On a May afternoon in the village of Ahirauli, a thousand kilometers east from New Delhi, a group of Brahmin men idled in the courtyard of the Hindu temple where they served as priests, custodians, and managers. The youngest, in his mid-twenties, told me he wouldn’t be voting for Narendra Modi the coming month because the local parliamentarian had refused to acknowledge the legend of Ahilya, for whom the village was named, during his term. From the holy books, he told me, we know that Ahilya lost her social status after her husband, the sage Gautam Rishi, cursed her for infidelity. She was later liberated by Lord Ram on his arrival in Ahirauli and to this very temple. To add insult to injury, the Brahmin parliamentarian—Ashwini Kumar Choubey—was also said to have appropriated the story for his own temple in Bhagalpur. As a result, their temple was allegedly excluded from the programs that allot money for the development of pilgrimages and received no funds from the government. As I walked through the village that day, speaking with residents, the hijacking of Ahirauli’s spiritual identity was a common grievance.
One of the three “twice-born” castes—so-called because, according to scriptures, they have served time for their sins by occupying one of the more menial castes in their first incarnation—Brahmins are a priestly class with prerogatives of overseeing temple affairs; in Ahirauli, they form at least one-fourth of her six thousand people. Regardless of the village’s support, Prime Minister Modi would be reelected for the third time in June, and Ashwini Choubey was twice elected from Modi’s party, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The party has a history of putting their bets on Brahmin candidates and no wonder: eleven Brahmin legislators have been retained in the last sixteen general elections since Independence. Nonetheless, BJP would lose sixty-three seats, including the one presiding over Ahirauli, in the 2024 election. Opinion writers have tried to understand BJP’s loss of seats through an economic lens and made assumptions about the impact of rising unemployment and inflation across the country, but Ahirauli’s concerns are far from that of Delhi and industrialized India. Here, a combination of legends, class loyalty, and social relations between Brahmin shape the prevailing voting sentiments.
Prior to the election, I had visited almost half a dozen villages in northern India, including Ayodhya, the center of BJP’s political ground since the early 1990s. There, too, the concerns of the constituency were hardly reducible to political or economic grievance. Nor do demographics explain how Modi has maintained power since 2014. Hindus form 80 percent of the total population and, post-Independence, India legally identifies only two kinds of minorities: religious and linguist. BJP is historically a Hindi speaking party and draws the majority of its seats from Hindi states. Among religious minorities, Muslims are by far the most prevalent and yet, in the largest state assembly in Uttar Pradesh, BJP won sixty-two of eighty-two seats, each of which has at least one-third Muslims, in 2017. We are told that the Muslims votes get divided among several regional parties, that Muslims don’t vote as a bloc. And even if they voted against BJP, they might not have all voted for a single party, so political influence continues to elude the country’s most populous minority.
The case of Islam in India—and the disenfranchisement of its practitioners—is illustrative of how dynamic shifts throughout the twentieth century nonetheless resulted in a regressive ruling class in the twenty-first, one that has no intention of serving the interests of their constituency. It was only during British rule that Indian Muslims emerged as a political entity. Though treated as a separate electorate who alone participated in the election of their representatives for the Imperial legislative house, the British government granted weightage to their votes and Muslims as a minority enjoyed an equal political clout as the Hindu majority. But after Independence, the Indian constitution revoked these benefits as well as the system of reserved seats for religious minorities. Following the 2024 election, in which strategic voting by Muslims has been held accountable for a shrunken BJP, Uttar Pradesh forced Muslim shopkeepers to reveal their names on the signboards of their shops, banned sale of halal-certified food, and prescribed life sentences for Muslim men to prohibit them from marrying Hindu girls. In the end, only twenty-four Muslims were elected to parliament and now occupy only 4 percent of the government. Even though the united opposition, INDIA Alliance, gained seats thanks to the Muslim vote, the non-BJP parties seldom return the favor and put their trust in Muslim candidates. The Indian National Congress, the main opposition party, fielded fifteen less Muslim candidates in the 2024 election than it did in 2019. Their visibility as a population and the role they play in curbing the extent to which BJP monopolizes the government has neither resulted in their inclusion in political space nor stopped government policies that criminalize their identity. The main impediment to their emergence as a majority goes back to the villages and India’s oldest social institution: caste.
In rural India, a combination of legends, class loyalty, and social relations between Brahmin shape the prevailing voting sentiments.
