Magic realism of mayajaal

Mayawati's ascendancy may be remarkable but will she succeed in the emancipation of dalits?

Raghav Sharma Delhi

The re-invention of the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) is the story of Uttar Pradesh in 2007. The organisation is not even a quarter-century old. But its leader is a Dalit woman who became chief minister at the age of 37. To set this in perspective, she became head of the government of India's most populous state at the age Rahul Gandhi is today.

Yet, the emergence of the Dalit-led political formation from second status to that of the single largest party has been a big step. It is one with all- India implications but its roots lie in the politics of UP, the state where one of every six Indians lives. 

How did the BSP ever get this far? There is, after all, a yawning gap between Dalit political ascendancy in the state and the economic conditions and social circumstances of Dalits themselves. Just over one in ten still lives in villages. More than one in ten of their children die as infants. Every three either cultivate and till the land as small farmers or earn daily wages as labourers. Even in 1991, there was a seven per cent gap between the levels of Dalit adult literacy and that of the population as a whole.

Santosh Mehrotra of the Planning Commission starkly illustrates the Dalit scene in UP.  In Tamil Nadu, three of four Dalit children are delivered in a hospital. In UP, the number of Scheduled Caste (SC) children delivered in hospitals is less than one in every five. More children die young and more mothers die in child birth. If they are from the Dalit communities, their chances of suffering are all the greater.  Infant mortality rates in Tamil Nadu for Dalit children in the southern state is 42 per thousand live births, while in UP it is as high as 110 per thousand.   

Yet, there have been signs of change for quite a while, signs easy to miss. These have been both at the ground level and among a small but emerging Dalit middle class. 

In the districts closer to the metropolis of Delhi, vegetable farming and kitchen gardens have boosted incomes of Dalit cultivators. In the last decade, Dalit viranganas, or heroines of the 1857 rebellion, have attained cult-like status for a new generation aspiring to stand on its own feet.

The number of SC employees in state government undertakings is close to a lakh. This may not seem large in a state with 35 million Dalits but in terms of households it works out to one in every 70 households. And the figure does not take account of Union government employees.

Some changes are subterranean because few observers look closely enough on the ground. Om Prakash Valmiki's book, Joothan, after its translation into English, won the prestigious New India Foundation Award in 2005. Yet, it was already a bestseller in Hindi by the time the author got it into print eight years ago. Mayawati's annual birthday celebrations now include advertisements in Hindi dailies placed by small-scale Dalit contractors. A small sign of the change is the formation of the western UP Dalit Chamber of Commerce.

The rise of the BSP has been visible at the surface only in the recent past. In 1989, it won over one in ten votes, denting the Congress's loyal Dalit vote bank in a manner none had ever managed in the state. The roots lay in the past, in the 1960s, when Kanshi Ram worked in a government job in Maharashtra which he quit to devote himself to full-time political work. The Bamcef, an employees union established in 1973 by him was succeeded by DS-4, a social change organisation set up in 1983.

The formation of the BSP in 1984 came within less than a year of two very important events in the north Indian politics which struck at the very heart of Kanshi Ram's project to unify the Dalits, OBCs and minorities. The Sangh Parivar launched a Bharat Ekatmata Yatra in 1983, with the Manu Smriti as prominent in its platform as the ubiquitous Ganga jal. By then, Kanshi Ram had already covered huge distances on his cycle yatras. 

 To this day it is the cycle yatris and the DS-4 cadres who play a role akin to that of Mao's cadres of the Long March in China's history.  They give the party its spine, a backbone it falls back upon in election campaigns and in the long hiatus between elections. It is a cadre woven around government employees and matriculates, graduates and political veterans and it has enabled the BSP to reach out well beyond the reach of the print and audio-visual media in which Dalits have so marginal a presence.

