Bivalent Hegemony: How Hindu Nationalists Appeal to Caste-Oppressed People in Communist-Ruled Kerala

• Published date: 01 September 2024
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/00323292231183801
• Author: Samantha Agarwal
• Date: 01 September 2024
• Subject Matter: Articles

Bivalent Hegemony: How

Hindu Nationalists Appeal to

Caste-Oppressed People in

Communist-Ruled Kerala

Samantha Agarwal

Johns Hopkins University

Abstract

A recent trend has confounded observers of India’s political system. Dalits—apopulation

that has historically been deprived of vital resources and socially ostracized by upper-caste

Hindus—have increasingly given their vote to the Hindu nationalist movement led by the

Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP). Why have some members of India’s most marginalized caste

come to support a party that has preserved caste hierarchies and catered to the socially

dominant sections of society? This article explores this question through the case of

Kerala, where Dalit support for the BJP is additionally perplexing given the state’shistory

of left-led governments that have implemented far-reaching redistributive reforms that

greatly benef‌ited Dalits. Nevertheless, in recent years the Hindu nationalists have made sig-

nif‌icant inroads among Kerala’s Dalit population. Drawing on two hundred interviews and

eight months of ethnography, this article identif‌ies two major factors driving Dalits’defec-

tion to the BJP. The f‌irst is linked to the communist parties’(CPs’) agricultural land redis-

tribution program which, despite being the most ambitious of its kind in modern India,

excluded the majority of Dalits and reinscribed caste hierarchies. The second factor is

the cultural discrimination Dalits face while working in the CPs, including being grossly

underrepresented in the party leadership. The BJP exploits these grievances by providing

representation to Dalit cadres who are embedded in strategic majority-Dalit neigh-

borhoods. These cadres win popular support through welfare brokering and also

by constructing a new narrative that portrays the CPs as casteist and the BJP as a

more socially just alternative for Kerala’s Dalits. This article makes sense of these f‌indings

by drawing on Nancy Fraser’s concept of bivalent oppression to advance a novel

Gramscian theory of “bivalent hegemony.”

Keywords

caste, hegemony, Hindu nationalism, ethnonationalism, social democracy

Corresponding Author:

Samantha Agarwal, Johns Hopkins University, 3400 N. Charles St., Baltimore, MD 21218, USA.

Email: sagarw32@jhu.edu

Article

Politics & Society

2024, Vol. 52(3) 335–375

© The Author(s) 2023

Article reuse guidelines:

sagepub.com/journals-permissions

DOI: 10.1177/00323292231183801

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A recent trend has confounded observers of India’s political system. Dalits

1

—a popu-

lation that has historically been deprived of vital resources and stigmatized by upper-

caste Hindus—have increasingly given their vote to the Hindu nationalist movement

led by the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP).

2

Followers of Hindu nationalism, dispropor-

tionately upper caste, have traditionally viewed Dalits as “untouchables”and

engaged in caste-based discrimination in various forms.

3

How has India’s most mar-

ginalized caste come to support a party that has historically propagated caste hierar-

chies and catered to the socially dominant sections of society? I explore this

question through the case of Kerala, a state in southern India, where Dalit support

for the BJP is additionally perplexing given the state’s history of left-led governments.

While in power the Left Democratic Front (LDF), led by the Communist Party of

India–Marxist (CPM) and the CPI (together CPs henceforth), has successfully imple-

mented a number of far-reaching, redistributive reforms that greatly benef‌ited the

region’s poorest including Dalits.

4

For example, under the leadership of the CPs

Kerala made major strides toward the universalization of health care and education

and has achieved the highest daily wage rate in all of India. The CPs have also at

least discursively opposed caste and promoted secularism. Nevertheless, in recent

years the Hindu nationalists have, as elsewhere in India,

5

made signif‌icant inroads

among Kerala’s Dalit population. In this article, I seek to explain this phenomenon

by drawing on eight months of ethnographic observations and approximately two

hundred interviews in the state’s capital city of Trivandrum, which is a beachhead

for the BJP in Kerala.

In tackling this question in Kerala, this article seeks to shed light on a broader ques-

tion of global relevance: Under what conditions do oppressed groups support right-

wing parties? While there is a large global scholarship on why working classes from

dominant ethnic/racial groups come to support ethnonationalist or right-wing parties,

it has been assumed that ethnic/racial minorities generally vote for liberal parties

that champion civil rights and do not support political currents characterized by major-

itarianism and illiberalism.

