Abstract
Sudha Pai and Sajjan Kumar. Maya, Modi, Azad: Dalit Politics in the Times of Hindutva. Noida, Uttar Pradesh: Harper Collins, 2023, 305 pp., ₹599.
The book under review is a commentary on the culmination of Dalit assertion in Uttar Pradesh (UP) in 2007, and its subsequent decline after the 2012 Assembly election. The Dalit-centric Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) got an absolute majority in the 2007 Assembly polls and its leader Mayawati became the Chief Minister of UP. But the BSP lost in 2012 assembly elections, and its subsequent regular electoral defeats in Assembly and Parliamentary elections in UP signalled its decline, with the result that its core constituency—Dalits—began shifting to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which deployed inclusive strategies to assimilate them. Today, the majority of Dalits have deserted the BSP and joined the BJP for empowerment and fulfilment of their aspirations. The authors, empathising with Dalit identity and assertion, see some ray of hope in emerging small Dalit parties competing to retrieve the Dalit constituency lost to the BJP.
The authors show that in the last decade (2012–2022), there is a decline of the BSP, with Dalits shifting towards the BJP, but also there are protests by new Dalit organizations against atrocities and the rise of right-wing hegemony. The authors ask why Dalit protests do not translate into anger against the BJP in elections, especially in UP. They argue that Dalits seemed to have transited from identity politics to aspirational politics. When Modi arrived on the national scene in 2014, he linked Dalits with development and reaped a harvest in the electoral arena. That was facilitated by the breakdown of BSP organisational structure at grassroots levels.
The authors examine the puzzle of why Dalits have abandoned their protest against upper caste domination and moved to the BJP, which they once decried as manuwadi. They argue that smaller Dalit subcastes felt marginalised in the BSP, and moved to the BJP. Of course, the BJP adopted several strategies and tactics to rope them in. So, how do Dalits balance political protests against Dalit atrocities on one, and electoral support to the BJP on the other?
According to the authors, Mayawati made several mistakes: First, she did not meld the ‘lower’ Dalits with ‘upper’ Dalits and, hence, there was a lack of homogenisation of Dalits. Second, the BSP became less a social movement and more a political party. Third, Mayawati failed to synchronise her new-found sarvajan ‘all-communities’ orientation with Dalit aspiration and empowerment. Nonetheless, the authors argue, the BSP seemed to have achieved its purpose of providing identity and self-confidence to Dalits in making their social and political choices, and so that Dalit politics in UP has entered a post-BSP phase in which Dalit assertion is found in various organizations, especially the Bhim Army. They pose a question: When upper castes can move to any party and take political advantage, why are Dalits criticised for moving to other parties, especially to the BJP?
As the BSP has become weak, several other Dalit organizations have emerged that compete for Dalit support, invoking the name of Kansi Ram. Empathizing with the Dalits, the authors have taken their perspective and wonder whether there is any possibility of its revival in UP after the decline of BSP and Mayawati.
In the first chapter of the book, the authors discuss how Mayawati as BSP leader moved from exclusionary to inclusive politics with an ideological shift from Bahujan—‘[Dalits], the majority of the people’—to sarvajan (‘all the people’) that helped the party get absolute majority in 2007 assembly election in UP.
In the second chapter, the authors argue that Mayawati failed to properly operationalize the sarvajan experiment. The Dalits were disappointed as she could not amalgamate the rising Dalit aspiration with her social engineering enterprise of bringing Dalits and Brahmins together. She did try to patch up by bringing in Dalit-centric developmental schemes and installation of statues of Dalit icons to appease them, but the damage had already been done. The non-Jatav Dalits drifted away from BSP, leading to its defeat in the 2012 assembly polls.
The third chapter discusses how Mayawati’s policies led to her distancing herself from Muslims and her party-stalwarts Babu Singh Kushwaha, Swami Prasad Maurya and Naseemuddin. The BSP’s defeat in 2012 and Mayawati’s prime-ministerial ambitions forced her to shift away from Dalits in UP to Delhi. The failure of her social engineering model, the authors argue, led to the BSP’s subsequent defeats in 2012, 2017 and 2022 assembly and 2014 and 2019 Lok Sabha Polls, giving a clear hint to Dalits that it was time to move to the BJP—a party that promised them development and empowerment.
In the next chapters, the authors describe how the BJP took advantage of this Dalit aspiration, and gave their ‘inclusive’ politics a practical shape that attracted Dalits into the Hindutva fold. The authors cite cases from Lakhimpur Kheri in UP to showcase rising Dalit atrocities against Dalits that pushed Dalits in search of security to the BJP in a massive way. The authors raise the question of whether the Dalit shift to the BJP is tactical or ideological, a shift to the BJP that accelerated with Modi’s arrival. They argue that this is because of the ‘cultural assimilation of Dalits’ and the ‘othering of Muslims,’ but fail to note a massive 18% shift of ‘pasmanda’ Muslims towards the BJP in the 2022 assembly polls in UP, which demonstrates that the BJP’s ‘inclusive politics’ has attracted more Muslims towards the party.
In the final chapters, the authors seem enthusiastic about three new small Dalit outfits: the Bhim Army led by Chandrashekhar Azad; the Ambedkar Jan Morcha led by Shrawan Kumar Nirala in Eastern UP (Poorvanchal); and the Bahujan Mukti Party led by Daddu Prasad in Bundelkhand. They focus more on the Bhim Army and its leader Chandrashekhar, though all the three claim Ambedkarite lineage and vie with each other for capturing the Dalit constituency. The authors lament the decline of Dalit party BSP, but hope that the Dalit outfits will regroup to keep the flag of Dalit assertion high in UP.
The authors present their volume through a lens of identity politics and fail to delineate the undercurrent of transformative politics—in the country in general and UP in particular—hinged on the twin issues of inclusive politics and transition from caste to class. It’s very clear from the reading of the volume that the authors fail to recognise the positive aspect of Dalit integration with the mainstream Hindu social order which had earlier been divided hierarchically on caste lines that, unfortunately, often displayed inter-caste domination and exploitation. One positive aspect of this is that the social evil of untouchability (that was constitutionally abolished and now at its extinction in society) that led to social discrimination and alienation of a social denomination from the mainstream society may become almost extinct. The authors seem to be writing an obituary for the BSP in UP on the one hand, and a background paper on the other, for seeking the revival of petty Dalit outfits to challenge the BJP’s inclusive politics, by adding an exclusionary tinge in the hope of reviving identity politics to defeat the so-called Hinduization and cultural assimilation of Dalits by the BJP.
The book is a good read for all those interested in understanding the decline of BSP and Mayawati in UP after the victory of Samajwadi Party in 2012 and the coming of BJP and Narendra Modi in 2014 at the national level and Adityanath Yogi in 2017 at the state level. The authors’ empathy for the revival of autonomous Dalit politics in UP could be a great motivation for the new Dalit leadership and Dalit-centric parties to read this book and learn the reasons for the rise and fall of Dalit leaders and BSP.