There are many ways to start the new year with a weekly column. That might include outlining the underlying fault lines for the year. That’s what this column often does: predict the year ahead. I rarely do this in this column, and I never even outline my wishlist. In any other year, these would have been plausible choices for a new year’s edition of this column. But 2025 is a special year for India’s political economy. Ultimately, this marks the conclusion of a long history of two mutually opposing political projects in modern India. On September 17 this year, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) will celebrate its 100th anniversary. Three months later, December 26 will mark 100 years since the formation of the Communist Party of India (CPI).
premium As ironic as it may seem in the case of the RSS, it is as much a modern political project as the CPI, drawing less from India’s ancient heritage and culture than from modern European ethno-nationalist political ideas and nation-states. Inspired by. About the time when it was founded. How should these two political projects of the left and the right in India be evaluated a hundred years after their inception? In many ways, there is only one clear winner in this story.
After decades of ups and downs and ideological turmoil and compromise, the Bharatiya Janata Party’s predecessor, the Jan Sangh, at one point had frequent dealings with the communists, and even the Bharatiya Janata Party and the communists in 1989 The RSS’s political influence – which supported the National Front government – expressed through its political wing, the BJP – broke new ground in the 1980s and began an upward trajectory. The BJP has been the single largest party in all but two national elections since 1996. It won a parliamentary majority in the 2014 and 2019 elections, and on this basis succeeded in winning power for the third time in a row in 2024. of the Coalition before the polls. By all accounts, the Bharatiya Janata Party is the dominant political force in the country.
From an RSS perspective, what makes the post-2014 phase of BJP dominance even more special is that, unlike in the 1990s, the BJP has been able to gain executive power without diluting the RSS’s core ideological agenda. The fact is that they succeeded in gaining control. Ayodhya already has a Ram temple, Article 370 has been scrapped from the constitution, and many Bharatiya Janata Party-ruled states are already considering the idea of a state-level Uniform Civil Code. With three core goals already in sight, RSS and its affiliates could not have asked for a better way to achieve its Centennial goals.
The Communists, on the other hand, are ending their 100th anniversary in a very different way. They are a marginalized electoral force in this country today. Strictly on the basis of self-sufficiency, they hold power in only one state of the country, namely, Kerala. Indeed, their greatest adversity was not a national political event, but a global one. The collapse of the Soviet Union put an end to the socialist project that had encouraged and led the formation of communist parties around the world, including India, and some even started revolutions. In many ways, this raises serious questions about the raison d’être of a Communist Party whose program, at least on a statutory basis, is committed to waging a revolution. No Communist Party or leader today seriously believes in the possibility of such a revolution in their lifetime.
Indeed, what makes India’s communist project so special is that it not only survived the collapse of the Soviet camp, but even managed to increase its electoral strength to such an extent that the communists almost reached the peak in its aftermath. The fact is that it was successful. They also became a key pillar of the coalition government from 2004 to 2008. Since then, it has been downhill until he approached the post of prime minister. Self-annihilation. For India’s communists, the electoral fiasco of the past two decades is of far greater concern than ideological questions about the relevance and feasibility of socialism itself as the country approaches its 100th birthday. is a matter of course.
Beyond these obvious empirical observations, is there more to say about 100 years of the political project of the communist left and the Hindu right in India?
Both of these projects, in their monolithic, polarized designs, have to deal with the inherent contradictions inherent in the Indian context: the Hindu majority in the case of the RSS, and the proverbial proletariat in the case of the communists. There was. This contradiction, called caste, is unique to Hinduism but permeates other religions in India as well. As India adopted a democracy based on universal suffrage after independence, caste contradictions in politics became increasingly pronounced and the nature of electoral competition gradually changed.
It is no mere coincidence that both the RSS and the Communists came up with what can be called the most important treatise on solving the caste problem in the 1970s, by which time both the post-independence polity and the Congress supremacy had They were in a state of conflict. Mobility and caste conditions were the main drivers of this political turmoil.