The rest is history. The party first formed alliances with Mulayam Singh Yadav's Samajwadi Party (SP) in 1991 in a Lok Sabha by-election to Etawah. Two years later, the allies stopped the forward march of the BJP in the UP state assembly elections. Cadres in the villages and towns responded to the Hndutva brigade with the slogan, Mile Mulayam Kanshi Ram, Hawa mai ud jaye Jai Shri Ram. (When Kanshi Ram and Mulayam Singh joined hands, the slogan of Jai Shri Ram, the rallying call of the Sangh, would vanish in thin air.) The coalition broke up soon after and on three occasions from the mid-1990s onwards the BSP formed ministries with the BJP’s support. It never aligned with the Hindutva party at election time. Between 1996 and 2002, it climbed from the status of the third to the second force in UP politics.

For the last five years and more, the BSP has worked to expand its social base. Its slogan of the Bahujan or the majority has not been given up, but the catch word of the hour has been  a sarva samaj or a society that includes all sections. There is a paradox evident in this stance. Dalit hegemony is within reach only, if the Dalit-led party can reach out to non-Dalits more successfully than ever before.

The slogan to woo the Brahmins refers explicitly to the election symbol of the party.  Haathi nahin Ganesh hai, Brahma Vishnu Mahesh Hai. The invocation of the Hindu trinity of the Creator, Preserver and Destroyer by a champion of Dalit power is not new. It was first invoked five years ago when the BSP in Kanshi Ram's lifetime put up as many as 37 Brahmin candidates. The difference lies in the painstaking groundwork that has been put in since. In the first half of 2005 alone there were 50 district specific rallies aimed to win over the former priestly community. This was followed by a huge rally in Lucknow in June 2005, where Mayawati specifically brought together Brahmin sympathisers and supporters and appealed to them to give her party a fair chance. Smarting by then under the blows of the Yadav-dominated SP government, a section, and a sizable one, it now seems, gave her a hearing. Some went further and gave her a chance.

The re-crystalisation of a social alliance of the groups at the apex and the bottom of the social pyramid requires explanation. One factor is a common antipathy to the domination of the political and public space by the upper strata of the OBCs. Another is the slow coming to terms of both the Dalits and the Brahmins. The former realise that they cannot permanently alienate any section of the population, especially one that looms so large in the services sector and administration. The latter in turn seems more willing now than in the past to accept a position as supporters of a Dalit-led dispensation. 

This is no doubt aided by the fact that land-related tensions in the countryside often pit the Dalits against communities and groups other than the Brahmins. The major beneficiaries of land reforms, the former tillers of the soil such as the Yadavs and Kurmis, the Koeris and Jats, are often at odds with Dalits. This is true not only in a narrow sense of wage-related disputes or contests over land control, it is also true in terms of who will carve out a new social order in the post savarna era that began in the late 1980s.

Such a denouement is not peculiar to UP. Much of the southern and western region underwent such a transition in the 20th century. But there is critical difference. The Dalits in Tamil Nadu may be better read than their counterparts in UP, but they are not a dominant force in politics. In UP alone Dalit numbers have been translated into political power of an autonomous variety. Neither Dravidian nationalism in the south nor lower- caste radicalism in Maharashtra has come anywhere near achieving what Mayawati has. There is no escaping the fact that the experiment in UP is a historic and unprecedented one.

It is also one fraught with many dangers. None is as real as that of a head-on confrontation with those groups who dominated the polity for much of the post-89 period. Looking back, it is clear that figures like Mulayam Singh the 'socialist', and Kalyan Singh, ‘the saffronite’, had much in common. Indeed, her keenness to overthrow the older dwija dominated social order was not matched by an eagerness to uplift or emancipate Dalits. The Yadavs and the Lodhs even united for a while when the two leaders fought the 2002 elections together. It is no coincidence that each is accompanied by a key Rajput figure. Amar Singh looms large in the upper echelons of the SP and Rajnath Singh's appeal as the BJP chief has helped revive the BJP. These are new alliances of landed castes that are unified to keep Dalits in their place.

