Why BJP has abandoned Hindutva for Ambedkarism | Jouvenel's Theory of Power applied to India

ELI5/TLDR

Ashish Dhar takes a 20th-century French political theorist, Bertrand de Jouvenel, and uses him to explain why Indian politics has drifted from Hindutva towards caste-based welfarism. Jouvenel’s claim is that central power always grows by allying with the masses to crush whatever independent intermediate elites stand in its way — kings did it to barons, modern democracies do it to anyone with autonomous wealth or status. Mapped onto India, the argument is that the state has cut a deal with expanding “backward” caste blocs to dismantle the upper-caste middle that briefly carried the Ram temple movement. The cure on offer is a return to Sanatana Dharma as a transcendent code that limits state power. Whether you buy that depends on how much you trust both the theory and the messenger.

The Full Story

The trigger: a bill named after a man whose case it doesn’t fit

The video opens with Karnataka’s Rohit Vemula Bill — sweeping anti-caste-discrimination legislation in higher education, with SC/ST-dominated equity committees, mandatory compensation, and ten-lakh-rupee fines on institutions. Other states are queuing up with copies. The wrinkle: the 2024 Telangana police closure report found that Vemula’s suicide was driven by academic and financial stress, not caste discrimination, and that Vemula himself was not from a Scheduled Caste. The host frames this as a clean example of laws being passed under banners that the underlying facts no longer support, and reads it as evidence that the Overton window in India has shifted decisively. The political right, in his telling, has not resisted — it has surrendered.

Why no one stops it: the prisoner’s dilemma

Before going to theory, Dhar restates a point from an earlier video. BJP and the opposition are stuck in a Nash equilibrium. Either side could in principle drop caste politics for “national” issues, but neither can risk being the one that disarms first. So both keep escalating quotas, censuses, and identity claims. The equilibrium is stable. It is also, in his framing, civilizationally corrosive.

Enter Jouvenel

The theoretical spine of the video is Bertrand de Jouvenel, a mid-20th-century French theorist whose central work argues against the Whig story that history bends towards liberty. Jouvenel’s reading is darker. Power — meaning the central state, whoever happens to be running it — is its own thing, with its own appetite, and it precedes the nation rather than emerging from a peaceful social contract.

Power has two faces. One is selfish: rulers like ruling, the way a chess player likes moving pieces. The other is functional: to keep being obeyed, the ruler has to deliver order, justice, and prosperity. The selfish face supplies the energy, the functional face supplies the legitimacy. Both are needed.

Security comes before liberty

The pivot in Jouvenel that does the most work in the video is the claim about human needs. Imagine two meters on a dashboard — security and liberty. When security is full, you care about liberty. When security drops to zero — raiders at the gate, savings wiped out — you sprint to whoever can fill it back up and you trade liberty for the refill without negotiating. Years later, safe again, you start grumbling about taxes and rules. The line: liberty is a luxury, security is a necessity.

High, middle, low

Jouvenel’s society has three layers. The high is the central authority. The low is the mass — peasants, workers, ordinary people. The middle is the awkward bit: independent elites with their own wealth, land, followers, and therefore their own ability to say no to the centre. Feudal barons, zamindars, intellectuals, religious authorities. They are awkward precisely because they don’t depend on the state for status.

Jouvenel’s claim is that this middle is what protects ordinary liberty. The masses alone are too scattered to resist a centralising state. Only an independent middle has the muscle to push back. Without a middle, the high expands until every individual stands alone in front of it.

The high-low alliance

Power, by its nature, wants to grow. So it forms an alliance with the low against the middle. It presents itself to the masses as their liberator from the privileged elites. The masses are easier to absorb because they depend on the state for their elevation; the middle is harder because it doesn’t. Jouvenel reads the French Revolution this way — the monarchy and then the post-revolutionary state in alliance with the people, dismantling the aristocracy. Democracy, in this reading, doesn’t shrink central power. It accelerates its growth, because elected branches all draw from the same source — the voting majority — and end up fusing rather than balancing. Liberal language about “the will of the people” becomes the smoke screen behind which a far more aggressive state operates than any monarch dared.

Mapping it onto India

Here the video stops being abstract. The British Empire was the high. The native population was the low. Macaulay’s English-educated class became the middle — designed as a buffer. In 1947, the British left and the English-educated middle simply walked into the high. At the same time, powerful land-holding caste blocs — Reddys and Kammas in Andhra, Lingayats and Vokkaligas in Karnataka, Patidars in Gujarat, Jats in Haryana, Marathas in Maharashtra — moved up to dominate the states.

