Abstract
Political conservatism in India is usually associated with right-wing traditionalist positions infused with religion, or with forms of economic liberal conservatism, the kind of which the Swatantra Party briefly incarnated. This article asks if the notion of conservatism can be useful to study non-Hindu right parties, by considering the trajectory of the Samajwadi Party, in the state of Uttar Pradesh (UP). Born out of the socialist tradition, the Samajwadi Party spearheaded the struggle for reservations, secularism and the quest of power of the middle peasantry, in the early 1990s. It gradually transformed into a family holding associated with caste preferentialism, cronyism and the criminalization of politics. This article seeks to account for these transformations by examining the party’s trajectory since its origins, its ideological underpinnings and the evolution of its sociological composition, placed in the context of changing electoral politics in UP.
Introduction
Addressing a rally in Moradabad in April 2014, Mulayam Singh Yadav, leader of the Samajwadi Party, a regional party dominant in the North Indian state of Uttar Pradesh (UP), aroused widespread indignation when he opposed capital punishment for rape, arguing that ‘boys will be boys … they make mistakes’ (ladke, ladke hain… galti ho jati hai). 2 Four years earlier, in March 2010, the same leader had attracted the ire of his colleagues in Parliament, when he had stated that the tabled Women’s Reservation Bill would fill the Parliament with the kind of women who invite catcalls and whistles. 3
These problematic utterances, added to the longstanding image of a party associated with dynasticism, cronyism, caste preferentialism and the criminalization of politics, have contributed to forging the image of a crassly sexist, archaic political force, more in tune with the socially conservative elites that have dominated UP politics and society over the past decades than the backward masses it claims to represent. The evocation of the party’s ideological affiliation—socialism (‘samajwad’)—is usually met with circumspection or sarcasm.
The question this article asks is the following: how do we account for such transformation of a party that remains the self-proclaimed inheritor of the socialist movement in North India, which once stood up against caste and gender inequalities and represented resistance against communal forces? Are the contradictions among discourse, practice and professed ideology the result of a change of heart in the party’s leadership, or is there a more structural explanation for the transformation of a party that initially rose to challenge the domination of the traditional elites to incarnate the rule of the new elites of UP?
A sub-question that this article also attempts to address is to see whether the category of political conservatism is useful in any way to characterize the trajectory of a party like the Samajwadi Party.
Political conservatism in India is usually associated with a right-wing traditionalist position infused with religion. 4 Similarly, conservatism in India is also associated with some form of upper-caste representations grounded on religion, culture or social relations. It is also associated with forms of economic liberal conservatism, the Swatantra Party remaining to this day its main ephemeral incarnation.
Can we find traces of conservatism in non-Hindu right and secular parties? What kind of definition or conception of conservatism might be helpful to read their political beliefs and actions? Is there a definition or a conception of conservatism that would be helpful to differentiate between such parties, rather than club them together under a generic label?
This article’s first contention is that to focus on party ideology would not lead very far. Ideology is a poor marker of a party’s identity in India; which party, between the Hindu right and the left, has not proclaimed to be pro-poor, pro-farmer and secular to some degree? What party can claim not to contain any element of social conservatism? Parties in India have been described as pragmatists and opportunists due to the alacrity with which alliances and counter-alliances are made and un-made (Hasan, 2010; Sridharan, 2004). Ideology was also a vector of division among the socialists in North India (Brass, 1990), or among the Dalit parties in Maharashtra (Wankhede, 2012).
The second contention is that one should not define a party from its discourse and self-representation but from its sociology and political practices. The evolution of the sociological composition of a party—its leadership, its cadres and elected representatives—is a good indicator of a party’s identity and trajectory.
The third contention is, quite simply, that context matters. Parties trajectory and their sociology largely derive from adaptation to the changing context of electoral competition.
This article adopts a minimalist vision of political conservatism, defined as a political philosophy that favours a particular existing form of social and political order, in the face of external forces for change. But rather than focusing on ideas, or philosophy, our definition of political conservatism concentrates on practices of defending a particular social and political order. Conservatism in practice, or deed, rather than in word.
