The BJP has been trying to shed it’s Brahmin-Baniya image and interweave its identity with the Dalit community. It organised the Ambedkar Jayanti celebrations. Ram Nath Kovind, a Dalit is President of India. Representation has been offered to backward classes and alliances formed with them. But such social engineering is often thwarted by the Sangh Parivar affiliates with Hindutva as their core ideology. The flare-up in Maharashtra proves that the party’s efforts to expand its social base have floundered. Its maximum managerial skill will be required to calm the fury and punitive police action will not serve the purpose. The current unrest in Koregaon-Vhim is an example of the clash between Dalit communal pride and self-respect and the BJP’s national pride. Efforts have been made to explain it away as a local event sparked by tensions between Maratha mobilisation and Dalit self-assertion in the region but the unrest in the country is not merely directed against the Maratha community. Maratha mobilisation in the past few weeks has indeed targeted the Dalits but the Dalit anger has been triggered by a wider spectrum of grievances. It is a movement for self-respect, constitutional rights, jobs and livelihoods. The student unrest in Hyderabad Central University (HCU), the Una flogging of Dalits by cow vigilantes and tension in Saharanpur had dovetailed with the agitation in Maharashtra. New articulate Dalit leaders have emerged.
The BJP must recognise that Dalit political assertion in Maharashtra could impact on its national strategy. It has lost no time in condemning violence against Koregaon but it has to relook its own strategy and tactics to retain its broad social base to gear up for the parliamentary elections in 2019.