As for the RSS, this was conveyed in the 1974 Vasant Vyakanmala lecture on social equality and Hindu integration by then RSS chief Balasahab Deoras, who stated that caste discrimination was anathema to the RSS goal of achieving Hindu integration. unequivocally declared that it was. “May we all feel that Hindus must unite and that social equality is the only basis for that unity,” Deoras said in his speech, adding that for political survival, It clearly appealed to the organization’s conservative base.
For communists, this line comes from a 1979 Economic and Political Weekly article titled “Caste, Class and Property Relations” by BT Ranadive. Ranadive, or BTR as he is popularly known, is one of the most senior leaders of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) or CPI(M) and former general secretary of the undivided CPI who gave the Communist Party of India its infamous armed struggle line. It was. Party since 1947. It was later later withdrawn.
BTR’s argument was more avant-garde than persuasive. “But the consciousness of the suffering people (lower castes) is lagging behind this reality. Instead of a common struggle, it seems as if the inter-caste struggle is reaching a new climax, and so far Castes seem to be at odds with each other more than ever, and civil wars are the order of the day. It seems like… it is a total deception to think that it is the abolition of untouchability and caste, with landlords and monopolies controlling the economy and a bourgeois landlord government in power. It clearly stated that the struggle against caste inequality must be a subset. One that opposes class inequality.
Does the success of the RSS and the failure of the Communists to advance their political fortunes simply reflect their ability to promote their caste ‘line’ within the ranks and within their desired target groups? Certain facts make you want to answer this question in the affirmative.
The Babri Mosque in Ayodhya was demolished on the watch of the BJP chief minister, who hails from an OBC sub-caste. Narendra Modi, the most popular leader in the history of the BJP, is himself an OBC. Most election surveys, and more importantly parliamentary representation data, show that the Bharatiya Janata Party enjoys significant support among most non-upper castes in the country. It is no longer the Baniya-Brahmin party of old.
Meanwhile, the Communists lost first to caste-based parties in northern India and then their biggest stronghold in West Bengal, where their government was seen as a faction of upper-caste Hindu Bengalis. Indeed, the long-term and immediate triggers of their defeat in Bengal were rooted in class rather than caste. Another fact that supports this argument is that they survived in Kerala, where the party’s second-generation leaders were not upper castes but OBCs.
Also read: CPI leader seeks removal of Kerala ADGP over ‘secret’ RSS meeting
But it would be a mistake to jump to the thesis that caste explains everything about the basics of such evidence. Class categories remain relevant in India’s political competition and can be ignored only at one’s own peril. The biggest argument in favor of such skepticism is that there is broad convergence among political parties in India today in terms of caste-agnostic class appeasement. These include not only caste-agnostic cash transfers and income support schemes, but even the dilution of caste-based reservations to extend affirmative action to the so-called upper caste poor. In fact, the decline in the BJP’s parliamentary strength in the 2024 elections is very likely due to a lack of class rather than identity items in the campaign. In this column, I have often described this weakness of the BJP as hegemony without an advantage.
There are more interesting and difficult questions to answer regarding these two political projects in India. It is as follows: Is there a fundamental asymmetry between the effectiveness and adaptability of the political practices of these two political ideologies in this country?
The RSS and its political wing, the BJP, are able to usurp an electoral democratic version of class struggle by providing economic palliatives along with identity politics at its core. However, communists are unable to balance identity while trying to promote class struggle in revisionist or radical forms. Unless the communists can find creative solutions to this constraint, the future of Indian political competition will fundamentally reconfigure along conservative and less conservative social democratic poles. I have to assume that it will. Fiscal easing will be the common element, and it will be the differentiating factor. The RSS’s political project stands to benefit from the former, as it is able to link class and caste with the majority identity project.
Roshan Kishore, HT’s data and political economy editor, writes a weekly column on the state of the country’s economy and its political implications, and vice versa.
