India: BSP the Dalit Party says it will sped up the building of the Ram Temple in Ayodhya | (The Hindu, July 23, 2021)

 

 

 

See also: https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/other-states/will-speed-up-ram-temple-bsp-promises-brahmins/article35490264.ece

The fall of Mayawati: Brahmins leave the BSP building (Ajoy Bose)

The Economic Times, March 13, 2017

The fall of Mayawati: Brahmins leave the BSP building

By Ajoy Bose

The devastating rout of the BSP finally brings the curtain down on the amazing saga of Behenji. Her meteoric rise since the early 1990s has been followed by successive setbacks each worse than the other over the past eight years. Even Mayawati cannot survive this series of relentless body blows.
Her hysteria was evident when she declared that the EVMs had been rigged and that an unknown mysterious journalist ‘wearing a cap and a beard’ had warned her so at a previous press conference. Mayawati now faces the mortification of losing her own Rajya Sabha seat after her term expires next year. The meagre number of BSP legislators is not enough to send her back to Parliament. It can be argued that the BSP was helpless like other political parties against the Modi tsunami in UP in 2014 and once again now. But there is reason to believe there is one elemental dynamic influencing the rise, decline and fall of Mayawati: the support and loss of it from Brahmins.
It is a telling paradox that the first big success of a Dalit party in mainstream Indian politics was propelled by Brahmins in UP who decided to prop up a political outfit with an overtly anti-Brahminical ideology. They were determined to curb the rising clout of Mulayam Singh Yadav who had, with the help of the BSP, defeated the BJP in 1993 in the aftermath of the Babri Masjid demolition.
In the summer of 1995, Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Murli Manohar Joshi, both Brahmins, engineered a coup that led to the installation of Mayawati as CM of a minority BSP government in UP supported by both the BJP and the Congress. The then Congress Prime Minister PV Narasimha Rao, also a Brahmin, publicly celebrated it as “a miracle of democracy”.

They don’t hang out any more

Despite the fall of the shortlived Mayawati government, because of wrangling with local BJP bosses, the party’s top Brahmin leaders like Vajpayee and Joshi brought her back to power twice more in the next few years. Each time, backward caste leaders like Kalyan Singh and others like Rajnath Singh, a Thakur, fiercely complained that this was damaging the party, but to no avail. Nurtured by the BJP’s powerful Brahmin lobby, the BSP kept increasing its electoral tally at the cost of its political ally.
Exactly a decade ago, Mayawati played her master stroke bypassing the BJP Brahmin lobby and striking adeal directly with the Brahmin community in UP. This led to her historic 2007 assembly poll victory.
Unfortunately, unable to handle the daunting task of accommodating Brahmin interests in a Dalit party, Mayawati started losing support from both communities, each resenting that she was favouring the other. This tug of war between her political sponsors and core support base first snuffed out her prime ministerial dream in 2009. Then it ousted her from power three years later. With the advent of the Modi juggernaut in 2014, the Brahmins appear to have abandoned her completely.
For a leader and a party belonging to a marginalised community such as Dalits, it is crucial to get support from Brahmins who provide both legitimacy and brand value. Despite their political and economic decline, Brahmins still control conversations at tea shops across towns and villages in UP. It is the support of Brahmins first from within the BJP and then outside that had enormously enhanced the stature of Behenji from the mid-1990s till the end of last decade.
It had helped her get backing from various sections across the caste spectrum, including from a section of Muslims. But they all started drifting away from her the moment she lost the Brahmins. Now she stands isolated only with Jatavs. Amove to replace her earlier Brahmin alliance with one with Muslims has ended in an unmitigated disaster.
It failed to get the BSP a substantial minority vote and possibly resulted in ‘Hindu’ consolidation in the process. It shows that subaltern groups going it alone or clinging to each other without any support from ‘higher up’ in the social hierarchy has severe limitations in mass politics.

DISCLAIMER : Views expressed above are the author's own.

