A Tale of Two Parivars in Bihar

It is curtains down for the political career of Nitish Kumar, who was baptised into politics through the Jayaprakash Narayan movement in the 1970s in Bihar — a movement that was itself a fusion of two families of politics, the Sangh Parivar and the Janata Parivar. The JP movement marked the consolidation of OBC politics in the State, against the Congress dominance that mirrored, and entrenched, upper-caste social hegemony.

OBC politics in Bihar has gone through numerous churns over the last century. Three communities — Yadavs, Kurmi and Koeri — helmed the challenge to upper-caste hegemony in the State. Mr. Kumar is a Kurmi. After playing second fiddle to Lalu Prasad Yadav within the Janata Parivar for many years, Mr. Kumar broke away to found the Samata Party in 1994 — which later transitioned into the Janata Dal (United). After being in the saddle for 20 years as Chief Minister, he is now set to enter the Rajya Sabha.

His exit from the central stage to the antechamber marks the conclusion of a social and political process shaped through the interaction between the Sangh Parivar and the Janata Parivar over the last half-century. With this, the extinction of the Janata Parivar appears closer; it is a triumph of the Sangh Parivar.

Mandal vs Kamandal

Politics in the Hindi heartland has often been framed as Mandal versus Kamandal — OBC assertion and autonomy opposed to the Hindutva push for unity and order among all Hindu castes. That has not been an entirely linear or binary antagonism. Mr. Kumar’s own version of Mandal politics has been in alliance with Kamandal for most of his career. Under Narendra Modi, the BJP absorbed that dynamic of rivalry, contestation and accommodation among castes and converted it into an intra-Parivar affair — the Sangh Parivar’s own affair, rather than inter-party rivalries and alliances.

Caste assertions and rivalries have not ceased; they now play out within the Parivar. The recent controversy around UGC guidelines on tackling caste discrimination is a case in point. The Janata Parivar, that sprawling ecosystem of caste groups organised as competing and collaborating parties, is being retired. The Koeri redoubt in Bihar — Upendra Kushwaha’s Rashtriya Lok Morcha — is also under pressure to dissolve itself into the BJP.

The JP movement and the Janata experiment had aggregated all aggrieved social groups against the upper-caste, Dalit and Muslim coalition that sustained the Congress. The Sangh Parivar helped midwife the Janata Parivar, and both together beat the Congress in the heartland. The Ram Janmabhoomi movement advanced Hindu consolidation, and the Bhagalpur riots of 1989 — which killed nearly 1,000 people, overwhelmingly Muslim — deepened communal polarisation in the State. Yet it was Lalu Prasad who outmanoeuvred the Sangh Parivar by stitching together Hindu subalterns with Muslims into an unbeatable social base for the RJD. The demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992 completed the decimation of the Congress, pushing its upper-caste supporters towards the BJP, and Muslims and Dalits towards the RJD.

Surging Sangh Parivar

The Mandal–Kamandal dynamic has played out through multiple cycles of fragmentation and consolidation of social groups and parties, with the Sangh Parivar emerging more powerful at each stage. Lalu Yadav’s OBC base unravelled, leaving him with only Yadavs and Muslims by 2005, even as Mr. Kumar raided his camps for non-Yadav OBCs and Dalits. In 2005, the RJD was definitively toppled, and Mr. Kumar came to helm the BJP–JDU ruling coalition as Chief Minister.

Nitish initially resisted the emergence of Narendra Modi as the national leader of the BJP, but soon yielded before the surging ally. Mr. Modi entered Bihar in 2014 as an OBC leader, occupying the very ground the Janata Parivar had claimed as its own, leaving no doubt that its ally would eventually be cannibalised.

That process is now complete — or at least the BJP believes so. A leader from the OBC community will, in all likelihood, be the next Chief Minister, and the party has already deepened its bench with OBC leaders at every level. An upper-caste BJP leader said, only half in jest, that BJP stood for ‘Backward Janata Party.’ Upper-caste supporters of the BJP have limited options, and the party is willing to bend to the strength of numbers that OBCs possess.

Caste dynamics are now being managed as family disputes within the Hindutva universe. It is no longer social justice versus Hindutva, no longer Mandal against Kamandal. It is social justice within Hindutva — Mandal absorbed into the Kamandal. The guided soft exile of Mr. Kumar marks a major milestone in the continuing eclipse of autonomous social justice parties in India.