The pendulum politics of Bihar Chief Minister and Janata Dal(U) chief Nitish Kumar, who swung between the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD)-Congress axis several times in recent years, signifies the social kinetics unleashed by the rise of Hindutva. The evident opportunism in the renewal of the BJP-JD(U) alliance is only superficial.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi has subsumed the social justice rhetoric within the rubric of Hindutva. This Hindutva 2.0 has thrown old tropes of social justice politics into a tailspin. Mr. Kumar’s latest somersault is his last attempt to hold on to his base — he concluded that his political longevity would be higher as an ally of the BJP than as an opponent. The BJP, on the other hand, has split the Opposition and derailed an attempted revival of Mandal politics, through its newest alliance.
Various strands of subaltern politics shared a common scepticism about Hinduism, even as nationalist politics sought to advance a composite Hindu identity through appeasement and coercion. Socialists, the forebears of the current social justice stock, hoped to use the Jan Sangh, the predecessor of the BJP, to undermine the dominance of the Congress. Socialists saw the Congress as the vehicle of upper caste dominance and hoped they could opportunistically ally with Hindutva.
