Politics of social engineering

Of the 21 new ministers, seven are from Bihar and Uttar Pradesh

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has inducted new ministers in his council with an eye on the coming Assembly elections. The move will also help the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) consolidate the process of social engineering that yielded handsome gains in the general elections in May.

Of the 21 new ministers, a third (seven) are from Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. The Assembly elections are due in Bihar in less than a year and Uttar Pradesh (UP) will go to polls in 2017.

By inducting Rajiv Pratap Rudy, Ram Kripal Yadav and Giriraj Singh, Modi has attempted a balancing act. Yadav is a known other backward class (OBC) face, while Singh is an upper caste Bhumihar. BJP seems to be attempting a coalition of Dalits, a section of the OBCs and the upper castes. This formula seemed to have helped the party sweep polls in the May Lok Sabha elections. But subsequent by-election saw erosion of some of that gains, especially in Bihar where the RJD-JD(U) combine managed to corner OBC votes in its favour.

Rudy's induction is seen as a reward for his hard work during the recently concluded Maharashtra Assembly polls.

A social engineering formula appears to have been repeated in Uttar Pradesh, the largest in terms of Lok Sabha seats. Ram Shankar Katheria, Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi, Mahesh Sharma and Niranjan Jyoti were inducted from the state. It seems Modi had tried to bring representatives from all sections of the society. Katheria is a Dalit, Naqvi is from a minority community. Sharma is an upper caste Hindu, while Jyoti is an OBC and proponent of Hindutva.

Experts say among the four, the most important is inclusion of Katheria, as the BJP is trying to woo the Dalit community with an active support of its progenitor, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). The community was instrumental for a landslide victory in the May elections in UP as well as the recent Haryana Assembly elections.

Modi's picking of another Dalit leader, Vijay Sampla from Punjab, which has one of the highest population of this community, further establishes BJP's intention of making inroads into the community. In Punjab, elections are due in 2017.

Naming of Sanwar Lal Jat and Birender Singh among Cabinet ministers is read as an effort to placate Jat voters in western UP, Haryana and Rajasthan. The community was unhappy after Manohar Lal Khattar, a non-Jat, was appointed chief minister of Haryana.