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As the plight and precarity of migrant workers take centerstage, a pertinent question is about its political bearings. The fact that an overwhelming majority of those precariat are subalterns or Dalit-Bahujans, who, since 2014, shifted to the Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) and Hindutva in a big way, merits the question whether they would rethink their saffron link and return to the fold of non-BJP parties. Understanding this puzzle requires a brief engagement with the structure of subalterneity and its dynamic interplay with the Hindutva and Muslim question in India.
There are two contrasting claims of subalterneity – one oppositional to Hindutva and the other conciliatory towards it. There is a deep fraternity towards Muslims in the oppositional view as they are believed to be low caste Hindus who converted to Islam to escape from Brahmanical Hinduism. Pasmanda politics of the Muslim community is a reciprocal response to this claim of oppositional subalterneity.
On the other hand, the conciliatory subalterneity which is friendly to Hindutva, heralds a phenomenon which I term as subaltern Hindutva, which at present is the dominant political discourse in the western, central and northern States of India, and of late has made remarkable entry in the east, particularly in Bengal by winning over a majority of Dalits and tribes. It takes a constructist approach of myth building and argues that Muslim rule and a secular discourse of minority appeasement is responsible for their precariat position. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh-en-dorsed three volume book by BJP Dalit leader Bizay Sonkar Shastri claiming Dalitsto be upper castes before the adent of Islam in India is a case in point.
To decipher the expected political behavior of the subalterns in the wake of the current crisis engulfing reverse migration-bound workers, one needs to go back to 2014 to deconstruct the phenomenon of the mainstreaming of subaltern Hindutva which overwhelmed the democratic discourse of India except in the southern and north-eastern States. It led to most non-dominant Other Backward Classes (OBC) and Dalits abandoning social justice-centric parties and rallying behind the BJP. Three factors explain this shifting alliance of the subalterns in 2014.