Focusing on the 1967 and 1969 polls, Ian Duncan, independent researcher and former professor of Indian politics and history at the University of Sussex; offers an enlightening and penetrating account of the Bhartiya Kisan Dal and its unparalleled electoral victories in the rural belt of North India. The party engineered a transformation in the countryside and effectively shifted a base that Congress had veritably monopolised. The story is one in the series of many such known to Indian democracy, but offers special insight into the creation of electorates, mandates and ideologies without the usual political trappings of money-muscle power and mendacity. 

Duncan understands that what appears to be at first blush a victory cemented in the face of a growing caste detente in the countryside was one made possible only due to the increasing precarity faced by agrarian groups who saw the centre’s wavering equation with them as fundamentally threatening to their life-world and interests. While the Congress had walked the impossible tightrope of balancing urban-rural relations with some ease in the early post-independence years, the economic changes wrought by the 60s transformed this dynamic fundamentally. The government was now more willing to intervene in the countryside as it was increasingly seen as a resource fount which naturally created an environment of anxiety among the peasantry who feared losing their autonomy in terms of both taxation and produce pricing which they had hitherto enjoyed. 

While the risks of increasing taxation and facetious “development” of the ruralscape were more “potential” than “real”, a discord had set in which became the defining political raison of the decade. Further, Charan Singh’s continued and principled work within the UP Congress as an inveterate defender of the peasantry became integral to smoothening the path for BKD’s success on the electoral battleground. He became a welcome foil to the Congress’s novel exclusionary agendas and gained wide popularity even without the party’s broad institutional bulwark behind him.

The paper offers incisive insights on three constituencies, seeking to explicate the electoral victory of the presiding BKD candidates from seemingly disparate political background and the kind of social, political and economic changes that facilitated their momentous performances in these areas. What emerges from this study is the bona fide notion that caste was not in fact the sole decisive factor, but the very transformation of local networks and political influence into wider institutionalised frameworks (that Charan Singh oversaw) which cemented the BKD’s support in the rural electorate. 

Jats are long considered the BKD’s electoral edifice but they showed minute regional variation across constituencies in how they responded to the party. The picture that emerges affirms that caste cannot be considered the sole determinant of the BKD’s zenith years as had been repeatedly emphasised in contemporary media. Duncan’s work goes a long way in eschewing us of the notion that caste is a monolith and politics in UP limns blindly to the aspirations of caste leaders: the case of the BKD is illustrative of the importance of broad-mandate cadre building emphasised by the party. A shrewd and measured take on the BKD, this paper must urgently be read by anyone interested in caste, party-building, North Indian politics and the peasantry as a uniquely sagacious and perceptive body politic throughout India’s political history; especially now that we are confronted with the results of the 2024 Lok Sabha elections.