That left a hole where the middle used to be. Dhar argues this is why post-independence India produced so little independent intellectual output. A thin replacement middle — largely upper-caste Hindus who clawed up through limited meritocratic openings — eventually formed. The BJP of the 1990s, often called a Brahmin-Baniya party in that era, was the political expression of this self-made middle. The Ram temple mobilisation, on this reading, was the middle asserting its instinct for liberty.

Why Hindutva is being abandoned

The high-low alliance, in Dhar’s account, never went away. Its name is Mandalisation. Its ideology is Ambedkarism. He notes the timing: B. R. Ambedkar got the Bharat Ratna in 1990, exactly as the Hindutva wave was peaking. The state was offering a deal — get classified as backward, get access. The OBC category kept expanding; even erstwhile ruling castes like the Marathas now demand inclusion.

Stuck in the middle are the upper castes who can’t claim backward status — Brahmins, Baniyas, and the upper-caste fragments who didn’t make it into the new ruling layer. They are self-reliant, which in Jouvenel’s frame makes them disloyal to power and therefore expendable. Hence, Dhar argues, the structural — not historical — hostility of the modern Indian state towards Brahmins specifically. The high needs the middle gone.

The proposed exit

The video ends with prescription. Dhar borrows Jouvenel’s idea that liberty depends on a transcendent moral code that stands above the shifting will of majorities. For India, that code is Sanatana Dharma as articulated in the Shastras, with the Dharmashastras providing — in his reading — a meta-framework for managing diversity through shared conduct rather than enforced uniformity. The practical to-do: rebuild the independent middle. Restore Dharmacharyas, independent thinkers, traditional institutions. The first concrete step he names is freeing Hindu temples from state control, which he notes has been reduced to a slogan with no progress in a decade.

Key Takeaways

Jouvenel’s central claim: central power grows by allying with the masses to dismantle independent intermediate elites.
Security is a primary need, liberty a secondary one — populations under stress trade the second for the first quickly.
The independent middle is what makes liberty possible; without it, the state faces only atomised individuals.
Indian timeline as Dhar reads it: British (high) — Macaulay middle — 1947 transfer of high — land-holding castes capture states — upper-caste self-made middle briefly carries Hindutva — Mandalisation re-establishes the high-low alliance — Hindutva fades.
The Rohit Vemula Bill, regardless of the underlying case facts, is treated as a marker of how far the Overton window has shifted.
The proposed remedy is civilisational rather than electoral: rebuild independent dharmic authorities, reclaim temples from state control, anchor politics in a transcendent code.

Claude’s Take

This is partisan, and it should be read that way. The channel is openly Hindu-right, and the video has a thesis it wants to land — that the upper castes are being structurally targeted, that Ambedkarite politics is downstream of a power grab rather than a redistributive correction, and that the answer is a return to Dharma as the source of legitimate authority. None of that is hidden, and the host is upfront about it. The score reflects the analytical scaffolding, not the conclusion.

The genuinely interesting move is the application of Jouvenel. Most Indian political commentary stays inside the categories the actors themselves use — secularism, social justice, communalism, development. Jouvenel forces you to step outside and look at the shape of the thing: a centre, a middle, a mass, and the dynamic between them. Read this way, the rise of OBC politics and the relative isolation of Brahmin-Baniya cultural politics within the BJP coalition is at least worth thinking about as a power story rather than only a justice story.

Where the video gets thinner is the gap between the model and the evidence. Jouvenel was writing about European feudalism collapsing into mass democracy. India never had European feudalism, did have caste hierarchies that the British both froze and reorganised, and reservations were a deliberate policy response to documented exclusion, not just a tool of central power expansion. Dhar largely brushes past the redistributive case. The Vemula example is rhetorically strong but does not by itself show that the broader anti-discrimination apparatus is misdirected — one closure report doesn’t settle a category. The treatment of the upper-caste middle as a heroic guardian of liberty also conveniently flattens the question of whose liberty was being guarded historically.

The prescription — Dharma as a transcendent limit on state power — is the part where political theory shades into theology, and reasonable readers will land in different places. As a structural diagnosis of why caste politics keeps escalating despite being electorally costly to almost everyone, the Nash-equilibrium-plus-Jouvenel frame is at least a sharper tool than most. As a complete account, it is a half-explanation dressed up as the whole one.

Six out of ten. Useful for the theoretical lens, suspect on the politics it props up.