Every Hindu is born in a caste and thus the Hindu population is a diverse group of thousands of subgroups with different languages, cultures, and ancestral gods. In one sense, it’s the only marker that distinguishes a Hindu Indian from their countrymen; every caste has castes above them and castes below them, arranged like thousands of blocks stacked over each other Jenga-style, until you reach the Brahmin priestly class. There’s no one above Brahmins, and everyone else is below them, an organization that depends on keeping the low lowly. Ancient Brahmin writers prescribed harsh physical punishments for any transgressions for castes occupying the lowest place, and the power structure is still maintained through a careful, constitutional maintenance of fixed, hereditary hierarchies that cater to a born majority.
The lowest castes, Shudras and Dalits, form the majority population within Hindus, almost 70 percent. After Independence, Dalits were granted constitutional safeguards and were treated as a homogenous group until recently, when the nation’s highest court allowed for sub-categorization within them to dictate the distribution of constitutional benefits. In contemporary India, Dalits are legally identified as Scheduled Castes and Shudras are identified as Other Backward Classes (OBCs). The OBCs are a huge group of castes that encompasses shepherds, fishermen, agriculturists, artisans, potters, and masons—besides OBCs and Dalits, there are also aboriginal groups who became Hinduized over the course of centuries and Christian hill tribes, collectively known as Adivasis—so a Hindu political majority relies on the loyal ideology of a caste majority.
In 1945, B. R. Ambedkar, a Dalit lawyer and politician, coined the term “born majority” to describe the culture of discrimination that had given rise to the deadlocked Hindu and Muslim leaders standing in the way of independence, writing:
In India, the majority is not a political majority. In India the majority is born; it is not made. That is the difference between a communal majority and a political majority. A political majority is not a fixed or a permanent majority. It is a majority which is always made, unmade and remade. A communal majority is a permanent majority fixed in its attitude.
Ambedkar, while advocating for the minority status for Dalits in colonial India, argued that the basis of communal tension between Hindus and Muslims was their social separation. After all, they didn’t marry each other, didn’t eat together, and Muslims were discriminated against by Hindus as often as Dalits. Ambedkar rightly predicted that a born majority can’t be a political majority. But he didn’t suggest a workaround for perpetual cultural prejudice. If there is any hope of realigning a born majority that votes against its own interests—only 43 percent say their personal financial conditions improved under the Modi government—the parameters that dictate the power differential between religious, cultural, and historical divisions must themselves be redrawn.
Back in Ahirauli, the fisherman’s caste is the largest community and sees no contradictions in sacrificing personal welfare for a false sense of security. However grotesque or misguided, they are motivated by a noble idea: security of the country, often a voting agenda of privileged castes who suffer no social disabilities. The lower castes of Ahirauli vote in imitation of upper caste people in hope of being seen like them. But there’s little risk of confusing the two: like in other villages, Ahirauli has segregated housing for each community. Fishers live in one corner, Brahmins in another, while Dalits dwell on the most infertile and dirty land. This is by design: the ancestors and myths assigned to each community have always had the net effect of organizing people under one umbrella and BJP has adopted these methods in maintaining its caste majority. In 1901, the British civil servants H. H. Risley and E. A. Grant noted that some men of an aboriginal tribe, having land properties, managed to get enrolled into a Rajput (Kshatriya) caste by bribing Brahmin priests. They wrote in their report:
Their first step being to start a Brahman priest who invents for them a mythical ancestor, supplies them with a family miracle connected with the locality where their tribe are settled, and discovers that they belong to some hitherto unheard-of clan of the great Rajput community.
The Brits were of the view that the fine line that distinguished an ancient caste from an ancient tribe is endogamy. The men of an ancient tribe took women as their wives or claimed slaves won in war, but the moment they started marrying exclusively within the tribe, they became a caste.
BJP, their ideology rooted in Brahmin supremacy, often weave political fictions around lower-caste communities, using legends and gods to include them in their fold. For instance, the fiction of a Ram temple having existed at the place of a mosque in Uttar Pradesh did wonders for the BJP in ensuring support from the lower castes. Under Modi’s government, a compromised judiciary authorized the construction of a Hindu temple, where a mosque had been demolished by Hindu mobs in 1992, after a sustained campaign of harassment and litigation on the part of BJP and its parent organization, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, dating back to the 1990s. In January 2022, on the day Modi inaugurated the Ram temple built on the site, the fishermen of Ahirauli had tears in their eyes and organized a day-long ritual at their local temple in solidarity. According to the Ramayana, when Ram needed to cross a river in search of his wife Sita, who was kidnapped by the demon Ravana, the fisher community had offered him a boat. For the fisher community, the story is a matter of pride. It also signifies that fishers were in existence since the time god was born on earth.
