By Kancha Ilaiah

The Yadav community with its ownership of Krishna has the potential to spearhead a new political movement.

After the defeat of Laloo Prasad Yadav in Bihar there has been a wild guess that the Yadavs who emerged as a political force in North India are losing their political ground. A section of the media has been saying that even Mulayam Singh will lose his ground in the next UP election. In both Bihar and UP the Yadav political force emerged out of the socialist movement and gradually they organised the OBCs with a strong bent of secular thinking and organisational base. Hence, a large section of Muslims rallied round them. This has its impact on the rest of the Yadav—sheep, goat, cattle rearing and the milk vending --community of India that got influenced with the rise of Mulayam Singh Yadav and Laloo Prasad Yadav.

Yadavs are the largest all India community with a similar occupational background and one community name. Historically the Brahminc view of the community was that it was nomadic and therefore had no intellectual base to come into political realm as some of the agrarian Sudra castes like the Jats of UP, Patels of Gujarat, Marathas of Maharastra, Reddys and Kammas of Andhra Pradesh, Lingayats and Vokkalingas of Karnataka.

In the late eighties these two Yadav leaders emerged in most important states that could influence even the whole nation’s political field and the politics of Delhi. Many anglicised upper caste intellectuals were caught unawares as to how and why this happened? The Congress and the BJP that were by and large headed by Brahmins, Baniyas, Rajputs and the Sudra landlord castes did not like the rise of this single largest Sudra caste to mobilise itself as a political force in the country. So the media consistently mocked the Yadav leadership as crude, rustic and incapable of handling sophisticated politics that so far only the English educated upper castes handled. The Yadavs do not have an anglicised intellectual class that emerged from their own social base to counter that kind of campaign. Nor do they have a media industry in their hands.


But one factor that the Indian media and the anti-Yadav socio-political forces including the communists did not understand was why so many Yadav social forces remained so strongly anti-Hindutva for so long? How was it that in UP and Bihar unlike many other OBC castes they did not get swept away with a Jai Sri Ram wave? On the contrary from one end of Bihar to UP to down South the Yadav community kept opposing the Hindutva wave and in most of the communal riots they fought shoulder to shoulder with Muslims against the BJP and RSS communalism. The reason was that from among the Sudra communities of India the Yadav community is the only one which did not identify with the Gandhian Ramarajya concept. Why? Yadavs in the nationalist period started owning Krishna as the God of the community and they slowly started projecting him as their political agent.

No Brahmin tutors

The BJP or the Hindu ideology cannot own Krishna with the same reverence as they own Rama because Krishna did not obey the Brahminic rishis as Rama did. There is no evidence to prove that he had accepted any coronation ceremony under the authority of Brahmins to rule Yadu Rajya and nowhere is there any evidence that he accepted any Brahmin as his guru like Rama did. Krishna is a complex personality. He was a politician whereas Rama ruled at Brahmin command. Krishna never submitted to the Brahminical authority. On the contrary he made the Brahmin rishis surrender to his authority. The RSS and BJP cannot go with the Krishna Rajya concept, as that would be by implication a Sudra Rajya. To be precise a Yadav raj. If Krishna’s image is politicised by the Hindutva force, the Yadavs as a community would definitely gain visibility. With Ram the political Brahminism is safe because even if the symbolic authority need to be assigned to Shatriyas the real power could be handled by the Brahmins in that scheme.

It appears that the Yadav community is anti-Brahminic. It has even a mythological alternative to the Hindutva mode of Ram politics. In a political situation of Yadavs alone owning the political image of Krishna, imagine if the Yadavs organise across the country as a political force with Krishna as their symbol. It can cut the ground of every political party. Assume that the Yadavs also claim even the priesthood leadership over every Krishna temple in the country then Brahminism certainly will enter into a deeper crisis. I am not suggesting that this kind of anti-Brahminism would go in the direction of abolition of caste, as Ambedkar wished. But that would very much weaken the Hindu Brahminsm. The minority religions, Dalits and Tribals have a lot to gain from such a Yadav alternative.

With the mere defeat of Laloo Prasad if the media and the Brahminc political forces guess that Yadavs are on the run they are really mistaken. They have a strong social base, if such leaders move on to the national stage with their own national alternative. Siddharamaiah of Karnataka, who comes from a sub-caste of Yadav community called Kuruba is now working out his own alternative in Karnataka. He too like Mulayam and Laloo Prasad comes from a socialist background.

If all of them own the mythological image of Krishna—even in South India all educated Yadavs own that image—they can weaken the BJP and Congress in all the states. The Muslims are likely to go with them in a substantial way. The Christians in India are also emerging as a political force. They too support them as they have proven secular credentials. Yadavs at the all India level are not on the run. They seem to be on the way to arrive in national politics.