Telangana: Will caste make a comeback after a decade of statehood sentiment?

Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge (left) with Rahul Gandhi. (File image)

Ahead of a massive rally in Khammam addressed by Rahul Gandhi some days ago, Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge tweeted: “We are strongly committed to the development and progress of Telangana based on social justice and equity,” setting the tone for replicating a model of social engineering that helped his party ride to power in his home state of Karnataka.

The recent Karnataka elections saw how AHINDA – a Kannada acronym for Alpasankhyataru or minorities, Hindulidavaru or backward classes, and Dalitaru or Dalits – invented and advanced by the Karnataka Congress icon Devaraj Urs and fine-tuned for present times by Chief Minister Siddaramaiah worked as an antidote against the BJP’s Hindutva politics and helped it sweep the polls.

Congress’s Ahinda Strategy

In Telangana, the Congress leadership is apparently planning to take a leaf out of the Karnataka playbook. Congress’s July 2 rally was organised in Khammam, coinciding with the culmination of a 1,360 km foot march undertaken by Mallu Bhatti Vikramarka, the party’s Dalit face. The party, through the rally, sent out a clear signal favouring the building of a Dalit-centric caste coalition fronted by Bhatti under the guidance of Koppula Raju, an ex-IAS officer who is a core member of Rahul’s brains trust. Dalits are around 14 percent of the population.

Congress is also preparing the ground to unveil an OBC declaration shortly in the presence of  Siddharamaiah to expose the NDA government’s alleged failure to realise the demand for an OBC census across the country. OBCs are estimated to account for over 50 percent of the state’s population. Concurrently, an outreach to win the support of Muslims, a decisive segment in Telangana with 14.5 percent of voters, presently under the spell of the ruling BRS is also being devised.

For long, the resource-rich and dominant Reddys have been controlling the Congress and enjoyed power in undivided Andhra Pradesh till the formation of Telangana state. Despite losing both the 2014 and 2018 assembly elections, Congress has continued to prefer Reddys as state unit presidents – the present incumbent is Revanth Reddy and his predecessor was N Uttam Kumar Reddy – though the community accounts for just 7 percent of the population.

KCR’s “Samajika Telangana”

The Velamas, the community to which KCR (K Chandrasekhar Rao) belongs, have been at the helm owing to TRS replacing Congress as Telangana’s numero uno party in 2014. Though Velamas constitute less than 1 percent in the state’s 3.8 crore population, KCR has built an invincible caste coalition in the name of Samajika Telangana by bringing almost all social groups under one roof as the pioneer of the statehood movement.

And the OBCs who bring up the biggest numbers among the caste categories in the state’s population have remained the BRS/TRS’s core strength.

KCR also keeps Muslims in good humour by glorifying the Nizam’s rule and by rejecting the BJP’s demand for celebrating September 17 as Telangana “Liberation” Day. He has also befriended the AIMIM and promised to upgrade Muslim reservation from 4 percent to 12 percent.

But mounting anti-incumbency from two successive terms in office has alienated KCR from certain social segments. In an apparent bid to regain lost ground, he introduced the Dalit Bandhu Scheme offering Rs 10 lakh for each Dalit family. In a clever move, KCR also shelved the SC categorisation bill to gain the support of both the clashing Mala and Madiga sub-castes under SCs.

BJP’s Social Engineering Foray

The BJP that shot into the spotlight from oblivion by winning four Lok Sabha seats in the last general elections in 2019 aimed to target the OBCs by appointing Bandi Sanjay Kumar from Munnuru Kapu, a numerically dominant and politically vocal sub-caste under OBCs, as the state president.

In 2019, BJP had also made a dent in BRS’s ST votebank by capitalising on the Lambada-Adivasi conflicts over sharing of the ST quota and won the Adilabad (ST reserved) Lok Sabha seat.

Union home minister Amit Shah’s statement at his party’s recent Chevella meeting that the Muslim quota is unconstitutional and the BJP would scrap it if it came to power in Telangana, meanwhile, sought to foreground the Hindutva agenda amid the sharpening contradictions in its caste outreach. The aim, obviously, is to polarise the Hindu-Muslim divide in his party’s favour.

But it has turned out to be a daunting task for the BJP under Bandi Sanjay’s leadership to win over the OBCs with no unity among nearly 140 sub-castes engaged in internecine fights, fueled by clash of interests.

Will Caste Make a Comeback?

With little prospects of making inroads into the scattered OBCs, the BJP a few days ago has replaced Bandi Sanjay with G Kishan Reddy, Union minister of tourism, culture and development of the Northeast region, to at least wean away the Reddys from the Congress fold.

The land-owning upper-caste Reddys with their traditional control over Congress since the pre-Independence days and enjoyment of power under the grand old party’s big tent until the Andhra Pradesh bifurcation in 2014 were put out of commission following the formation of Telangana state with KCR at the helm. They will be looking to strike back this time.

The Telangana election is set to witness a caste war in the guise of catchy phrases – AHINDA model for Congress and KCR’s Samajika Telangana – while BJP’s Hindutva agenda aims for a Hindu consolidation against the Muslim vote. Which side will Telangana voters veer around to?

Gali Nagaraja is a senior journalist, formerly associated with The Hindu, The Times of India, and Hindustan Times for over three decades. Views are personal, and do not represent the stand of this publication.