North India did show signs of cohesion, visibly so in 1977, but it is now no longer easy to write about the

Bimaru bunch. As Yogendra Yadav and Suhas Palshikar put it in a recent article, the north has become a “political mosaic” in itself. While

Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh are more visibly distinct from UP and

Bihar, those two are themselves very different from each other, in ways that have not always been understood — except perhaps by the players themselves, who realise that equating them or looking for a “common strategy” is missing the point entirely.

Their social indicators have been almost the same, and caste has been central. Consider how the Ambedkarite revolution hit UP and not

Bihar. The Dalit population is much higher in UP than in Bihar. Meanwhile, Bihar has seen a polarisation between forwards and backwards for a much longer time than has been visible in UP. While earlier caste wars in Bihar played out more literally, in the form of blood-soaked Senas, UP has been more divided and fractious, and the BSP’s moorings in raising Dalit consciousness (however much it may claim today to be of the Sarva Samaj) explains its core vote even today.

In Bihar, the backward-forward divide got a broader platform. This was in large part due to Left influence. Today that may be woefully small, but in the ’60s and ’70s, they influenced the debate much more (even electorally, in the 1969 Vidhan Sabha polls, the Left’s vote share, mostly the CPI’s, was nearly 12 per cent); this influence stayed till 1989.

... contd.