In a meme that’s doing the rounds on social media, a woman in a village in Bihar is asked by a journalist if Vikas (development) has come to Bihar. She asks: what’s the caste of Vikas?
If one looks at the ticket distribution by various political parties in the fray, it would not be an anomaly to understand how caste alliances are formed.
Vikas has a caste in Bihar. The woman in that village didn’t ask the wrong question.
Bihar Elections: ‘What Is The Caste Of Vikas?’
If one looks at the ticket distribution by various political parties in the fray, it would not be an anomaly to understand how caste alliances are formed
Summary
In a meme that’s doing the rounds on social media, a woman in a village in Bihar is asked by a journalist if Vikas (development) has come to Bihar. She asks: what’s the caste of Vikas?
The history of caste politics in the state dates back to the Janeyu Andolan of the 1920s, when Yadavs and other lower castes started Sanskritising themselves by donning the so-called sacred Brahmanical thread. This led to violence between the Yadav, Kurmi and Koeri castes and the upper castes.
Contrary to popular belief, it wasn’t just Lalu Prasad Yadav of the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) who fought for reservation for the OBCs. It was the former chief minister of Bihar, Karpoori Thakur, who, in 1978, announced 25 per cent reservation for backward classes, thereby making social justice a powerful plank in the electoral politics of Bihar. On October 24, Prime Minister Narendra Modi kickstarted his poll campaign in Bihar by visiting Karpurigram, the birthplace of Karpoori Thakur, who came from the Nai or the barber community, in a bid to woo the backward classes and to claim the ideological legacy of the former chief minister. Chief Minister Nitish Kumar of the Janata Dal (United) who has earned the reputation of an opportunist politician who switches sides and ideologies, has done his social engineering to cater to all caste groups and while he is part of the NDA and is fighting against the Mahagatbandhan, he has long known that social justice is what works in Bihar and that justice can’t be done without considering the caste arithmetic.
It is the control of the “vote banks” of the Scheduled Castes (SCs) and the Extremely Backward Castes (EBCs), the Other Backward Classes (OBCs) and the Scheduled Tribes (STs) who together make up about 85 per cent of the population in Bihar as per the Bihar Caste Census survey of 2022-23, that becomes the decider in the elections. Even though, the politics of the backward castes have dominated Bihar politics for a long time, the EBCs, despite their numerical significance, have not had much political representation along with the SCs. If one looks at the ticket distribution by various political parties in the fray, it would not be an anomaly to understand how caste alliances are formed and yet, the “upper” castes here hold the reins.
The RJD manifesto and the recent policies announced by Nitish Kumar centre around caste affiliations and reservations and women, who are considered to be Chief Minister Nitish Kumar’s pocket constituency.
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Vikas has a caste in Bihar. The woman in that village didn’t ask the wrong question.
The cactus on the cover, which is an image of a public art installation in Patna by Subodh Gupta, an artist who hails from Bihar, was first unveiled in 2012. Called the Flowering Cactus, it reflects both barrenness and survival, two opposites. Like the state of Bihar, which holds many contradictions.
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