Politics :
Earlier, in the late
eighteenth century, when Asaf-Ud-Dowlah, the fourth Nawab of Awadh, attempted
to grant the kshatriya title of Raja to a group of influential landed Ayodhya
Kurmis, he was thwarted by a united opposition of Rajputs, who were themselves
(as described by Buchanan), "a group of newcomers to the court, who had
been peasant soldiers only a few years before". According to historian
William Pinch: Rajputs of Awadh, who along with brahmans constituted the main
beneficiaries of what historian Richard Barnett characterizes as "Asaf's
permissive program of social mobility," were not willing to let that
mobility reach beyond certain arbitrary socio-cultural boundaries.
The mantle of leadership in
this phase befell the well-connected Ramdin Sinha, a government forester who
had gained notoriety by resigning from his official post to protest a
provincial circular of 1894 that included Kurmis as a "depressed community"
and barred them therefore from recruitment into the police service. The
governor's office was flooded with letters from an outraged Kurmi-kshatriya
public and was soon obliged to rescind the allegation in an 1896 communique to
the police department "His Honor [the governor] is ... of the opinion that
Kurmis constitute a respectable community which he would be reluctant to
exclude from Government service."
The
first Kurmi caste association had been formed in 1894 at Lucknow which was
named as "Sardar Kurmi Sabha" in order to give teeth to their protest
against the British decision to cut their numbers in the Military forces and
against the police recruitment policy. This was followed by an organisation in
Awadh that sought to draw other communities - such as the Patidars, Marathas,
Kapus and Naidus - under the umbrella of the Kurmi name. This body then
campaigned for Kurmis to classify themselves as Kshatriya in the 1901 census.
In its 5th conference in 1909, this sabha declared to change its name from "Sardar
Kurmi Sabha" to "All India Kurmi Kshatriya Association" and in
1910, led to the formation of the "All
India Kurmi Kshatriya Mahasabha". Simultaneously, newly
constituted farmers' unions, or Kisan Sabhas - composed of cultivators and
pastoralists, many of whom were Kurmi, Ahir, and Yadav (Goala), and inspired by
Hindu mendicants, such as Baba Ram Chandra and Swami Sahajanand Saraswati -
denounced the Brahman and Rajput landlords as ineffective and their morality as
false.
In
1930, the Kurmis of Bihar joined with the Yadav and Koeri agriculturalists to
enter local elections. They lost badly but in 1934 the three communities formed
the "Triveni
Sangh" political party, which allegedly had a million
dues-paying members by 1936. However, the organisation was hobbled by
competition from the Congress-backed Backward Class Federation, which was
formed around the same time, and by co-option of community leaders by the
Congress party. The Triveni Sangh suffered badly in the 1937 elections,
although it did win in some areas. The organisation also suffered from caste
rivalries, notably the superior organisational ability of the higher castes who
opposed it, as well as the inability of the Yadavs to renounce their belief
that they were natural leaders and that the Kurmi were somehow inferior.
Similar problems beset a later planned caste union, the Raghav Samaj, with the
Koeris.
Again
in the 1970s, the India Kurmi Kshatriya Sabha (IKKS) attempted to bring the
Koeris under their wing, but again a disunity troubled this alliance. Kurmi
politician Nitish Kumar formed the Samata Party in 1994, forming a backward-upper
caste alliance with the conservative Bharatiya Janata Party, which achieved
only initial success. In 1998, politician Laloo Prasad Yadav took advantage of
this lack of unity in the IKKS, portraying Koeri Shakuni Chaudhry as an
incarnation of Kush. Under Yadav, the IKSS became less and less advantageous to
the Kurmi, favouring instead the priorities of the Yadav caste, and this
combined with the competition of the Kurmi-based Samata led to a divide between
these intermittently allied castes. Kurmis constitute around sixteen percentage
of the total population of India