The first section of this article deals with the origins and the ideological foundations of the Samajwadi Party, specifically the double legacy of Rammanohar Lohia and Chaudhary Charan Singh.
The second section describes four sociological evolutions that the party experienced through the 1990s and 2000s: the shift from broad backward mobilization to specific caste mobilization, a growing diversification of its personnel on the bases of caste, a growing homogenization of the same personnel on the bases of class, and a gradual concentration of power within the party in the hands of the party leader—Mulayam Singh Yadav—and his family. The argument is that the party’s sociological transformations and its implication in terms of political practices contradict the party’s ideological heritage, but without creating the need or the necessity to reformulate or reinvent it. The inconsistency between doctrine and action is the base of the argument that the Samajwadi Party may not be an ideologically conservative party, but it is so in practice.
The third section touches on some of the contextual transformations of electoral politics in UP that have affected Samajwadi Party’s recruitment strategies. The argument is that the conservative turn of the party results as much from the necessity to adapt to competitive pressures from electoral politics rather than from a particular change of heart in its leadership, or from power fatigue.
Origins and Ideological Foundations of the Samajwadi Party
The Samajwadi Party was formally created on 4 October 1992. It emerged as the victorious faction of a fratricidal struggle that opposed claimants to the political succession of Charan Singh, after his death in 1987. The leader of one of these factions, Mulayam Singh Yadav, a prominent political figure both among his caste—the Yadavs—and among the party’s apparatus, wrested the leadership of the Janata Dal from Charan Singh’s son, Ajit Singh, and built on it a party dominated by the elite segments of the state’s backward classes. 5 The creation of the Samajwadi Party marked the culmination of over four decades of divisions and reconfiguration of socialist forces in UP.
Socialist Origins
The party claims the dual legacy of Ram Manohar Lohia—as ideological founding father—and Chaudhary Charan Singh—as tutelary political figure. Both advocated a socialist political formation aimed at forming an alliance of the rural middle and low peasantry, alongside Dalits and Muslims, to defeat a Congress Party largely dominated by the upper castes. In Lohia’s view, such an alliance was also that of caste and class, an opportunity to practise political equality among marginalized groups, preparing the advent of a more just society.
That alliance, however, would prove difficult to set up, mainly due to feuds within the various factions and branches of the socialist movement as well as antagonisms between upwardly mobile and assertive segments of the Other Backward Classes (OBCs) and other lower peasant castes. The more prosperous Jats in Western UP and the lower peasant castes of Eastern UP particularly could not constitute a common platform (Verma, 2004).
Internal strife among socialist leaders across the country had always precluded the consolidation of socialist forces at either the state or the national level. 6 Lohia, who had founded the Congress Socialist Party in 1934 and broken away from the Congress in 1946, became the General Secretary of the Praja Socialist Party (PSP) in 1954. The PSP was the result of a merger between the Socialist Party and the Kisan Majdoor Praja Party (KMPP) of Acharya Kripalani (Jaffrelot, 2003). Opposed to the idea of a new alliance with the Congress, Lohia left the PSP a year later to form his own Socialist Party.
In 1964, representatives from the UP branches of various socialist parties agreed to merge forces, to face the growing threat of the Jana Sangh and the alliance between the Congress and the Communists (Schoenfeld, 1965). The newly created Samyukta (‘United’) Socialist Party (SSP) would split several times before being reunited again with the PSP, in 1972. 7
After Lohia’s death in 1967, Chaudhary Charan Singh pursued the consolidation of the socialist camp. In 1974, he created the Bharatiya Lok Dal (BLD), a merger of seven anti-Congress parties. 8 The BLD then formed an alliance with the Jana Sangh and the Congress (O) in 1977, after the Emergency, to defeat the Congress. In UP, the alliance won 82.8 per cent of the seats with a combined vote share of 47.76 per cent.
