BSP’S MISSION U.P. BANKS ‘Upper castes won’t desert ON BRAHMIN-DALIT ALLIANCE the BJP anytime soon’
Riding on the social engineering formula, the BSP won power in 2007; it wants to repeat the same in 2022 polls. The upcoming state election seems to be a do-or-die battle for the party since the emergence of a new front, A‘ zad Samaj Party’, led by Dalit activist turned politician Chandrashekhar Ravan who has emerged as a leader of sub-sections among Dalits in a few districts of western Uttar Pradesh like Bijnor, Saharanpur etc which have massive Dalit population.
The Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) is trying hard to revive its old Dalit-brahmin alliance which won it power in 2007, in the run-up to the 2022 Uttar Pradesh Assembly elections. Sources privy to the poll preparations of the BSP confirmed to The Sunday Guardian that the party wants to target a 35% vote share in the upcoming election and in that these two communities remain the key. “In a threeway battle, any party which gets more than 35% vote can sweep the elections,” a senior party functionary said. “The only way to get there is through forming a Dalitbrahmin alliance which has been trusted and tested in the past,” he added.
The BSP had launched its campaign for the 2022 Assembly elections in Uttar Pradesh with a Brahmin
conference named “Prabudh Varg Vichar Goshti” in Ayodhya.
The party’s national general secretary and Rajya Sabha member, Satish Chandra Mishra, is leading the charge by holding many “Prabudh Varg Vichar Goshti” meetings to woo the community in favour of the BSP.
Since July, Satish Chandra Mishra has chaired more than 10 such meetings which saw an impressive presence of community members in the gathering of Prayagraj, Sultanpur, Ambedkar Nagar, Kaushambi and Pratapgarh etc. Through these conferences, Mishra, who happens to be the party’s Brahmin face and main troubleshooter for its supremo Mayawati, is promising to give Brahmins respect and dignity which they got during the party’s rule between 2007-2012.
Party supremo Mayawati has alleged that the BJP is targeting Brahmins. On 18 July, Mayawati said, “The Brahmin community supported and tried the BJP for five years. They should now support the BSP for their security, dignity and progress in the coming Assembly elections.”
Ritesh Pandey, BSP’S parliamentary party leader in the Lok Sabha, told The Sunday Guardian: “We are getting very good response in these Prabudh Varg Vichar Goshti meetings; the community is feeling cheated by the present ruling dispensation and wants change. We are the only party whose organization is well prepared for the elections, we are holding meetings across the state and getting support from the people irrespective of caste or religion.”
The upcoming state election seems to be a do-or-die battle for the party since the emergence of a new front, “Azad Samaj Party”, led by Dalit activist turned politician Chandrashekhar Ravan.
Many experts believe that these moves may not help the party much and sees its electoral prospects a bit shaky on the ground as there is division even among the Dalit sub-castes and Brahmins are more inclined towards BJP.
“The BSP’S vote share may go down drastically this time because the Jatav, the other Dalit sub-groups may desert the party, while Brahmins are with the BJP,” Rajan Pandey, a Kanpur based political analyst, said.
“Chandrashekhar Ravan has emerged as a leader of sub-sections among Dalits in a few districts of western Uttar Pradesh like Bijnor, Saharanpur etc which have massive Dalit population and if he has an alliance with the Samajwadi Party, it will damage the BSP big time,” he added.
After the 2007 Assembly elections, the Bahujan Samaj Party had not tasted any big electoral success. Its vote share was in the range of 18-21% in the last three elections. In the 2019 parliamentary polls, it went for a pre-poll alliance with the Samajwadi Party and due to the large Yadav-dalit vote combination, the party got 10 seats out of 37 it contested.
The vote share of the alliance was roughly 38%. But, this time, the Bahujan Samaj Party has categorically declined alliance with any party and decided to go it alone in the election.
With the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) expanding its social base by giving more representation to the Other Backward Castes (OBCS) groups in the government architecture, its organizational set-up and policy decisions, there are occasional outbursts against the party on social media by upper castes. Many have argued that it might lead to alienation of the upper castes from the BJP which used to form the fulcrum of the party since the Mandir movement. The Sunday Guardian tried to talk to scholars of the Hindutva movement to trace what’s the ground situation and whether upper castes are still with the BJP or there’s a churning or alienation from the party.
“I don’t see the upper castes deserting the BJP anytime soon, the party is their best bet in a cost-benefit analysis because of multiple factors,” Vikas Pathak, a political analyst who had written extensively on the Hindutva movement and the BJP, said. “The upper castes are getting real representation in power, their representation is not going down, in the process which you say Mandalisation of Kamandal, now there’s a symbolic acceptance of Hinduism by the other caste groups who used to challenge it during the Mandal wave of the 1990s and with the rise of BSP. It is like a reconciliatory project. The Mandal movement of 1990s attacked the symbolic status of upper castes, but the Hindutva project of BJP since 2014 is about symbolic acceptance of Hinduism by everyone; therefore, upper castes will remain with the BJP as of now, the relationship between Mandal and kamandal is a give and take relationship. The upper castes are getting their share which was absent during the rule of regional parties and at the same time in this process, lower OBCS are getting larger representation not at the cost of upper castes,” he added.
In the 2019 Lok sabha elections, the BJP filed 88 upper castes candidates out of whom 80 won, interestingly it was the highest representation of upper castes from the cow belt since the 1984 elections. According to the Centre for the Studies of Developing Societies (CSDS) survey, upper castes like Brahmins, Bhumihars and Rajputs voted between 82-89% for the BJP in the 2019 general elections. Realising the importance of upper caste votes and their occasional attack on the BJP, other political parties like Indian National Congress (INC), Samajwadi Party (SP), Janata Dal (United) and the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) are trying hard to bring them under their fold in the politically significant states of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar with the Congress focusing on Brahmins, JDU appointing Rajiv Ranjan Singh alias Lalan Singh, as its national president, BSP organizing Brahmins’ meet in the run-up to the Uttar Pradesh Assembly election and Akhilesh Yadav, the supremo of the Samajwadi Party, promising to built Parsuram temples in Uttar Pradesh.
When the Vikas Dubey encounter happened, political parties latched onto it to woo the Brahmin community as it looked for some time that the community was feeling victimised and alienated from the ruling dispensation, in which there was no strong Brahmin leader. Many Brahmins on social media demanded the resignation of Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath, calling him anti-brahmin. But it all was a temporary outburst. “The Vikas Dubey episode has lost significance with time, the question of representation and symbolic acceptance looms large for the upper castes,” Sumit K Jha from the University of Delhi told The Sunday Guardian. “Since 1989, only under BJP, the upper castes are getting a lion’s share in ticket distribution in the Assembly and parliamentary polls; why would they leave them with the chances of Congress not bright in the cow belt,” he added.