The Aspiration of Others: Inside India's historic elections results in Uttar Pradesh

About half a decade ago, the Dalit scholar Chandra Bhan Prasad joined a team of researchers, including some from the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard, for a seminal survey in Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous and poorest state.

It surveyed all Dalit (the lowest caste in India's often vicious by-birth discriminatory social system) families from two areas in two districts, one in the east (Azamgarh) and one in the West (Bulandsahar) and asked them how their lives had changed after two decades of India’s economic liberalization. How was life in a market economy compared to a socialist country for some of the poorest and underprivileged citizens?

What they found astounded them. There had been a sea change in the number of Dalits owning consumer items, like bicycles, fans, TVs and mobile phones, and living in concrete houses.

On average, in both areas, roughly 50 per cent more people started living in concrete homes in this period of economic growth; the number of TV set owners grew by 33 per cent; 45 per cent more households had fans; and of course mobile phone of the households. Just to get a sense of how impoverished the situation used to be – for the first time, a quarter of households in both areas had chairs.

There was an even more intimate transformation. Few people here had ever used toothpaste. This number jumped a combined average of more than 65 per cent. Shampoo use, another unheard-of luxury, jumped nearly 70 per cent. 

What Prasad and others found more than half a decade ago is today transforming the political landscape of India – not least with Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) historic victory winning more than 300 seats in Uttar Pradesh with a vast number of Dalits and other backward castes voting for the party. In fact this victory has decimated the traditional Dalit party, the Bahujan Samaj Party.

These are tectonic grassroots changes powered by pent-up aspiration that are creating a new India. Modi has managed to build a narrative of propelling the aspiration of the ordinary Indian and the buy-in to that story is now completely altering every certainty in Indian politics.

To understand where this aspiration comes from, you only have to look at the numbers. Look for instance at how literacy, the primary fuel of aspiration grew in Uttar Pradesh between 1991 (the process of economic liberalisation started): it was 40.71% in 1991, 56.27% (2001), 67.68% (2011). Simultaneously how did the economy of the state (i.e. the object of aspiration) grow? Between 1993-01, it had averaged a growth rate of 1.31 per cent. Compare this to the ten years under Mayawati (average of 7 per cent) and Akhilesh Yadav, 5.6 per cent.    

In my book Recasting India published soon after the 2014 elections, I talked about the phenomenon of many sub-castes among Dalits voting for the BJP for a share of the economic pie with greater confidence and assertion than ever before. What people like Prasad were talking about in the cities – with the creation of a chamber of commerce for Dalits and Prasad even turning entrepreneur with e-food supply venture DalitFoods.com which sought to break the old notion of untouchability and make money at the same time) – were making an impact at the small town and village level. I was shown SMS-s and WhatsApp messages that spoke about start-ups being shared among Dalit groups. Even the concept of Hindu nationalism or Hindutva of the BJP, I found, was being interpreted in economic ways among the so-called lower castes and Dalits. In a research paper I wrote in a book on technology and religion which will be published later this year (Knut A. Jacobsen and Kristina Myrvold (eds), Technology and Religion in India: Spaces, Practices and Authorities. Leiden: Brill, 2017), I studied a movement led by a former civil engineering graduate from the Indian Institute of Technology (Varanasi) and former IBM risk management consultant called the Hindutva Abhiyan which pitched the ideology as one of economic aspiration including with its own skill development initiatives in diary farming and sericulture.

This also, by the way, means that where the voters, more empowered than ever, feel that they are being given a raw deal, for instance for the BJP and its ally, the Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD), in the state of Punjab, the name of Modi alone cannot rescue the BJP — and it just collapsed with SAD in a miserable defeat in Punjab. 

The last little recognised aspect of this rising aspiration which is directly connected to election victories of Modi is the spread of cooking gas. The Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves estimates that 800 million people in the country are affected by household air pollution.

One million people in India – that is a quarter of the global total – die of such pollution every year. Nearly 85% of all rural households in India, or 142 million of them, use some form of solid fuel like cow dung, wood or crop waste. More people die in rural India from inhaling the smoke of wood-fired stoves or chulhas than through any other reason. Even government estimates show around 100 million households that do not have access to cooking gas.

Through the Ujjwala Yojana of the Modi government - which seeks to push prosperous urban consumers to give up their gas susbsidy in favour of poorer rural folk - since its launch in May 2016, 17.3 million women have received liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) cylinders. The target for Ujjwal Yojana is 50 million gas connections at a cost of Rs. 8,000 crores ($1.3 billion).

Both in Odisha, where the BJP just won a landmark victory in panchayat polls and now in Uttar Pradesh, there are more women voters than ever. Odisha has 139 million women voters compared to 110 million men. In almost every recent election, more women have been voting in Odisha than men. Around 900,000 women have received Ujjawala connections in Odisha.

Uttar Pradesh has seen the distribution of LPG connections to 5.31 million women. Note here too more women have voted in the state in recent times. In 2012 assembly elections in the state, more women voted than men. From 2007 to 2012, the number of women voters in Uttar Pradesh rose by 23.41 per cent to hit a record high of 58.41 per cent. Uttar Pradesh is also among the top five Indian states most affected by indoor air pollution especially of the kind that comes from solid fuel powered stoves (the others are Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh and Bengal). These account for around 50 per cent of all households using solid fuel in India.

Issues like these which are transforming India bottom-up are not usually discussed in its cacophonous TV programmes which happen in the manner of elite drawing debates. India’s top commentators and journalists are not usually concerned about the aspiration of others. 

~