The experience, however, would be short lived. Tensions with the Jana Sangh at the centre and at the state level led to divisions among the socialists, precipitating the departure of Charan Singh—then Union Home Minister—on 9 April 1978. The socialist bloc split again into various parties, the main two led by Charan Singh and Raj Narain, after his own expulsion from the Union Cabinet on grounds of indiscipline. 9
Charan Singh’s brief stint as prime minister in July–August 1978 led to further divisions among the socialists. Unable to secure a majority in the Lok Sabha, Charan Singh resigned and left the Janata alliance in ruin. The divisions and the collapse of the Janata coalition at the centre paved the way for the resurgence of the Congress at the centre and at the state level. In the 1980, UP state elections, Charan Singh could only save 59 seats. 10
Nearly 4 years later, on 20 October 1984, Charan Singh formed yet another party, the Dalit Mazdoor Kisan Party (DMKP), through a merger with H.N. Bahuguna’s Socialist Front and the National Socialist Party. Mulayam Singh was appointed head of the UP unit, the party’s only viable unit. Eleven days later, Indira Gandhi was assassinated. The DMKP was swept away by the pro-Congress wave that followed. Charan Singh could only save his own seat in Baghpat, and another one, in Etah district (Brass, 2011).
In the 1985 state elections, Mulayam took over the organization of the party—renamed Lok Dal— and led the campaign, winning 84 seats with 21.43 per cent of vote share. Since the early 1980s, Charan Singh had gradually been withdrawing from active politics and entrusted Mulayam with leading the anti-V.P. Singh agitation campaign and the party. 11 Mulayam Singh’s hold over the party would grow through his tenure as Leader of the Opposition in the UP Vidhan Sabha.
After Charan Singh’s death in 1987, the Lok Dal split into the Lok Dal (A), a faction led by his son Ajit, and the Lok Dal (B), led by H.N. Bahuguna. After siding with Bahuguna, Mulayam Singh left to form the Janata Dal (JD). The JD underwent some upheaval but, ultimately, Mulayam prevailed over all these formations. His faction commanded the largest share of the Lok Dal’s political base among the leading middle-status agricultural castes in UP, the Yadavs figuring predominantly among them (Brass, 2011). Ajit Singh’s core supporters—the Jats—were geographically circumscribed to a few districts of Western UP. Besides, Mulayam Singh’s superior organizational skills also helped him to concentrate most of the organizational strength of the Lok Dal.
Besides the clashes of egos, the splits and mergers among the socialists had taken place due to divergence of views on strategy and ideology. This time, the split took place over the issue of party control, between factions defined not by ideology but by caste.
The mobilization for reservations not only gave a boost to the formation of caste-based political identities but also created a new space wherein backward castes could compete against each other to secure state benefits. The competition between faction leaders of the Lok Dal also reflected the political assertion of dominant groups among the backwards. This was the first blow by the Samajwadi Party, a dent in the socialist project of forging a broad-based backward alliance by splitting the party along caste lines.
The Ideological Foundations of the Samajwadi Party
Since its inception, the party has claimed adhesion to the tenets of Rammanohar Lohia’s socialism. Born in Akbarpur, Faizabad district, in 1910, in a Marwari Bania family, Lohia emerged in the 1930s as one of India’s foremost socialist thinkers and political actors. Throughout his life, Lohia sought to trace a political line distinct from the Communists and the Nehruvian brand of socialism.
Rejecting the Marxists’ class-based approach, he sought to anchor his socialism in India’s socio-economic context by articulating a vision of inequalities rooted in various intersecting forms of social stratification: caste, class, gender and language. Caste, according to Lohia, was the primary form of inequality but had to be seen in intersection with other forms of social stratification, particularly gender (Yadav, 2010).
All war on poverty is a sham, unless it is, at the same time, a conscious and sustained war on these two segregations [caste and gender]. (Lohia, 1963, p. 199)
Lohia’s view on the intersectionality of sources of inequalities translated into a recipe for political action that called for the unification of all backward groups, including Dalits, Muslims and Adivasis, into a social alliance and a political front (Kumar, 2010).
[…] This brings us to the third and true struggle against caste now on the agenda of India’s history. This struggle aims to pitchfork the five downgraded groups of society, women, Sudras, Harijans, Muslims and Adivasis, into positions of leadership, irrespective of their merit as it stands today. (Lohia, 1963, p. 199)
According to Lohia, caste ultimately had to be abolished. But in the first instance, it had to be politicized and instrumentalized to create social and electoral alliances, a precondition for overcoming caste-based inequalities and win elections. In his view, only a socialist movement, based on democratic ideals and the practice of equality, could achieve that. Political mobilization also had to be anchored in caste, since it had become clear to the socialists that mere economic policy, such as land reforms or pricing limits, would not address the issues of power relations and inequalities in villages (Jaffrelot, 2003).
