By Lalit Sethi
The BJP president, Mr. Amit Shah, has been re-elected as party chief for a three-year regular term with the full support of his boss, Mr. Narendra Modi. This will ensure that the Prime Minister’s writ runs in the saffron party. Though the BJP faces many challenges in the coming years, especially in Assembly elections in Punjab, West Bengal, Assam and Tamil Nadu this year and in U.P. next year, the party will be geared to a single chain of command.
The Parliamentary Board, which chose Mr. Shah unanimously, was boycotted by Mr. L.K Advani and Mr. Murli Manohar Joshi, but Mr. Shah called on them afterwards to seek their blessings. Though the two senior leaders wanted a detailed inquiry into BJP defeats in the Bihar and Delhi Assembly elections last year, this has been explained away by insisting that it won in four States: Haryana, Rajasthan, Jharkhand and Maharashtra where it was not in power.
It also joined the Jammu and Kashmir coalition government in alliance with People’s Democratic Party, but it has to be revived as the State is now under Governor’s rule. It won nearly all seats in Jammu province, but none in Kashmir.
But a big new threat or challenge has emerged from the Dalit lobby after the suicide of a brilliant Dalit student leader, Rohith Vemula, in a hostel of the Hyderabad Central University on January 17. Although the Prime Minister claims to be a Dalit himself and as one who experienced the pain of poor and backward people as a student and child in his formative years, the big agitation in Hyderabad and several other universities, including Delhi, is focussing on upper caste credentials of the mainstream BJP and RSS.
Rohith Vemula might have been impressed by the BJP six years ago when he went to Hyderabad, but what he and his fellow students saw in subsequent years was stark caste barriers among the student community and teachers. There was complete alienation. He became a leftist for a while, but the Communists, he saw, were engaged in class struggle. Caste prejudices were not recognized by them. He went on to set up an Ambedkar Students’ Association, which has spread its wings to 11 States.
His suicide followed a showdown with a BJP-led Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad leader, who was initially his friend. A BJP Minister of State, Mr. Dattatreya, jumped into the fray and demanded the expulsion of five Dalit students from Hyderabad University. The Union Minister of Human Resource Development, Mrs. Smriti Irani, was approached by her Ministerial colleague and five Dalit students were thrown out of the hostel of the Central university in Hyderabad. It took the Centre five more days to order a judicial inquiry into the expulsion and suicide and the Vice-Chancellor to go on leave. But the BJP, Mrs. Irani and the vice-chancellor, even the acting one, remain in the line of fire, especially Dalit fire. The student agitators refuse to cave in.
The BJP would expect that with time, the Dalit anger would subside in Hyderabad and elsewhere, but with the Budget Session of Parliament beginning in less than four weeks, the Opposition is not likely to miss the opportunity to harass the government of the day. The Congress might be entitled to think that in 60 years of its rule, it let sleeping dogs sleep and got away by taking several populist measures to win the voters to its camp, though the corruption scams of the new millennium took their toll and it lost out in the power stakes.
The RSS is trying to woo the Dalit people in a big way. One of its top leaders has asked all its members that each one should adopt at least one Dalit family, but its image of being pro-rich and famous refuses to go away. The achievements of Mr. Amit Shah as party president for 18 months include one that he raised the membership from 30 million to 110 million, but where are those tens of millions? Are they winning the BJP friends and voters? They did not in Delhi and Bihar Assembly elections last year.
This perception could cost the party dear in Punjab and U.P. where the percentage of Dalits among voters is huge. In Punjab, Arvind Kejriwal and his Aam Adami Party made some gains in the Lok Sabha elections in 2014 and he will fish in the troubled waters of U.P. as well next year. He is already active in Punjab and goes there to address public meetings, wearing a yellow turban to gel with his audiences.
Other parties will also try to ride the Dalit band wagon, but the Akali Dal in Punjab is perceived as a party dominated by Jats. In U.P. the Samajwadi Party is one mainly of Yadavs and the Bahujan Samaj Party led by Ms. Mayawati might claim to be the beacon light of Dalits, but it was routed and drew a blank in the 2014 elections, with not a single Lok Sabha seat to show.
Will the BJP try to exploit these factors to its advantage, but it will face difficulties. Even the Yadav rulers have belatedly woken up to the need to push development projects, though migrants from 1947 and local people have done something on their own even as irrigation projects and canals have raised farm output.
Will Ms. Mayawati try to win back her Dalit constituency or has her showmanship during her five-year tenure as Chief Minister of U.P. told the Dalits that she was not for their uplift but to protect her own interests? She might hope that the anti-incumbency factors of Mulayam Singh Yadav and his son, Akhilesh as Chief Ministers, would have left the people of U.P. disenchanted with them. She would be hoping to stage a comeback, but it might not be easy going for her or the father-son duo of Samajwadi Party.