'In India, a lower caste revolution is underway' (2024)

In India, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) led by Narendra Modi lost the national elections of 2024 as they fell short of majority by 32 seats, a considerable number. They will now form a coalition government with the regional anti-caste political parties they had previously opposed. Compulsions of coalition will prevent Modi from oppressing the anti-caste activists in the university campuses and the villages, and from unleashing terror on the Sikhs, Christians, Muslims using state institutions. The judiciary and the hitherto minimally oppositional media will find it easier to pursue their vocations in the coming months.

What defeated Modi and the BJP is anti-caste social and political movements whose vision was adopted by the Congress Party some time before the elections. This was not reflected sufficiently in the both the Indian and international media. The most compelling evidence of this anti-caste force is BJP's loss in the constituency of Faizabad, the Mughal city, where once stood the 16^th-century mosque Babri mosque.

It was in Faizabad that Modi's own political career began as an important organizer of the movement to demolish the mosque to build a temple for Rama, the king-god enforcer of caste laws. On December 6, 1992, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (the upper caste supremacist paramilitary organization and the parent of the BJP) and its offshoots accomplished the demolition and unleashed pogroms against Muslims across India killing thousands. On 22 January this year, Modi inaugurated the Rama temple. Not only Modi, but also the so-called left and right in the upper caste media, proclaimed that he had already won the elections. The effect was to normalize this monumental crime whose architects have gone unpunished.

Loss in symbolically charged constituency

Having conducted its entire electoral campaign on the issue of the temple and Islamophobia, the BJP lost in this symbolically and historically charged constituency to the senior Dalit (lowest in the caste order) political leader Awadhesh Prasad, candidate of the anti-caste Samajwadi Party (or Socialist Party; SP). Here lies the historic sense of the election results.

The BJP was created from the older upper-caste supremacist groups in 1980 against the rising anti-caste movements in India. In 1980, the Mandal commission report on the conditions of the oppressed castes (more than 90% of the population of India and of all religions including Islam) was completed and it proposed affirmative action in government institutions. This had caused alarm among the minority upper castes (less than 10% of all religions) who dominate India's media, arts, academics, judiciary and businesses. The Congress which held power from the 1980s refused to table it in the parliament.

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