Such tensions were vividly evident in the 18-month-long SP-BSP coalition government. Over 15,000 Ambedkar statues were installed in that period, often by Dalits asserting rights to gaon sabha land. This placed the BSP in a quandary as it was eager to continue in power and hard put to restrain its cadres and supporters. Much has changed in the political landscape of UP since then. Prof Sudha Pai observes in her new edited work Political process in Uttar Pradesh (Pearson Longman, 2007), that much of Mayawati's rural power was cemented by land distribution during her short terms in office in 1995 and 1997. Over quarter of a million Dalits were listed as recipients of pattas.

Yet, it is precisely such questions that could prove its undoing. The lower Mandal castes and the peasant communities that are not dominant in the countryside are both large in numbers and too crucial a vote-bank to be alienated. The Dalit specific slogans like ‘land reforms’ and  'Ambedkar Villages', critical in the past, now needed be downplayed. After all, the lower OBCs are huge, if disparate groups. Washermen and fishermen, tinkers and potters, boatmen and herders, had flocked to the raths of the BJP half-a-generation ago. Of late, they too were smarting under the new hegemony of the SP-backed landed groups. At the same time, the potential for tensions with the scheduled castes is never too far from the surface.

 Perhaps it is due to a shrewd assessment of the ground conditions that the 2007 campaign had but one theme song. A slogan put it well, if sharply. Chad goondon ki chhati par…Button daba de haathi par. Voters are being openly exhorted to put an end to hooliganism by voting for the BSP. This singular focus on the lawless regime of the last three-and-half-years was backed up with a strong attack on rival parties who stood up against the SP. The BJP, Mayawati pointed out, had abetted the formation of the Mulayam Singh ministry in August 2003. Ajit Singh had been an electoral ally the previous year, and the Congress had supported the SP to keep the BJP out.

 The only party that had unswervingly opposed Mulayam Singh was her own. Hence, what began as a political campaign to 'secure power' in the Satta prapt karo rally of March 2007 soon became a revel for those who wanted to vote for change. 

  The BSP is a far greater threat to the Congress than perhaps any other political formation in the country. It strikes at the heart of the social alliance that has kept the Congress in power for much of the time since Independence. Its core appeal lies in the fact that it promises the Dalit voters that they need not just vote but can also rule. Further, the rise of the party has coincided with the reform era: as life for the poor has got tougher, it is the BSP that has been their chief voice in much of north India, not the minuscule Left or the effete Congress.

The creation of a larger social alliance under Dalit leadership in UP may not be replicable at once in other states. But its impact will be felt far and wide. It will send out a message that the electoral arena can become the crucible for raising basic issues about the nature of power and politics in India today. It is a message that will find many a receptive ear.

The challenge for the BSP will be to indicate through its actions and politics, were it to come to power, that it can truly try creating an inclusive society. The challenges ahead are both political and administrative. The temptation will be to go after Mulayam Singh Yadav and his associate, Amar Singh. But it is just such a step that would enable him to rally together the intermediate castes and classes against the BSP.

Similarly, the BSP, with its five to ten per cent vote share in the neighbouring states of Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Chhatisgarh and Delhi, will be tempted to give the Congress nightmares. But the preparation for the winter 2007 assembly polls in these states and in Delhi has to be tempered with the need to march in tandem with the UPA government in New Delhi. 

The real challenge will be in the public realm in UP itself. Successive ministries have left large sections alienated from the power structure. The BJP is haunted by the black mark of the demolition of December 6, 1992 and has never quite convinced Muslims, nearly 19 per cent of the people in the state, of its credentials. Mulayam Singh had a minuscule Dalit constituency and limited, if growing, upper-caste support.

The revival of UP's economy and the raising of basic standards of human endowment will be the litmus test.  It can only work through positive programmes of public action that gives meaning to dignity and a better material life for the people, especially at the lowest rung, including Dalits.  Were this to happen, it would not only open a fresh chapter for the state but would also send a strong message of political and social change across the country.