The programmatic translation of that vision was the demand for reservations. Necessarily disadvantaged, unable to compete, the lower castes and classes had to be granted affirmative action. The demand for reservation in all government and public departments for low and backward castes, including Muslims and women, would be the programmatic foundation of any socialist alliance (Brass, 2011). 12
The Samajwadi Party would retain from this corpus the necessity to ground party and electoral mobilization on caste and local alliances. It would conveniently bypass the second part of Lohia’s vision—overcoming boundaries among lower groups by sharing power within the organization. It would also gradually bypass the inclusion of other lower groups, to concentrate on its core electoral support group, the Yadavs, and on the induction of candidates from other dominant groups, including the upper castes.
Two other aspects of Lohia’s thought also shaped the identity and doctrine of the Samajwadi Party. The first was the rejection of English and the promotion of Hindi. The second was an economic vision that favoured decentralization, small-scale labour-intensive economic activities, and a general attitude of distrust of the formal capitalistic industrial sector.
For Lohia, rejecting English not merely was a question of renouncing the colonizer’s tongue or an issue of self-respect but was, above all, a means to address the deep inequalities that the use of English in all walks of official and public life created.
The use of English as a medium in economy depresses work output, in education reduces learning and almost nullifies research, in administration weakens efficiency and adds to inequality and corruption. (Lohia, 1966, p. 44)
In his view, linguistic redistribution had to precede economic redistribution. 13
Opposition to English has been a constant for the Samajwadi Party, which has led numerous campaigns to promote vernacular languages and demanded that English be banned from public institutions.
In its 2009 election manifesto, the Samajwadi Party promised that, if brought to power, it would ban expensive education in English. 14 It also proposed to reduce the use of computers to generate jobs. 15 In a pre-campaign interview, Mulayam Singh declared: ‘The use of computers in offices is creating unemployment problems. Our party feels that if work can be done by a person using hands there is no need to deploy machines’ (The Times of India, 2009).
On the economic front, Lohia took inspiration from Gandhi’s views on economic decentralization and distrust of industry.
… [Large-scale industries may produce] a few more Calcuttas and Kanpurs, it may build rest on the dry bones of tens of millions dying in the numerous hamlets and towns in the country. But it would not be able to form capital for the two-thirds of the world. 16
Instead, Lohia advocated small production units, using simple low-cost technologies. He rejected private property in principle and advocated a non-violent transition towards decentralized socialized ownership. He proposed to cap income inequality under a ratio of one to ten. He proposed the nationalization of large industry and the organization of small industry into local cooperatives.
The unifying thread of Lohia’s ideas was equality. A socialist state had to do everything in its power to maximize individual equality, including the protection of privacy and individual liberties, and prevent inequalities from prevailing through ownership of means of production. In Will to Power, Lohia encapsulates his economic programme into six propositions: (a) land redistribution to the tiller by decree; (b) the formation of a land army for uncultivated tracts; (c) industrialization through small-unit machines; (d) redistribution of land with a minimum of 20 bighas and a cow per family; (e) parity between agricultural and industrial prices; and (f) the four-pillar state (Lohia, 1956, pp. 27–32). 17
Similarly, the Samajwadi Party is a proponent of strong state control over large industry, with underlying economic decentralization, consisting of nurturing the medium-scale private sector and small-scale cooperative sector through subsidies and public redistribution. 18 Just like Lohia, it advocates the introduction of small-unit technology to prevent the alienation of man by industry. It also favours the municipalization of utilities such as water, electricity and gas. On the agricultural front, it would encourage cooperative farming and the redistribution of surplus land to the most backward sections of the population.
The party’s economic positions also border the normative. The party regularly denounces the consumer culture promoted by the liberalization of the economy and calls for protectionist barriers in various segments of the consumer goods industry (Singh Yadav, 1999). The mistrust of corporations also extends to some luddite takes on industrialization and mechanization in general.
