NITISH GUSHES DALIT LOVE
Amonthly ration of 15 kilos of foodgrains and a Rs 1,000 monthly stipend for every student in hostel beside an array of unprecedented doles. When Nitish Kumar rained concessions on Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes on May 8, he was paying back a constituency that’s stood by him by and large.
Although some benefits were extended to students from Extremely Backward Classes, Other Backward Classes and minorities, Nitish’s primary focus was on the Dalits. There were cash incentives for SC/ ST students: Rs 50,000 for qualifying the state civil service preliminaries; and Rs 1 lakh for success in the all-India civil services prelims.
The aim is to win over educated Dalit youth, increasingly emerging as opinion-makers in the numerically significant community. Interestingly, the doles were announced within a week of Uday Narayan Choudhary, former assembly speaker and the JD(U)’s Mahadalit face, quitting to back the Lalu Prasad Yadav-led grand alliance.
Though Choudhary lost his seat in the 2015 state polls, he still has clout in several central Bihar constituencies,
where he could team up with former CM Jiten Ram Manjhi to cause problems for the NDA. Manjhi, another Mahadalit face, too quit the NDA to join Lalu in March.
But JD(U) leaders argue that men like Choudhary and Manjhi have still to prove their electoral utility in a state where Nitish, a nonDalit, is still seen by the community as a leader who looked out for them. The Mahadalit rebels, they say, would at best, have a limited impact.
The leaders say, what really worries Nitish is the opposition’s campaign to paint the BJP as ‘anti-Dalit’. If a chunk of the Dalits turn against the saffron party, the JD(U) could suffer collateral damage. Nearly as numerous as the Yadavs, the single largest caste grouping in the state, Dalits comprise an electorally significant 15 per cent of the Bihar electorate.
Of the 38 reserved seats in the 243-member assembly, Lalu’s Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) won 14 in the 2015 polls. The JD(U), then part of the mahagathbandhan against the BJP, took 10 seats, and the Congress and the BJP won five each. Manjhi’s Hindustani Awam Morcha (Secular) party and the CPI(ML) got one each and the remaining two were won by Independents.
Dalit politics in Bihar has been vastly different since 2007, when Nitish categorised 18 of the 22 SC sub-castes as Mahadalits and showered them with special benefits. He soon followed it up by including three of the four remaining sub-castes, leaving only the Paswans or Dusadhs (Ram Vilas Paswan’s community) outside the Mahadalit umbrella. This brought rich dividends, with the NDA scoring landslides in 2009 (Lok Sabha) and 2010 (assembly) polls. Nitish got his first electoral shock in 2014, when, without the BJP, the JD(U)’s Lok Sabha tally slumped from 20 to two. A year later, though, he convincingly turned the tables by sweeping the assembly polls as part of the grand alliance.
Now back in the NDA alongside Paswan, Nitish is further honing his Dalit strategy. Part of this was extending benefits under the Mahadalit Vikas Mission to all Scheduled Castes. This includes the Paswans, who comprise 4.5 per cent of the electorate and form the core of the Lok Janshakti Party’s support base.
But unlike 2014, when Nitish, Lalu and the BJP contested against each other, 2019 will be a bipolar battle. Nitish, back with the BJP and Paswan, hopes to draw a large chunk of the Kurmi, Paswan and upper caste votes. Lalu and Congress with Manjhi are banking on Yadav, Muslim, upper caste and Mushahar votes. Which way the remaining Dalit castes go could well be the decider.