CAPITAL LETTER. Operation Lotus blooms

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has effected a workmanlike expansion in the Union Cabinet which underlines performance and professionalism, and weeds out controversial elements. But the primary signal in this second expansion during Modi’s tenure is political in nature. That it was the BJP president, Amit Shah, and not the Prime Minister who had a final word with all prospective ministers and those who were to be ousted a day before the expansion points to the political import of the exercise.

The most obvious political manoeuvre in the expansion is that it factors in the poll-bound States, picking Anupriya Patel, Krishna Raj and Mahendranath Pandey from Uttar Pradesh, Ajay Tamta from Uttarakhand, Purushottam Rupala and Mansukh Mandavia to appease the Patels in Gujarat, and SS Ahluwalia as a ‘representative’ Sikh for Punjab even if he is an MP from Darjeeling.

But there is an even more fundamental message.

This is an attempt to showcase the BJP’s transformation from a primarily petty bourgeois Brahmin-Bania party to one acquiring a more umbrella-like, inclusive structure. Corresponding to the ruling party’s expansion which is inversely proportional to the decline of the Congress, the endeavour is clearly towards making the Union Cabinet far more reflective of India’s social diversity than even the Grand Old Party was in its heyday. The most notable characteristic in the list of 19 new entrants to the Cabinet is that five ministers namely Ramesh Chandappa Jigajinagi, Arjun Ram Meghwal, Ajay Tamta, Krishna Raj and Ramdas Athawale, are from different Dalit communities. Three new members including Anupriya Patel, PP Chaudhary and Subhash Bhamre are from different categories of Other Backward Classes (OBCs), while there is a tribal leader in Faggan Singh Kulaste, and Muslim representation in author-journalist MJ Akbar’s induction.

Including Akbar, the Cabinet now has three Muslims including Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi and Najma Heptullah. All three belong to the Hindi heartland where, with the exception of Bihar where Shahnawaz Hussein had been put up from Bhagalpur in 2014, the BJP had not given a single ticket to a Muslim in the 80 seats in Uttar Pradesh, 25 in Rajasthan and all 29 seats in Madhya Pradesh.

Clearly, there is an attempt to be seen to be fair, at least to some extent, to Muslims but primarily to Dalits who have not been a traditional support base of the BJP. This is part of the BJP’s dynamic social engineering project which succeeded in the 1990s at completely masking its upper caste lineage and overwhelmingly inducted OBCs in its expanding social support base.

In Uttar Pradesh, for instance, the BJP’s frontline leadership comprising persons such as Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Murli Manohar Joshi and Kalraj Mishra quite clearly reflected the party’s Brahmin-oriented character. Nevertheless, it successfully experimented with the projection of strong OBC leaders such as Kalyan Singh, Vinay Katiyar and Uma Bharati — the last-named later went on to become chief minister of Madhya Pradesh. Bharati is currently an MP from Jhansi in Uttar Pradesh. In addition, the BJP’s manifestoes for elections in Uttar Pradesh in the early 1990s promised to implement a quota of 27 per cent of State government posts for OBCs; the party gave tickets to members of different communities in the OBC category.

It is no surprise, then, that three of the BJP’s new Cabinet inductions are from the OBCs. This is the support base the BJP hopes will help the party wean non-Yadav OBCs away from the Samajwadi Party, led by Mulayam Singh Yadav. The young and combative Anupriya Patel is the most attractive leader to emerge from her father, Sonelal Patel’s, lesser-known Apna Dal, a congregation of the backward Kurmi caste in eastern UP. Although family dissensions mark Anupriya Patel’s rise to the Union Cabinet, the critical process that is under way is her party’s merger with the BJP.

The assimilation of smaller, caste-based political formations into the party structure has been the hallmark of the BJP’s expansion in hitherto unchartered territories as was recently seen in Assam. The BJP’s leadership in that State comprises former members of the Asom Gana Parishad (AGP), Sarbananda Sonowal and Himanta Biswa Sarma.

That brings the focus back to the most critical political factor in Tuesday’s Cabinet expansion — the inclusion of five Dalits, one each from Uttarakhand, Maharashtra, Karnataka, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh. In UP, the promotion of Krishna Raj, MP from Shahjahanpur and a woman to boot, is aimed at attracting Dalits from sections other than Bahujan Samaj Party chief Mayawati’s caste base of Jatavs.

The ruling party senses Mayawati’s vulnerability which is reflected not just in her declining national vote-share — it went from 6.2 per cent in 2009 to 4.1 per cent in 2014 — but also in the structural lacunae in her party. The message that the BJP president has been at pains to spread in almost all his weekly meetings in UP these days is that Mayawati’s party is haemorrhaging. “By the time the elections come, she will be the lone woman standing in her party,” Shah has been telling BJP cadres and booth workers whom he has been meeting constantly for the last two months.

That young Dalit voters gravitated towards the BJP in the 2014 elections can be assessed not just from the 71 seats it won on its own in addition to the two that Apna Dal secured, but also from the BSP’s falling graph in its home State. The BSP’s vote-share in UP declined by a good eight percentage points, from 27.4 per cent in 2009 to 19.6 per cent in 2014. This poll-bound State is clearly fertile ground for the BJP to stretch its support base further to include more caste groups, especially among Dalits.

So, while the Prime Minister has dropped some controversial ministers and refrained from picking the more volatile among the aspirants — for example, Gorakhpur MP Yogi Adityanath — while giving space to ‘professionals’ (Akbar, Anil Dave, CR Chowdhary) and those with experience in governance, this expansion is fundamentally a political exercise.