I wonder whether we need any machinery to manufacture items from cloth to match sticks, soap, biscuit, loaf, etc. In our country, we have tremendous manpower and compared to this power, we have less farming. The United States, which we are imitating, has a lot more farming and manpower is far less. (Singh Yadav, 1999)
While in power, the Samajwadi Party ignored some of its core ideological commitments. In the 2000s, it developed ties with various large corporations and the Bombay film industry, inducting film stars as campaigners and candidates. The party leadership was criticized by the socialist old guard for their newly acquired taste for luxury and alleged ties with shady businessmen and criminals (Prashant, 2004). The controversial figure of Amar Singh, a political hustler who had previously officiated within the Congress Party, was a central figure of mediation between the party and the world of big business (Verma, 2004).
On the international front, the Samajwadi Party adopts a swadeshi position already advocated by Lohia. It regularly rants against globalization, opposes most forms of FDI and criticizes US imperialism, which did not prevent it from supporting the Indo-US Civil Nuclear Agreement in 2007 (Sasikumar & Verniers, 2013).
The relationship of the Samajwadi Party with Lohia’s heritage has been qualified as literal, a form of uncritical socialist catechism, ‘largely symbolic and devotional’ (Shafiuzzaman, 2003). The Samajwadi Party adopted Lohia less for his commitment to equality and more for the centrality of caste as base for mobilization, and for consistently keeping equal distance between the Congress and the Hindu right.
The Transformation of the Samajwadi Party
As we saw in the first section, the Samajwadi Party was born through a rupture of the original socialist mould, as the Lok Dal fragmented into various caste-based factions. 19 Post 1992, the Samajwadi Party would keep relying on both its Yadav and Muslim bases, acquired during the Ram Janmabhoomi period. 20 The party would make local strategic alliances with other groups out of temporary necessity.
The concentration of the Samajwadi Party on his core Yadav base was not merely a strategic choice but also the outcome of decades of formation and crystallization of a political identity among Yadavs. Through the second half of the twentieth century, they have been the largest block of supporters of the main socialist parties in UP. Their mobilization was further reinforced by the invention of a mythical common past and religion, 21 which were used to justify the Yadavs’ natural gift for politics and therefore their entitlement to its benefits (Michelutti, 2008).
This culture of entitlement would also rely on a culture of muscular politics, popularized through the figures of the pehelwan (wrestler) 22 or the dabangg (fearless hero) (Michelutti, 2010). Since its inception, the Samajwadi Party would be largely associated with the notion of goonda raj, or the rule of thugs.
Second Rupture: Inclusiveness beyond the Backward Alliance
Initially, the distribution of tickets to state election candidates reflected the party’s caste preferentialism. It would regularly distribute more than half of its tickets to OBC candidates, nearly half of these to Yadav candidates. This resulted in a large representation of Yadavs among the party’s MLAs (above 60 per cent of the party’s OBC MLAs). Similarly, Yadavs tend to be over-represented in SP cabinets, holding most of the ‘remunerative’ portfolios (Table 1).
The share of OBCs among SP MLAs, however, would decrease from 50.5 per cent in 1993 to 26.1 per cent in 2012, owing to a strategy of diversifying the party’s candidate recruitment.
Caste Group Representation among SP MLAs, 1993–2017
The SP was not the only party that attempted to consolidate its core support base in the 1990s. Other major parties were engaged in a similar exercise. The Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) mobilized its Dalit base by antagonizing the upper castes. The BJP mobilized its core support among the upper castes while attempting to forge opportunistic alliances with non-dominant OBC groups. The Congress in decline retained its pro-upper-caste bias, as attested by the high proportion of upper-caste candidates among its remaining MLAs.
As the Samajwadi Party attempted to broaden its support base, it departed from the socialist prescription of forming a large alliance of backward groups, providing representation to members of the groups it initially opposed. Between 1993 and 2007, the ratio of upper-caste MLAs grew from 17.4 per cent to 30.9 per cent. 23 The relative decrease of OBC representation among the party MLAs also meant a decrease in the representation of the Yadavs. Constituting nearly a third of the party’s MLAs in 1993, they shrank to 16 per cent in 2012.