Violence by Political Design | Report of CPA initiated fact finding team on Muzaffarnagar violence

This fact-finding exercise was coordinated by the Centre for Policy Analysis. Team members were the human rights activist and former civil servant Harsh Mander, former Director-General of the Border Security Force, E N Rammohan, Professor Kamal Mitra Chenoy of Jawaharlal Nehru University, National Integration Council member John Dayal, senior journalist Sukumar Muralidharan and CPA Director and senior editor Seema Mustafa.

http://www.sacw.net/article5612.html

BSP and its politics of forging alliances with the Hindutva forces

The Times of India, 21 December 2009

What The Statues Say

by Badri Narayan

If you travel through Uttar Pradesh's kasbas, townships or cities like Lucknow and Allahabad, you might see some 20,000 Ambedkar statues. The vast and sprawling Ambedkar Park in Lucknow showcases tall statues of Ambedkar along with those of Kanshi Ram, Jyotiba Phule and Periyar. Most of these statues were erected during three tenures of the chief ministership of Mayawati (June 1995 to October 17, 1995, March 21, 1997 to September 20, 1997, and May 3, 2002 to August 26, 2003). After Mayawati came to power with a clear majority in 2007, construction of these statues gained momentum. Most of them were, and are, erected by the Bahujan Samaj Party government, with the aid of the development funds of several BSP ministers, MLAs and MPs. All this is being done in the name of fulfilling the dreams and missions of Ambedkar.

Strangely, Ambedkar who advocated struggles at the grassroots for the emancipation of Dalits was never in favour of erecting statues. In the initial days of his political career, Kanshi Ram also criticised Ambedkar's supporters in Maharashtra for betraying him by erecting his statues. He used to say that, in Maharashtra, Ambedkar's followers had killed his mission, message and dreams. He would ask, "What's the use of erecting statues, crows sit on these?" It is difficult to understand how the BSP founder later came to support the building of statues of Ambedkar, Mayawati as well as his own.

The dominant features of the Dalit emancipation movement that Indian society experienced were inspired by Ambedkar and led by Kanshi Ram. The movement developed in the form of a BSP upsurge. Kanshi Ram argued that the bahujan movement in UP was, in fact, the extension and flowering of the Dalit movement in Maharashtra. He even used to mix his own ideology with that of Ambedkar.

However, in the name of carrying forward the ideology of Ambedkar, the BSP in the past formed a government with the BJP, whose Hindutva ideology primarily strengthened Brahmanism. While Ambedkar favoured the abolition of the caste system in Indian society for Dalit emancipation, Kanshi Ram and Mayawati favoured the awakening of Dalit and backward identities in order to link these with the bahujan movement. Thus, in UP, to strengthen Ambedkar's vision, Kanshi Ram and Mayawati transformed his 'abolish caste system' slogan into a 'promote caste system' one.

So, while Ambedkar wanted it dismantled, the caste system was used by Kanshi Ram to polarise the Dalits instead. The latter's argument was that social polarisation based on the caste identities of Dalits and marginalised communities was meant to oppose and eventually demolish Brahmanical politics. Ambedkar laid emphasis on identity and the struggle for self-respect, locating Dalits in history. In contrast, Kanshi Ram mingled myth with history, popular culture with intellectualism. He used pragmatic wisdom (vyavaharic vivek) as the basis of his politics. In contrast, Ambedkar wanted to empower Dalits by building their intellectual capacities in order to ensure their political emancipation. His idea of emancipation was not memories or memorials.

