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Politics of Identity Contra Anti-caste Social Visions
The intricate relations between caste-based identity politics and anti-caste social associations and visions in West Bengal are unravelled, based on findings from a micro study conducted in a village in Nadia district between November 2020 and March 2021. In-depth interviews too were conducted with Namasudra leaders, the anti-caste Matua sect, and Matua dals (village associations) in Nadia and North 24 Parganas districts. While the discourse on citizenship and the long experience of social and political marginalisation have resulted in a strategic polarisation of the Matuas towards the politics of Hindutva, this has never stifled their quest for social justice.The intricate relations between caste-based identity politics and anti-caste social associations and visions in West Bengal are unravelled, based on findings from a micro study conducted in a village in Nadia district between November 2020 and March 2021. In-depth interviews too were conducted with Namasudra leaders, the anti-caste Matua sect, and Matua dals (village associations) in Nadia and North 24 Parganas districts. While the discourse on citizenship and the long experience of social and political marginalisation have resulted in a strategic polarisation of the Matuas towards the politics of Hindutva, this has never stifled their quest for social justice.
The author is grateful to Vidhu Verma, Sekhar Bandyopadhyay, Rajarshi Dasgupta, Aparna Agarwal, and Abdul Matin for their guidance and feedback on the paper. The author also thanks the anonymous reviewers for their careful reading of the draft and insightful comments and suggestions.
It has been a general trend among scholars of caste politics to begin and end their analyses of caste as a socially given identity. In West Bengal, the decline of the left parties and the rise of the All India Trinamool Congress (TMC) in power in 2011 caused many scholars to opine that there is a change in the idiom of politics in the state. Seeing the TMC’s association with anti-caste outfits, like the Matua Mahasangha, scholars like Praskanva Sinharay (2012) argued that it has introduced a “new politics of caste,” which was earlier suppressed in the postcolonial politics of West Bengal. Later, in the Lok Sabha election 2019, when the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won in 18 constituencies, many emphasised how the party has been successful in mobilising the low castes and the Matuas (Das 2021; Mukherjee 2021). They saw the rise of the BJP as a continuation of the identity politics that the TMC initiated after coming to power.
Before the state assembly election 2021, many pollsters noted that the key to the BJP’s success is determined by the Scheduled Caste (SC), Scheduled Tribe (ST), and Other Backward Classes (OBC) votes.1 It was argued that the BJP has socially engineered the “right caste combination” (Raychaudhuri 2020), where the ideology of political Hindutva consolidated the low castes along with the upper castes. The politics around the citizenship law and the anti-incumbency against the TMC resulted in the Matuas and numerous other low castes to shift electorally towards the BJP. This particular political behaviour of the low castes is termed as “subaltern Hindutva” by pollster Sajjan Kumar (2020). It loosely means that the numerically weaker lower castes in search of political representation are allied with Hindutva-based political parties, like the BJP.
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