This erosion is, however, mitigated by four factors. The first is that the SP maintains inequalities in the distribution of portfolios in its cabinets. Dominant OBCs and upper castes receive more portfolios, generally the more prestigious ones (Jaffrelot & Verniers, 2012). Second, Yadav representation in the party’s local branches remains higher than that in the Assembly. 24 They also tend to be over-represented in local institutions. 25 Third, if one considers the ‘stable political class’ of the Samajwadi Party, defined as the number of MLAs elected more than twice, Yadavs figure prominently. 26
The Samajwadi Party emerged as a caste-based formation from the struggle to capture Charan Singh’s legacy. It emerged as a Yadav outfit from the beginning and could never completely depart from that identity, although it sought to become more diverse later on. In recent years, the deepening of class divisions within castes made the project of building alliances among backward more difficult, but the commitment of the Samajwadi Party to this project had never been strong in the first place.
Third Rupture: The Changing Profile of Samajwadi Party Legislators: from Lohia to Petty Bourgeois
As the party diversified its recruitment on the bases of caste, it also became more elitist in the selection of its candidates. Increased competitiveness in the 2000s and the will to expand their vote base pushed parties in UP to increasingly induct candidates with ‘winnability’, a euphemism for muscle power and money. According to party strategists, voter base expansion could be achieved by inducting strongmen from dominant local castes.
Data available on the occupation and assets of candidates and elected representatives in UP state elections reveal that, over time, the share of successful candidates from certain businesses increased markedly during the 2000s (Verniers, 2016). 27 Most of these ‘businessmen-politicians’ come from sectors of economic activity close to the state (licensing), cash-rich and prosperous, and highly criminalized, such as construction, transport or consumer goods distribution. As parties seek to recruit strong candidates with self-funding abilities, they attract individual entrepreneurs seeking to invest in politics as a means to expand some form of private interest, by developing party networks, gaining state protection, public contracts and land.
The pressures and demands of electoral politics also push professional politicians to foray into business ventures to keep their political operations and careers afloat.
Table 2 reveals that this phenomenon concerns not just the Samajwadi Party but all parties, including the Congress, although to a lesser extent. What distinguishes the Samajwadi Party from its competitors, however, is that it has built a network of local party branches that recruit its members among local elite groups. Contrary to a party like the BSP, whose local organization remains largely in the hands of Jatav Dalits, the SP builds ties with local elites by inducting them within its organization and therefore within its faction-controlled patronage networks.
Profession of MLAs in the 2012 UP Assembly, per Party
This last feature of the Samajwadi Party distinguishes it among its competitors, from the past or present. The Samajwadi Party model of elite induction differs from the Congress system, which relied on the induction of traditional elites, largely skewed in favour of the upper castes (Kothari, 1964). It also differs from the Jan Sangh and later on BJP model, also skewed in favour of traditional elites and more attentive to the ideological credentials of their candidates (Baxter, 1971; Graham, 1990). It differs from the BSP, which outsources its candidates from dominant segments of the electorate who have loose ties with its organization. By aligning its local organization with members of locally dominant groups, the Samajwadi Party has effectively become the party of the new elites of UP, across castes.
Those ties between the party and its cadres is essentially pragmatic and based on the collusion of material interests, rather commitment to some shared ideology or political vision.
Fourth Rupture: From Caste Party to Family Holding
Finally, the diversification of the party’s social composition did not affect Mulayam Singh and his kin’s wielding of power; nor did it promote any form of internal democracy (Jaffrelot & Verniers, 2012).
The Samajwadi Party is a rather unique case in Indian regional politics. As an organization, it is heavily factionalized, most being controlled by various relatives of Mulayam Singh Yadav. Faction leaders compete internally for influence and access, over the distribution of tickets and contracts, for cabinet berths and for the nomination of cronies and allies in public offices. They also function as intermediaries between businessmen and the government, through their portfolios, through access to Mulayam and through networks of influence in the bureaucracy and state agencies.
