Skewed social composition of the Congress under Nehru and Indira

Uttar Pradesh was an important centre of Congress activity during the colonial times. With the coming of mass politics after the rise of Gandhi around 1920, U.P. and Bihar became major centres of Congress activity. Allahabad became the seat of the AICC.
Gyanendra Pandey has impressively documented the rise of the Congress in U.P. in his book “Ascendancy of the Congress in Uttar Pradesh”.
There were of course problems in the Congress mass mobilization, a major one being a skewed caste composition among its workers. The dominance of Brahmins can, of course, be accounted for on the basis of the fact that modern political consciousness in any society begins among the elite, particularly the literati. But, something that cannot be easily accounted for is the assertion of Pandey that not a single Dalit student was enrolled in the nationalist schools established throughout U.P. in opposition to the colonial state.
After independence, the Nehruvian socialist rhetoric, surprisingly, went hand in hand with a skewed social composition. Right from the 1950s to the 1980s, the Congress in U.P. was heavily dominated at all levels – candidates for Lok Sabha and Vidhan Sabha seats, and presidents of provincial and district Congress committees – by Brahmins, Rajputs, Banias and Kayasths. These four castes accounted for about 60% of these positions (See detailed tables in Christophe Jaffrelot, ‘The Silent Revolution’) though their combined strength was hardly 20%. Brahmins alone consistently cornered an unduly large share. In 1973, 38 of the 75 presidents of the Congress district and town committees were Brahmins. ( Jaffrelot, Page 132).
There is today a strong section of the population that would claim that this was nothing but giving the “meritorious” their due. The problem is that merit cannot be reduced to bookish knowledge. Any truly democratic representation should give any sort of vocational knowledge the same importance as mere bookish knowledge. Intelligence should thus be seen socially. In his book “Political Agenda of Education”, NCERT Director Krishna Kumar has powerfully argued that the Gandhian emphasis on vocational training ( Nai Talim) was in a way an attack on the Brahminical bias in favour of bookish knowledge as against forms of knowledge involved in labour. One can relate this to the traditional Brahminical aversion against working the plough.
Moreover, access to bookish education itself is dependent upon one’s resource base. Therefore, exclusion of entire social groups from political power on grounds of lack of education was tantamount to a very shallow commitment to democracy.
This skewed social composition despite lip service to socialism made the Congress under Nehru and Indira Gandhi primarily an upper caste party in U.P.
It managed to win elections through the co-option of individual Dalit leaders. The Congress vote bank in U.P. thus comprised caste Hindus, Dalits and Muslims. Several examples can be cited to drive home this point. B.P. Maurya and Chhedi Lal Sathi were Dalit leaders from Western U.P. who were initially with Ambedkar’s Scheduled Caste Federation and, later, the Republican Party of India. Maurya became M.P. from Aligarh (a district with 22% Chamar-Jatav population) on an RPI ticket in 1962. His rabid anti-Congressism was taken care of by Indira when he was co-opted into the Congress in 1969.
In other words, rather than being a solid cadre-based party, the Congress, as Jaffrelot has argued, relied on vote banks. On the one hand, it used local upper caste notables and former princes to get votes for the party on the basis of their general influence while, on the other, it co-opted Dalit leaders to get their community vote.