The decision of the government some months ago to cut fuel subsidies, raise the price of kerosene and LPG and deregulate the price of petrol and diesel was met with predictable howls of protest from the Opposition. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Communist parties united for a nation-wide bandh. The Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) staged protests in all district headquarters in Uttar Pradesh. BSP President Mayawati claimed that the price hike proved that the government was indifferent to the misery and plight of the common man.
We tend to dismiss such protests as ritual political rhetoric. But a genuine political case can be made for the BJP and the Left’s support for the LPG subsidy. The middle class support base of the BJP and the cadre of unionised workers who vote for the Left are major beneficiaries of subsidies on fuel, particularly the one on LPG.
The real puzzle is Mayawati’s support for the LPG subsidy. The core of her support base, poor rural Dalits are not big users of LPG. LPG is used predominantly by the urban middle class. Universal LPG subsidy is one of the most egregious instances of the very poor paying for the relatively affluent.
For Mayawati, the LPG subsidy issue should have been manna from heaven. The rich cornering a large part of the subsidy on domestic cooking fuel has all the emotional resonance Mayawati should need; a vivid example of the way the system is rigged against Dalits. One would expect her to be thundering about this injustice in dusty political rallies in Etawah, goading her supporters to vote her to power, promising them that she will use the levers of power to direct such goodies their way.
Yet Mayawati chose to let this one go. What gives?
Here is my take.
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First, it’s Agency Theory. The unwashed millions who vote for the BSP might be poor Dalits who burn firewood or kerosene to cook their meals. But the leadership is not. The leadership is very middle class. Their meals are cooked over the blue flame of Liquefied Petroleum Gas. The BSP grew out the Backward and Minorities Employees Federation (BAMCEF) and the Dalit Soshit Samaj Sangharsh Samiti (DS4), both of which were set up to promote the interests of Dalit government employees. I wouldn’t be surprised if the BSP has retained the ideological and organisational kernel of these two organisations. Mayawati’s father, Prabhu Das, worked for the postal department. Government employees — urban middle class with constrained budgets — are, of course, among the most vocal supporters of the LPG subsidy. It’s not surprising that the leadership of the BSP, including Mayawati, instinctively supports the LPG subsidy.
The second and the more interesting explanation has less to do with Mayawati and more to do with her supporters. I owe a debt to Thomas Frank’s excellent examination of a similar phenomenon in his book What’s the Matter with Kansas? Poor and destitute they may be, but like the Kansas in Thomas Frank’s book, the Dalits of UP “vote like the people they want to be rather than the people that they [are]”. While collecting firewood to cook their meal, the hope for a better life burns — the hope of a pucca house, of a stable income and of all the visible symbols of middle class respectability. So, they clamour for reservations in government jobs, quotas in colleges and for subsidies in LPG cylinders.
Ironically, it’s this hope that blinds Dalits to their real economic interests. The crores spent on the LPG subsidy could be used to build schools, pave rural roads or provide basic sanitation — things that would go a long way in realising those hopes. It makes poor Dalit voters complicit in the injustice being done to them.
I write this piece in a chirpy Bandra (West) café. It’s a late Sunday morning, Bandra’s bankers are loitering over for their cafe mochas. I bet Mayawati isn’t popular in this café. I bet that these people will blame her for corruption, bad governance and bad English.
I realise how much we owe the poor Dalits of Uttar Pradesh. And their patience with India. That patience provides a measure of political stability that is the bedrock of India’s furious growth. The Indian state cannot survive redistributive claims, not to mention a Naxal-like open revolt of the Dalits. Like Thomas Frank’s Kansas, Dalits seem to have swapped political empowerment for economic empowerment. Mayawati has done much to foster that patience by diluting Dalit frustration with middle class aspiration. It is her ambition, her political entrepreneurship but also her vision of politics as a tool of empowerment, that has led the Bahujan Samaj Party to power. It has also kept the flame of eventual justice alive among the Dalits.