The power of faction leaders is reinforced by the fact that under the party’s first two layers of leadership, there is an intense turnover of elected representatives. On an average, the party discards half of its incumbent MLAs in each election, of whom 60 per cent get re-elected. 28
The more diversified the party became, the more control the family exerted on its apparatus. The family-holding character of the party was also reinforced by the induction of new members before nearly every election. Currently, 16 members of the Yadav family are in active politics. 29
This was not the case earlier, although the withering or passing of the party’s historic figures, who could hold their ground vis-à-vis Mulayam and his kin, contributed to it. Over a decade, Mulayam Singh lost four longstanding companions: Ram Saran Das, a close associate of Lohia and former UP President of the Samajwadi Party (2008); Janeshwar Mishra, co-founder of the Samajwadi Party (2010); 30 Mohan Singh, three-time MP from Deoria and a General Secretary of the Party (2013); 31 and Brij Bhushan Tiwari, a five-time Samajwadi Party MP (2012).
The disappearance of the old guard coincided with the rise of Mulayam’s brothers, Shivpal and Ram Gopal, in the party. They entered the picture only in 1996 and played relatively minor roles in the party until 2009, when Shivpal became state party president and leader of the opposition in the state assembly. Until then, he had been limited to a secondary organizational role in the party. His elder brother, Ram Gopal, pursued his career in the Rajya Sabha as the Delhi face of the party.
These features of the Samajwadi Party—elitism and concentration of power—contradict the hopes for democratization and emancipation raised by the rise of the backward movement. The party that used to carry the backward torch has turned into the defender of the interests of the newly entrenched social, political and economic elites of the state.
Explaining the Samajwadi Party’s Conservative Turn
The four transformations that the Samajwadi Party has undergone form the base of the argument that it has become a conservative formation. While we have used a fairly generic definition of conservatism—as resistance against changes in the social order—we must qualify the kind of conservatism associated with a party that has emerged from the backward movement.
One way to answer that question is to look at the condition of emergence of the Samajwadi Party’s conservatism. Much like Congress’ early days’ conservatism, it has emerged through pragmatism and necessity, rather than ideology.
Much of the Samajwadi Party’s transformations come from the necessity of adapting to the changing context of UP’s electoral politics: increased competitiveness, the rising entry cost for individual candidates and a high turnover of elected representatives.
All these factors act as constraints on parties and candidates, who must adapt to these changing conditions. The resources required to contest competitively in an election filter out those who cannot afford the process. The combination of the cost of entry and swiftness of exit create structural incentives for predatory behaviour, as successful representatives have little time to recoup their investment. Parties have adapted to this state of affairs by co-opting candidates who possess the necessary resources to compete effectively—the right caste affiliation given the local demography and support from local economic elites. Consequently, UP’s political class gets recruited among local elites, who tend to represent elite interests once in office.
This, again, is not a new phenomenon. The Congress relied on upper-caste candidates because their high status granted them some authority over voters. But they also possessed the land that provided the resources to get votes and sustain oneself in politics.
Over the past three decades, economic transformations, or the slow transition from an agriculture-based economy to a more market-based non-farm economy, have altered the resources required to prosper in politics. In a market economy, those who hold the key to the markets are bound to be able to derive power from it.
While individuals from different groups benefit from this system, Yadavs within the Samajwadi Party still get the lion’s share. Despite efforts to convince its voters otherwise, the party still suffers from a reputation of treating its core support base preferentially, which cost it dear in the 2017 state elections.
In The Caste System, Lohia had warned about the possibility of seeing dominant groups among lower castes and backward classes seizing the benefits and shutting the door behind them.
[…] Secondly, the colossi among the lower-castes like the Chamars and Ahirs may want to appropriate the fruits of this policy [reservations] without sharing them with the myriads of other low-castes, with the result that the Brahmin and Chamar change places but caste remains intact. (Lohia, 1963, p. 299)
For a long time, it was assumed that achieving fair representation was the main goal of the backward movement. Securing a fair share of representation was a matter of dignity and a means to secure access to public resources and state protection. The quest for reservations was the key element of caste-based horizontal or transversal mobilization strategies. Today, however, such transversal mobilizations have lost their potency, as reservations have exhausted their potential, both in terms of salient rallying cry of backward voters, and as an instrument of upward social mobility.
