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.