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by dmix
1110 days ago
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satya_Pal_Singh_(Uttar_Pradesh... Strange how a former police officer gets a gov job with influence over higher education. He called himself a “man of science” but his entire career was police work with a bit of politics at the tail end. He was “minister of state” [1] for the Ministry of Human Resource Development which apparently was renamed the Ministry of Education after he left. [1] Google tells me that’s an assistant/junior role to the actual Minister. |
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Satyapal Singh specifically helped the BJP win over the Jat community in Western Uttar Pradesh which before 2014 voted for the RLD (a Jat primary party in western UP, Rajasthan, and Haryana).
By rewarding him, with a low level backbench minister position, he can provide patronage to the rest of his patronage network.
He also tried to save Amit Shah+Modi's political skin during the Ishrat Jahan encounter killing case while he was part of the IPS.
Indian politics is heavily based on micro-level community based calculations because of how close elections are in India (most elections are decided within 5,000 votes ie. one town). Due to this, caste, family, and regional patronage networks form, and this is common across all parties (INC, BJP, etc).
For example, Modi rose to power in Gujarat by helping organize a Dalits+Tribal+Urban coalition in the 1980s and 90s at the expense of a combined Muslim+Patel voting bloc. This same template Modi used is what the BJP has been using since 2014 (intersectionality of identity based on Hinduism ie. Hinduvta).
And the same thing happened in Satyapal Singh's area during the Muzaffarnagar/Shamli riots when the Dalit Hindu + Dalit Muslim voter bloc split due to communal violence, leading to Hindu Dalits leaving the BSP for the BJP, Hindu Jatts leaving the RLD for BJP, and Dalit Muslims leaving the BSP to support the Samajwadi Party because there was no other viable party left in Western Uttar Pradesh.
I am not a fan of the BJP, but you got to hand it to them - they are probably the only national party in India with a strong understanding of subaltern power struggles and micro-level demographic data. Anyone in the INC who knew this stuff defected to the BJP by 2019 anyhow, but might defect back to the INC assuming the right PM candidate is selected (Gehlot would be a strong competitor against Modi, RG would have a hard time)