Representation—or electoral politics—seems now to have become an instrument to achieve what may be another end of politics in UP: territorial control. 32 From a local vantage point, individuals and groups invest in politics either to enhance the social and economic control that they exert locally through democracy, or to wrest that position from others. 33
The conservatism of the Samajwadi Party derives thus from the conservatism of local elites who use electoral politics as a means to preserve their privileged position.
In his 1969, doctoral dissertation on Uttar Pradesh’s political elites, Ralph C. Meyer had already forewarned that there was a growing interlocking of political and economic power in UP (Meyer, 1969). He also warned that economic growth and transformations alone would not bring political stability. The situation today is not fundamentally different. What has changed, however, is the composition of the elites, more diverse in terms of caste and the configuration of the party system, more competitive.
Conclusion: Backward Politics as Conservative Politics
In his study of the Swatantra Party and Indian conservatism, Howard L. Erdman points to elements of conservatism among the non-elite categories, underlying an inconsistency between discourse and doctrine:
More difficult to come to grips with than such manifestations of conservatism is a doctrine whose practical consequences are profoundly conservative, even though its exponents profess to want certain major changes in Indian life. (Erdman, 1967, p. 30)
This doctrine, says Erdman, has three main components: (a) idealization of the village, or the ‘real’ India; (b) reaction against imperialist arrogance and the ‘corrosive effects’ of Western modernity on traditional, rural India; and (c) opposition to industrialization, including variants on Luddite and utopian socialist themes. 34
Erdman then described the socialist tradition in the Congress. The socialists who broke away from the Congress before and after Independence shared some of these premises but also rephrased some of them. For instance, they substituted the idealized image of the peasant with the small proprietor suffering under the yoke of rural landlordism and caste discrimination. The defiance of British imperialism was replaced by a mistrust of India’s new capitalist class and their patrons in the government. They still share the same critique of industrialization.
What one finds is that the Samajwadi Party, heir to this socialist tradition, has not broken away from this ideological mould but contradicts it through its practice of politics, signalled by its transformations. The party never felt the need to reformulate or update its ideology. But the sociology of the party—a party controlled by a family, co-opting representatives of the new socio-economic elites of the state—and the vicissitudes from their exercise of power, clearly contradict their socialist aspirations.
This is how the Samajwadi Party differs from other more conventionally conservative political forces, such as the Swatantra Party of the Hindu Right parties. Its conservatism is rooted in its sociology, in its electoral practices and in its mode of exercising power at large, rather than in its ideological commitments. The pragmatism behind the Samajwadi Party’s conservatism explains why it can still profess adhesion to its old socialist credo while contradicting it in practice. 35
What makes this case interesting is not simply the trajectory of a party’s transformation—which could be summed up, after all, as a banal story of a left-leaning party shifting towards conservatism through the prolonged exercise of power. It is the realization that these transformations were wrought not simply by design or autopoiesis but through adaptation to the constraints of electoral politics and, therefore, democracy. It is the forces and rules of democracy, of competition, that have encouraged the Samajwadi Party—and others—to recruit their candidates among locally entrenched elites.
If we adopt a broad definition of conservatism as a form of resistance to change, as an aim to maintain status quo against competing forces, then the Samajwadi Party is conservative. It is a party led by the same family for the last 23 years, which seeks to seize power for the benefit of groups and individuals who in turn use this power to exert territorial control wherever they can, a party whose purpose is to defend the conservative interests of not only its core electoral support group—the Yadavs—but also that of the new conservative elites of the state.
The conservatism and elitism of a party like the Samajwadi Party has broader implications for our understanding of backward politics in India. One can ask for instance to what extent the necessity to adapt to the constraints of electoral politics contradicts, and indeed cripples, the promises of emancipation borne by the parties that have emerged from the contestation of the old social and political order.
It also sheds light on more recent political developments. For instance, in the 2017 UP Assembly elections, many voters across caste groups have rejected the politics of caste-based preferentialism of the SP and the BSP, to the benefit of the BJP. The elitism of regional parties has paved the way for new forms of plebeian politics, that combine conventional religious appeal with the promise of shared development.