Loud Numbers

Jaffrelot describes this process of democratic transformation in great detail and the amount of information in this book is astounding. He has painstakingly gathered information on the social background of virtually every legislator and significant politician in North India since as far back as 1919 to show just how widespread the transformation in political representation over the last two decades has been. It reveals just how conservative the Congress actually was in the ’50s and ’60s in its social composition. Its near-irrelevance in UP and Bihar can be traced largely to the fact that contrary to its image, it was not a party with room for open competition that could accommodate newly-mobilised castes. Whether the party’s inability to incorporate backward castes or retain SCs within its fold was a result of ideological obtuseness and elitist social composition as Jaffrelot suggests, or excessive centralisation and lack of intra-party competition as others have suggested, is more debatable. What’s less debatable is that any party that lacks a strategy to mobilise these castes does so at its own risk. Ironically, on the evidence presented in the book, even the bjp is more proactive in trying to recruit these castes than the Congress is in UP and Bihar.

The book also has tremendous historical material and analysis of the different forms caste politics has taken: the reasons for its earlier success in the south, the conditions under which broad-based backward caste coalitions succeed, the different ideological and mobilisational strategies by which parties recruit members of these castes, and the different idioms through which these castes have empowered themselves. But the book’s strength is also its main weakness. It is single-minded in its pursuit of one measure of democratic transformation: the mirror theory of representation. If our legislatures mirror the caste composition of society we can be said to be more democratic. This may well be true, but this claim rests on huge assumptions that Jaffrelot himself never defends. Like, why is Bihar one of the few states where poverty has risen rather than declined? Why has Mayawati’s rise to power not been accompanied by any significant increase or reallocation of development expenditure? Is representation the same thing as accountability? If the Congress can be accused of not having intra-party competition, are the bsp and SP any better in institutionalising party structures? Is anti-upper caste politics the same as anti-caste politics? Is political behaviour simply an expression of caste background? I’m not sure the data in this book substantiates this claim. And if the voters and legislators were expressions of their caste background, it would make nonsense of the claim that we have become conscious political agents actively making our choices. Indeed, all that greater political representation would signify is the mechanical logic of numbers catching up, not a rising assertion on the part of political agents. I think the politicisation of Indian society is deep and genuine. But the irony of the silent revolution Jaffrelot misses is, a taste for politics unites us more than caste divides us.