By Manini Chatterjee
The BharatiyaJanata Party president, Amit Shah, gave a spate of interviews to different television channels last week, days after the shock defeat of his party in the by-elections to the two prestigious LokSabha constituencies of Gorakhpur and Phulpur in Uttar Pradesh.
The interviews were clearly meant to underline that the setbacks in UP and the prospects of a long term Samajwadi Party-BahujanSamaj Party alliance had not fazed him one bit. He is, after all, the new Chanakya of Indian politics who has converted the BJP into an election winning machine. And where elections could not be won fair and square, he was adept at securing a post-poll arrangement to form the government anyway. Goa, Manipur, Nagaland and Meghalaya have already showcased those skills. His nonchalant dismissal of the UP results indicated he had more tricks up his sleeve.
That smug confidence, it soon turned out, was not misplaced. The BJP had withdrawn “extra” candidates for the RajyaSabha elections in Maharashtra and Gujarat. It could have done the same in UP. The BJP had enough legislative members to win eight of the 10 seats that were up for election. The SP had enough for an outright win in one. And with the SP’s surplus votes, the BSP could win the tenth seat easily.
The SP-BSP arrangement was made in the open. The BSP chief, Mayavati, had publicly stated that her party would back the SP candidates in Gorakhpur and Phulpur in exchange of the SP’s support to her candidate in the RajyaSabha election.
But the BJP would not let that happen. It decided to back a businessman, Anil Agarwal, and thus force a contest for the tenth seat. The aim was two-fold: to “avenge” the bypoll defeats, and to drive a wedge in the newly minted alliance between the SP and BSP.
Amit Shah’s gamble paid off. Late on Friday night when the votes were counted and recounted, the BJP had won nine seats. The BSP candidate did not make it.
The BJP celebrated the win with much glee and Amit Shah’s admirers extolled his “strategic” acumen and “management” skills. Yet, far from avenging the defeat in Gorakhpur and Phulpur, the BJP’s “victory” in Lucknow on March 23 may well have compounded it. In its zeal to teach the BSP a lesson, the BJP gave a symbolic seal to its growing reputation of being an aggressive upper-caste party in the eyes of the lower castes, particularly the Dalits.
The machinations of the BJP to get any BSP candidate defeated in favour of a businessman would have led to disaffection, at least among Mayavati’s still formidable mass base. But this particular candidate evoked a special resonance. He was neither Mayavati’s relative nor a benefactor who was being obliged with a RajyaSabha ticket. The BSP candidate was a party veteran from the time it was formed by Kanshi Ram, and a Dalit leader in his own right. And he was called BhimraoAmbedkar – named after the principal architect of the Indian Constitution and the greatest Dalit icon in history.
The symbolism of BJP’s decision to defeat BhimraoAmbedkar comes at a time when the anti-Dalit biases of the ruling regime are becoming evident in ways more substantive. The most recent instance of this is the strange silence of the BJP leadership on the controversial Supreme Court judgment diluting the provisions of the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act.
On March 20, a two-judge bench of A.K. Goel and U.U. Lalit laid down stringent rules for the implementation of the act to check its “rampant misuse”. Apart from allowing anticipatory bail, it ruled that if the accused is a public servant, he can only be arrested with the permission of the appointing authority. In other cases, the permission of the Senior Superintendent of Police of the district will be required.
The lengthy judgment also spoke of “vested interests” misusing the act against political opponents and to settle private disputes. Its focus on the plight of the accused under an act that was legislated in 1989 and then strengthened in 2015 because existing laws were felt to be too inadequate to deal with the atrocities against India’s weakest sections was, to say the least, startling.
Opposition parties were quick to express concern about the implications of the judgment. The Congress noted that the verdict had increased the “feeling of insecurity among SCs, STs and other oppressed classes” and called for a review of the decision. Later in the week, Congress MPs led by Rahul Gandhi protested against the verdict in front of Mahatma Gandhi’s statue in Parliament.
The CPI(M) politburo pointed out that the judgment “ignored the social reality of caste oppression, harassment and atrocities perpetrated on Dalits on a daily basis” and also rued that the Central government counsel did not respond properly and raise objections against the dilution of the provisions of the act.
More significant, though, were the voices of concern emerging from within the BJP and the ruling National Democratic Alliance. Two Union ministers – Ram Vilas Paswan of the LokJanshakti Party and RamdasAthavale of the Republican Party of India (A) – came out in the open asking the government to file a review petition before a larger Supreme Court bench.
Several Dalit members of parliament of the BJP met the Union minister for social justice, Thawar Chand Gehlot, asking him to impress upon the government the need to take steps to undo the verdict. Gehlot said he had raised the issue with the law minister and the party chief and was awaiting their response.
The law minister, Ravi Shankar Prasad, addressed the media more than once through the week on the issue of data theft by Cambridge Analytica. On questions regarding the Supreme Court verdict, he merely said he was going to “examine it”.
On the evening of March 23, when the BJP was executing its plan of defeating BhimraoAmbedkar in Lucknow, the prime minister and the BJP chief were addressing a closed door meeting of the BJP parliamentary party in Delhi. Udit Raj, a Dalit MP, had told reporters that he would raise the demand for a review petition to overturn the apex court verdict at the meeting. He never got a chance. NarendraModi and Amit Shah did all the talking. Neither said a word on the verdict.
It is possible that electoral calculations may yet compel the government to file a review petition. But the party leadership’s complete silence on an issue that is roiling a large section of the Indian people who continue to be among the most oppressed and underprivileged is telling in its own way.
The RohithVemula suicide case, when the government made fervent efforts to deny him his Dalit identity, the Unalynchings, the failure to provide post-matric scholarships to Dalit students leading to an accumulation of arrears to the tune of Rs 6,900 crore in the last five years and the change in reservation norms in university and college teachers’ appointments are being seen as a part of a wider offensive unleashed by the BJP and its ideological parent, the RashtriyaSwayamsevakSangh.
In the UP assembly elections, the BJP scored a massive victory by reaching out selectively to different sub-castes within the Dalits and the OBCs, and also profited from the division of votes between the SP and BSP. But the decision to anoint Yogi Adityanath as chief minister signaled not just aggressive Hindutva targeting the minorities but also an upper caste reassertion of social hegemony.
The defeat of BhimraoAmbedkar is part of the same trajectory. But as Mayavati made it clear the next day, that defeat has only cemented the alliance between the BSP and the SP and even endeared her to the Congress whose seven MLAs backed Ambedkar.
Rather than dividing the Opposition, the ruling alliance is now facing fissures from within over the Modi government’s indifference to the concerns of the bahujansamaj. NarendraModi may succeed in winning more elections but his boast of sabkasaath, sabkavikas is beginning to wear thin even among his own kin.
