India to get head of state from lowest caste
NEW DELHI: India’s next president will emerge from the Dalit caste — a community so marginalised they were once known as ‘untouchables’ — with the victory of the ruling party candidate set to strengthen Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s grip on power.
Ram Nath Kovind, 71, is hot favourite to be elected Monday by national and state lawmakers to become titular head-of-state as the candidate of Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
It will be only the second time, after President KR Narayanan, who served from 1997 to 2002, that a member of the downtrodden caste has assumed the post.
The result will be announced Thursday. And for Modi, with one eye on re-election in 2019, it will send an important message to a key, long disdained electoral group.
Dalits, who number around 200 million, are among the poorest communities in India and have traditionally been relegated to activities on the margins of society.
Despite legal protection,
Every (Indian) politician would want support from this 16 per cent voting bloc for any election. — Vimal Thorat, National Campaign on Dalit Human Rights activist and convenor
discrimination is rife and Dalits are routinely denied access to education and other opportunities for advancement.
Analysts say Modi can win political capital by helping BJP politician Kovind — a former Supreme Court lawyer and exgovernor of the eastern state of Bihar — to win the contest against opposition nominee Meira Kumar, also a Dalit.
Modi has used Twitter to hail the rise of Kovind, the son of a farmer, from “a humble background”.
Kumar, the daughter of freedom fighter Babu Jagjivan Ram, was a diplomat before entering politics in 1985 and became India’s first woman speaker in 2009, but the electoral college numbers are heavily tilted against her.
Her nomination, which followed Kovind’s, was seen by many as the opposition’s attempt to counter Modi’s move to woo Dalits.
Votes from the Dalits and the BJP’s traditional Hindu base propelled Modi to his 2014 landslide, especially in the battleground states of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar.
“Every (Indian) politician would want support from this 16 per cent voting bloc for any election,” Vimal Thorat, an activist and convenor of the National Campaign on Dalit Human Rights, told AFP.
Dalit support is even more important for the BJP as it has mostly been shunned by Muslims, who make up about 14 per cent of the 1.3 billion population.
Dalit votes supplemented by support from the BJP’s right wing Hindu nationalist followers “will, for once and all, defeat the ‘Muslim veto’ in this country”, Nistula Hebbar, political editor of The Hindu newspaper, told AFP.
“Dalits as a community or a base are spread across the country, especially in all electorally important states. Their vote is extremely important, especially for the BJP,” Hebbar said.
But reports of clashes and caste discrimination are routine across the country.
Authorities in BJP-ruled Uttar Pradesh state sent riot police to Saharanpur district in May after clashes between Dalits and upper caste Hindus.
Violent protests erupted in Modi’s home state Gujarat last year after video footage emerged of an attack on four Dalit villagers who were taking a dead cow to be skinned. — AFP