Rahul Gandhi’s ‘Baharat Jodo Nyaya Yatra’ has come in the background of the victory of the RSSBJP combine in the Hindi heartland. The victory suggested that Prime Minister Modi and Hindutva loom large in the mindscapes of the north Indian electorate.

The reason for this is the relentless control of the narrative and the RSS-BJP’s planting of the Hindutva ideology in an otherwise ‘ideologically vacant’ post-neoliberal polity of India. In southern India, the BJP has found it difficult, despite the RSS’s deep incursions, to crack the winning code. The reasons for this are social as well as historical. South India has been the cradle of anti-caste revolution, rational and literary movements, and regional linguistic pride.

The average south Indian sees a silent yet dreadful equanimity between Hindi and Hindutva. Despite a high degree of public religiosity, communalism, which is a supercharged version of religion to achieve political ends, has failed to gain a foothold in South India. Hitherto, all the RSSBJP’s efforts, the Sabarimala temple issue in Kerala, hubristic chants of Bajrang Bali in Karnataka, and the call to change the name of Hyderabad to Bhagyanagar in Telangana have had little traction. Emboldened by the victory in the north, the RSSBJP is pulling no punches anymore.

The inauguration of the Ram Mandir has added more iron to the BJP’s armour. What makes the BJP formidable is the ‘dialectic of precarity and security.’ Thus, the RSS-BJP exploits the deep economic insecurities of the poor who are browbeaten by neoliberalism and entices them to take shelter under its wings. Before it starts pecking at them, it throws before them free grains, wins their confidence, and convinces them to blame a social group for their tragic condition.

The sense of security is further emboldened by contrived histories of imaginative leaders who in the past had defeated Muslim ‘invaders’ and died protecting the Hindu motherland. To the upper-caste middle classes, who consider reservation and affirmative action as a direct infringement of their merit-mediated right to rule, the BJP offers the security of Hindu consolidation. The demand for a pan-India caste census and the slogan of ‘jiski jinki abaadi, utni unki bhaagidari’ has further increased their insecurities. The question then arises is why did the OBCs, STs, and SCs not favour the Congress in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, and Chhattisgarh. The answer lies in the fact that these states have not had a sustained history of ‘backward class/caste politics.’ Habituated to a neat and tight bi-polar contest, Congress failed to take this issue to the masses.

Even worse was the shuffling of the soft Hindutva card deck in Madhya Pradesh and partially so in Chhattisgarh. The regional leadership in these two states failed to utilize Rahul Gandhi’s call for social justice. So, does it mean that the opposition has reached a cul-de-sac? The answer is a resounding no! After 2014, it was in these assembly elections that for the first time the BJP was under stress.

BJP leaders, the RSS foot soldiers, and the entire central leadership had to bite their nails till the final results were declared. What the opposition needs is to broaden its horizon of tactical and strategic manoeuvres to end the precarity-security dialectic. Socio-economic disabilities that plague modern India could be divided into vertical and horizontal disabilities. Vertical disabilities constitute caste, gender, and religionbased disabilities which have a pre-history in the social structure of Indian society, patriarchy, and communalism. Horizontal disabilities constitute the inability of citizens to get good health and educational services.

Horizontal disabilities cut through caste lines (although the lower and backward castes are the bigger victims) as the Bihar caste census showed that 25.09 per cent of the upper castes are poor. Given this, a pan-India remedy for horizontal disabilities should be promoted by the opposition. Unlike the piecemeal Ayushman Bharat, a call for nationalization of all health infrastructure in India or a national health scheme on the lines of Britain should be promoted. The Indian health market has boomed over time.

Currently, Indians spend Rs. 120 billion on healthcare. Even more astonishing is the fact that in the urban areas, those earning less than Rs 8,000 per month spent an average amount of Rs 344 on health and the richest households spent an average amount of Rs 1,275 in the same period.

The average cost per episode of outpatient care is Rs. 400 for public providers, Rs. 586 for informal private providers, and Rs. 2643 for formal for-profit providers and they managed 39.3, 37.9, and 22.9 per cent of episodes, respectively. Along with this, the outof-pocket health expenditure in India accounts for 62.6 per cent of total health expenditure which is one the highest in the world.

Full health coverage would resonate with everyone. The tax-GDP ratio in India is at 17.7 per cent with direct taxpayers constituting only 58 million people in a country of 1.4 billion. The money to finance the national health scheme could be funded by bringing back the corporate taxes that were cut in 2019. In 2020-21, the government lost approximately Rs 1 lakh crore on account of these tax cuts. An open call to tax the corporates and finance the national health scheme would only bolster the appeal of the attacks on crony capitalists.

The Congress and the I.N.D.I.A. alliance will have to lurch further to the left and must arm themselves with a new grammar of populism that detoxifies the idea of freebies or revris. In a functioning economy, everybody pays their taxes. In India, 64.3 per cent of the total GST is coming from the bottom 50 per cent.

The latter spends a higher percentage of their income on indirect taxes than the middle 40 per cent and the top 10 per cent combined, thereby keeping the economy going. The task for the Opposition is cut out. It is for them to unite and find common ground.

(The writer is a PhD Candidate, Dept. of Political Science, University of Connecticut, USA and author of Against the Current, 2023)