁ ve months, but she was

returned to power in 1997 and

again in 2002–03; all three times

she was at the head of coalition

governments. In the summer of

2007, however, the BSP won an

absolute majority in the state,

and Mayawati and the BSP came

to power.

Throughout her terms in ofﬁ ce

Mayawati has attracted both con-

troversy and criticism. It is said

that she has accumulated a large

personal fortune and has a vast

collection of diamonds and silk

Mayawati, 2007. Bahujan Samaj Party

(BSP) leader Mayawati standing before

statues of herself, the Dalit leader

Ambedkar (center), and the founder of

the BSP party, Kanshi Ram in Lucknow,

Uttar Pradesh. Mayawati was celebrat-

ing the 2007 election victory that

would make her chief minister of Uttar

Pradesh, India’s largest state.

(Ajay

Kumar Singh/Associated Press)

(continues)

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A BRIEF HISTORY OF INDIA

300

saris. Her 2007 ﬁ ling with the government stated her cash and assets

at 520 million rupees ($10.4 million). Claims of corruption (common in

most Indian political parties) have resulted in lawsuits against her.

Some political analysts, however, believe that the BSP and Mayawati

have built their strong following in Uttar Pradesh through a com-

bination of policies that consolidate Dalit support and policies that

beneﬁ t other impoverished communities. In her ﬁ rst term in ofﬁ ce in

1995, Mayawati demonstrated the possible beneﬁ ts of political power

for low-caste and Untouchable communities in the state. She put

BSP supporters into key administrative posts throughout the state,

appointing Untouchable district magistrates in almost half of Uttar

Pradesh’s districts. A village redevelopment scheme was expanded

to include Untouchable villages and to locate its roads, pumps, and

houses within Untouchable neighborhoods. Grants were increased

to allow Untouchable and Muslim children to attend primary school;

20 percent of police inspector posts were reserved for Untouchables.

Muslims were also made eligible for reserved seats in the state admin-

istration. As of 2009, one in every ﬁ ve voters in Uttar Pradesh was

a Dalit and almost 80 percent support the BSP. In the 2007 election,

Mayawati further consolidated her party’s hold by reaching out to

other castes in the state, giving even Brahman candidates seats on her

party’s ticket.

An Indian Express reporter wrote in 2003 of the changes seen by

Dalits in Uttar Pradesh:

Check with the Dalits of these villages. They will tell you this was

God’s forsaken country. They tilled the land of the upper castes,

looked after their animals, washed their clothes, shaped their pots,

made their shoes and cleaned their mess. In turn, they were declared

untouchable and unclean—and forced to live in the dirtiest quarters

of the village. . . . “There was a time when we were scared to speak

out, even look up [one villager told the reporter]. Now we go and

meet the tehsildar, the thanedar [government ofﬁ cials] and they

listen to our complaints.”. . . Everyone concedes that there can be

no comparison between the old days and the present. (Sheth 2004)

Source: Bose, Ajoy. “Excerpt from Behenji.” Tehelka Magazine 5, no. 18

(2008). Available online. URL: http://www.tehelka.com/story_main39.

asp?ﬁ lename=Ne100508a_miracle.asp. Accessed January 27, 2010; Sheth,

D. L. Caste, Ethnicity and Exclusion in South Asia: The Role of Afﬁ rmative Action

Policies in Building Inclusive Societies (United Nations Development Programme,

Human Development Report Ofﬁ ce, 2004), pp. 50–51.

MAYAWATI (continued)

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INDIA IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

off from his family, vowed never to marry, and dedicated himself full

time to the organization of low-caste people. Inspired by the writings of

Ambedkar and Phule, Kanshi Ram believed that the future of low castes

lay in political unity. Between 1989 and 1991 the BSP averaged almost

2 percent of the vote in national elections and had won several seats in

the Lok Sabha. In the 1996 national elections, the party won 11 seats,

and in 1998 it won ﬁ ve seats.

OBCs and Dalits in Government

By 1999 more-politicized OBC communities had made signiﬁ cant

gains in both the Lok Sabha and state assemblies in Hindi-belt states.

In general the Lok Sabha became much less upper caste in the decades

between 1952 and 2002. Where in 1952, 66 percent of all Lok Sabha

members were from the upper castes, in 2002 only 33 percent were.

The OBCs’ overall parliamentary presence also increased. Where in

1977 OBCs made up 10 percent of the Lok Sabha’s members, in 2002

they made up 25 percent.

In the Hindi-belt states of Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, and Bihar,

the years from 1989 to 1999 saw a dramatic change in the representation

of OBCs in state assemblies. In 1989 the percentage of OBCs in Parliament

had been only 10.6 percent in Uttar Pradesh, 7.5 percent in Madhya

Pradesh, and 18.5 percent in Bihar. Ten years later, however, OBCs were 25

percent of the members of Parliament from Uttar Pradesh, 23 percent from

Madhya Pradesh, and 29 percent from Bihar. At the same time, the percent-

age of upper-caste members of Parliament from the three states had also

fallen, from an average of 48 percent in 1989 to only 33 percent by 1999.

At the same time, the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) was contesting elec-

tions on a national basis by 1998 and by 1999 was averaging 4 percent

of the national vote and had been certiﬁ ed as a national party. The BSP’s

greatest strength was in Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, and the Punjab.

In 1995, 1997, and from 2002 to 2003, the BSP ran the state government

in Uttar Pradesh in coalition with other parties. But in 2007, the party

won the state government outright and has remained in power ever since.

The BJP in Power

The BJP’s new National Democratic Alliance (NDA), a coalition of

23 political parties, was strong enough to remain in power for ﬁ ve

years. Chief among its goals was a pledge to continue the globaliza-

tion reforms begun by the Congress Party in 1991. These reforms had

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