6

The case of Dalits—a group that is both culturally and eco-

nomically oppressed—backing the BJP in large and growing numbers problematizes

this assumption. Studying this phenomenon matters not least of all because it helps

to illuminate whether, and under what conditions, these parties have a chance of con-

sistently winning elections in nations with large and/or expanding minority popula-

tions. Further, the benef‌it of studying it in a context like Kerala—where a strong left

government has until recently kept Hindu nationalism at bay and is still doing a

better job than many other state governments in India—is that it offers insights as to

how ethnonationalists establish themselves as viable contenders for power in contexts

that they have historically considered “hostile.”

7

It also offers lessons as to how redis-

tributive social democratic states—and indeed states more generally—can better

address multidimensional inequalities and in the process more successfully ward off

the threat of right-wing ethnonationalism.

In Kerala, I identify two major factors driving Dalits’defection to the BJP: caste-

blind redistribution and cultural misrecognition. The former is linked to the CPs’agri-

cultural land redistribution program that, despite being the most ambitious of its kind in

the history of modern India, excluded the vast majority of Dalits and reinscribed the

336 Politics & Society 52(3)

feudal-era caste hierarchies that it purported to overturn.

8

The second factor is con-

nected to the social discrimination Dalits have faced while working in the CPs. In par-

ticular, there is a strong perception that Dalits have been grossly underrepresented in

the party leadership and relegated to the least desirable party work.

9

If‌ind that the

BJP exploits these grievances more effectively than other political parties, by, f‌irst, pro-

viding representation to Dalit cadres that are embedded in strategic majority-Dalit

neighborhoods (“colonies”). These Dalit cadres, in turn, work within Kerala’s robust

welfare apparatus to implement urban development projects, while simultaneously

reframing these initiatives as a product of BJP national rule. Positioning themselves

as welfare brokers for colony residents, BJP cadres not only win popular support

through service provisioning, but they also construct a new narrative about Dalit mar-

ginality that portrays the left as “anti-Dalit”and the BJP as the more just alternative for

Kerala’s marginalized castes.

I conceptualize the BJP’s strategic recruitment of Dalits in Gramscian terms as a case

of right-wing hegemonic contention.

10

In the case of Kerala, it is left parties that are dom-

inant and the Hindu nationalists—although increasingly hegemonic at the national

level

11

—who are the contenders. In Kerala, as elsewhere in India, the war to “win the

consent”of Dalits, a culturally and economically oppressed group, takes on an explicitly

ethnicized character. However, because Gramsci’s conception of hegemony is restricted

to a classical Marxist understanding of economic class, it leaves unexplained the partic-

ular character of hegemonic warfare in contexts where nonclass forms of domination are

signif‌icant and there are large “doubly oppressed”groups such as Dalits.

12

In this article,

I aim to address this omission and reconstruct Gramscian theories of hegemony for con-

texts def‌ined by intersectional or interlocking oppression.

In particular, I advance the interlinked concepts of “bivalent hegemony”and “inter-

sectional social bloc.”Nancy Fraser has argued that under capitalism two analytically

distinct yet overlapping axes of oppression def‌ine the experiences of socially margin-

alized groups, namely, maldistribution (e.g., being deprived of material resources or

having one’s labor expropriated) and misrecognition (e.g., being subject to societal

norms alien to one’s own experience or stigmatized based on identity).

13

While

some groups tend to experience only one of these “types”of injustice, racially/ethni-

cally oppressed people are typically “bivalently oppressed.”For this population, the

two types of oppression are imbricated, and thus must be addressed in tandem. By

this def‌inition, I argue that India’s Dalits are a classic example of a “bivalent collectiv-

ity.”

14

Historically they have endured extreme economic maldistribution by being

denied access to essential resources and relegated to the lowest paid, most precarious

occupations. They also have suffered from cultural misrecognition, including being

subjected to a dominant Hindu value-system, deprived of representation in the

public sphere and treated as “untouchables.”Accordingly, an effective war of position

to incorporate Dalits must operate through both economic and cultural “valences”of

oppression. In Kerala, I illustrate how the Hindu nationalists recruit Dalits, most of

whom were previously supporters or members of the CPs, by highlighting the left’s

failures in ameliorating the economic and cultural dimensions of caste inequality.

The BJP’s possibilities for constructing a “bivalent hegemony”are, moreover,

enabled and shaped by the left’s historically univalent approach to caste inequality,

Agarwal 337