The basic differences between Ambedkar and Kanshi Ram are latent in the development of their personalities and viewpoints. Ambedkar, who studied at Columbia University, was a modern and intellectual leader. Kanshi Ram, in contrast, belonged to a small village of Punjab, with a critical stance towards Marathi Dalit politics. He evolved as an excellent organiser of Dalit politics. Ambedkar believed Dalits couldn't be freed from Brahmanism within the Hindu fold. He, therefore, embraced Buddhism along with thousands of Dalits. Kanshi Ram and Mayawati held an opposed view on this subject, the main reason being not to alienate and anger the majority of Dalits who are part of popular sects of the Bhakti kaal (era of devotion) of the Hindus, like Kabirpanthi, Ravidasi, Satnami, Shivnarayani, etc. It was a wise political strategy, which was to both link them and carry forward the avowed mission.

If Ambedkar were around today, he might have paused and thought very deeply before forging alliances with the Hindutva forces. But Kanshi Ram was known to defend his political strategy without any scruples or qualms. He used to say, "If someone feels that this is opportunism, my answer is that if Brahmanism used it to strengthen itself, why i should not strengthen the Dalits treading the same path?"

Though Kanshi Ram criticised the Congress and the BJP for practising Brahmanism, he followed the path of these political parties. Ambedkar, on the other hand, favoured an alternative culture, religion and politics to assert Dalit rights; he held ideology and principles in high esteem. Kanshi Ram, by contrast, adopted pragmatic politics as a guide in the search for Dalit emancipation. He used to elaborate the differences between Ambedkar and himself by saying, "Ambedkar used to collect books, i collect people."

The difference between a thorough intellectual and a practical organiser is, therefore, pretty sharp. The statues in UP are a testimony to two very different political visions.

The writer is with G B Pant Social Science Institute, Allahabad.

Badri Narayan interview: BJP BSP compete to mobilise Dalits

The Times of India, 4 March 2009

'Cultural symbols are reinterpreted to suit ideologies'

Political parties use various methods to expand their vote base. The BJP and the BSP are using cultural tools myths, symbols, legends and heroes
to build new political communities, especially in Uttar Pradesh. Badri Narayan of the Govind Ballabh Pant Social Science Institute, Allahabad, has written extensively on the phenomenon. He spoke to Amrith Lal:

Your recent writings reveal how the BJP and the BSP are using cultural tools to expand their base in UP. Could you explain this process?

The new political strategy of both the BJP and the BSP for mobilising small and marginalised Dalit castes is to arouse their sense of past using cultural symbols of each community. The process is being reinforced by the strong desire of the communities themselves to assert their identities through myths, memories, legends and heroes.

Cultural symbols are reinterpreted, recreated and reconstructed to suit the political ideology of the party concerned. The BSP is using them to create a homogeneous Dalit identity. The BJP is trying to bring various castes within the framework of Hindutva by linking them with Hindu icons and reshaping them to highlight the contribution of Dalits to the Hindu past and history. Both organise celebrations around these heroes. Pamphlets, brochures, stickers are distributed among the target group to mobilise them as a consolidated vote bank.

The two parties seem to be consolidating various caste groups from different ideological vantage points. Could they coalesce into one single political group at some point?

In a fractured and multi-caste society like India where new groups are entering the democratic arena, both the parties are actively trying to mobilise them as consolidated vote-banks. These parties have to continuously readjust and renegotiate with identity aspirations of various communities and revise them to suit their political ideology. They also have to mobilise them in their favour as a compulsion of democratic politics. As each new group joins the democratic arena, they remain a distinct ideological group. Until they develop their own political ideology, they will never coalesce into a single group.

In Fascinating Hindutva, you have talked about the sangh parivar expanding its ideological influence in UP. But the BJP's vote share has been on the decline there. How do you explain this contradiction?

The BJP's political strategy for mobilising Dalits electorally is a part of the overall strategy of the sangh parivar of spreading the notion of Hindu cultural nationalism under the Hindutva nomenclature, based on moral and cultural codes preached by epics like the Ramayana and the Mahabharata and the code of law propagated in Manu Samhita. The BJP might fail politically in UP in the short run, but the long-term agenda of the sangh parivar to culturally saffronise Dalits and others is continuing. If the Hindutva forces succeed, UP might go the Gujarat way and end up as a communally divided region.