BJP, their ideology rooted in Brahmin supremacy, often weave political fictions around lower-caste communities, using legends and gods to include them in their fold.
In modern times, it’s not as though Brahmin priests go door to door to manufacture fictions and family miracles, but the domination of twice-born castes in the field of media allows Modi to spread religious propaganda at a mass level. The construction of the Ram temple remains among the most popular of Modi’s initiatives during his last term. Nor is state-sponsored propaganda the only means by which false belief is nurtured. A month before I visited Ahirauli, I had gone to Kalyan Bigha, another village in central Bihar, to take stock of people’s sentiments. Kalyan Bigha is the home village of Bihar’s chief minister, Nitish Kumar. His party, Janata Dal (United), has ruled over Bihar for almost two decades, for many of those years in coalition with the BJP. There I met Sahibi, in his late forties, who has been voting for Nitish his whole life. Like his fellow caste men, Sahibi inherited agricultural lands and would live on earnings made through farm produce, though the actual labor is performed by Dalit workers on his land. In his thirties, Sahibi was charged with murder after a local scuffle proved fatal and spent seven years in jail. He was released on parole around the time Modi got his first term in 2014. Sahibi tried several businesses to build his career back but, after five years of hits and misses, he had the idea to build a temple on his vacant farmland. It became a huge attraction immediately, as well as a marriage destination that brought in thousands in donations. During festivals, the businesses that stalled their temporary shops on the temple’s premises paid rent to Sahibi. The temple made Sahibi both rich and respected; he no longer has to toil, and villagers seek him out to host sacrificial rituals of their own volition.
Kurmis, the agricultural caste to which Sahibi belongs, are not twice-born. Religiously they are still lower castes, but due to progressive social movements in the early 1990s, some OBCs such as Yadavs, Kurmis, and Kushwahas rose in their status because they also had become beneficiaries of land distribution law after the Zamindari system of landlordism was abolished. I asked Sahibi if affirmative action programs, like the reservation of prestigious seats in jobs and education, was part of his agenda for the 2024 elections. Despite qualifying to be a beneficiary, Sahibi said he voted for Nitish because he was his maternal uncle, not by blood but by caste. The majority of the village voted likewise. Both landholder Kurmis in Kalyan Bigha and fishers in Ahirauli would often tell me that reservation held little allure for them because no one from their families ever went on to work for the government or attend university. Kurmis earned from their lands while fishers from fishing. Their respective castes proved a self-fulfilling prophecy in keeping them lodged in a tradition that precluded the possibility of advancement or entertained any notion of social equality.
The very formation of caste majorities preserves inequality, religious hatred, segregation, and class supremacy—ideas which can’t be called liberal for a democracy. A numerical minority here can emerge as a majority, not as a result of demographic change or reform, but by way of birth. For instance, in Ahirauli, the numerical majority was Manjhis—extremely backward classes—while Brahmins were a large minority. Manjhis supported Modi, but Brahmins were against him for the alleged theft of their temple’s spirituality. The Brahmins’ sentiments prevailed over the rest of the communities because they are assumed to be wise while the Manjhis degraded. BJP lost the seat. In Kalyan Bigha, Brahmins were a rarity, limited to only a couple of houses. Kurmis were the largest minority while Dalits were numerical majority. Because most of the Dalits worked at the farms of Kurmis for several generations, Kurmis controlled their economic life and, despite being free by law to vote for anyone, Dalits wouldn’t dare to exercise their votes against any candidate favored by their masters. The head of the neighborhood told me that if the candidate endorsed by Kurmis were ever to lose, Kurmi men would descend on their neighborhood and beat Dalit men viciously. In a caste majority, regressive ideas and violence are attributed to accidents of birth and the basic tenets of democracy—liberty, equality, and fraternity—are negated. A numerical low-born minority, in a caste democracy, will have to struggle for even basic civil rights. Their emergence as a majority, the least prevailing of liberal ideas, will forever remain a dream. Conversely, a high-born minority will always be a ruler of a caste democracy.