Reflections on the Republican Party: (Prompted by Recollections of Encounters at 15 Janpath)

Abstract

Towards the end of the 1960s, the Ambedkarite Republican Party of India was facing a serious crisis. Its plight intensified with the death of the leader Dadasaheb Gaikwad at the end of 1971. This article takes the long view of the predicament of the party and asks why it had suffered such frequent and lasting instability. Drawing on interviews conducted at that time, including those conducted at the party New Delhi headquarters on Janpath, more recent discussions and a close examination of documentary records, the article examines the volatility and factional conflict exhibited by the party. In contrast to approaches that seek to find the roots of factionalism in personal rivalries and individual animosities, the article searches for more structural causes. It concludes that the inability of the party to broker differences about political cooperation and electoral alliances was a major cause of dissent. Particularly intense differences and division were generated by the issue of cooperation with the Congress party. Ultimately, it was the absence of any institutional procedures for settling disputes that caused the party to decline and eventually collapse into rival factional organizations.

The establishment of the Dr Ambedkar International Centre on Janpath in New Delhi marked a further important milestone in the recognition and acknowledgement of the significance of Dr Ambedkar in the history of India. It was also a reminder for some of the earlier important role the now demolished bungalow on the site at 15 Janpath had played as a focus of Dalit politics. ¹ It had not been, as some mistakenly think, the residence of Dr Ambedkar. When in Delhi, Ambedkar first lived at Prithviraj Road and later on Alipur Road in Civil Lines at the house where he passed away. But for many years 15 Janpath had been the centre of activity, the national headquarters and the New Delhi offices of the Republican Party of India (RPI), the successor to Ambedkar’s Scheduled Caste Federation (SCF). This account of the RPI is prompted in part by memories of the time passed at 15 Janpath between September 1971 and July 1972. In September 1971 the mood generally in the capital was sombre with the regular morning air raid siren practice suggesting the approach of the war with Pakistan that eventually arrived in December. At 15 Janpath the spirits were equally subdued. The RPI was in the depths of the most serious crisis it had ever faced. Five main elements were contributing to the emergency the party was confronting.

First, the RPI had completely disintegrated in western Uttar Pradesh (UP) where it had recently enjoyed some of its most significant successes. The party was usually associated with Maharashtra. However, in 1962 it had recorded by far its best election results in western UP. Since then, not only had the party in this region split into warring groupings but it had also collapsed electorally and its most prominent leaders had defected to join Mrs Gandhi’s Congress. Most damaging was the departure of B. P. Maurya, a leader of national as well as regional standing. He joined with Ramji Ram, the only RPI candidate elected to the fourth Lok Sabha. Maurya also persuaded Chandra Pal Shailani, a key lieutenant in western UP, to team up with him. The Republican camp was further dispirited when all three were given Congress tickets to fight the 1971 elections, and they were all returned to the fifth Lok Sabha. It would be difficult to exaggerate the rancour surrounding these defections. As one RPI office holder put it ‘Our community worshipped Maurya…now if he comes here nobody would like to see him’. ² Another Dalit activist expressed it even more brutally ‘Maurya Saheb destroyed the RPI by joining the Congress’ (Singh, 1998, p. 2612). ³

The party had also lost Chedi Lal Sathi, arguably its leading intellectual in the state, if not in the whole country. He had been the first party President in UP and a nominee to the Legislative Council. He too defected to the Congress and was also given their support to return to the upper house of the state legislature. Having been routed in the elections of 1967 and 1969, the party was now eviscerated by the departure of these leading figures and further disheartened by their decision to abscond to the Congress. It was no exaggeration to say that ‘The RPI leadership from Uttar Pradesh was thus co-opted by the Congress (I)’ (Jaoul, 2006, p. 187).

Second, there had been unease for some considerable time about extending the appeal of the party beyond its traditional core of support it had enjoyed amongst particular caste groups. The disbanding of the SCF and the establishment of the RPI had meant to signal a widening of the appeal of the party. It was intended to show that the reliance of the SCF on particular castes was now giving way to more broadly based appeals. However, two related concerns accompanied this shift. First there were those who were opposed in any circumstances to modify the relationship between the party and particular castes; they were simply unwilling to abandon the previous ‘communitarian’ or ‘casteist’ approach of the SCF. Second there were concerns that whilst the party may be claiming, in theory, to seek a broader appeal, in reality, in daily political practice, activists were continuing with a strategy oriented towards securing the support only of particular castes.

Third, there were rumbling disputes about who were the legitimate office holders and leaders of the party nationally, and the contending individuals were heading for litigation in the highest courts in the land. Disputes about priorities and internal organization had plagued the party since its formation. What is sometimes rather too loosely called ‘factionalism’ (a concept discussed in this context later) had been fuelled by personal dislikes and antipathies as well as more structured disagreements between different generations of party activists (Gokhale, 1993, pp. 219–225). However, towards the end of the 1960s deeper and more permanent divisions had developed with the emergence of a dissident caucus around party General Secretary B. D. Khobragade (Gokhale, 1993, pp. 250–253). Many of the meetings attempting to thrash out a solution to these differences took place in the capital at 15 Janpath.

A fourth problem was represented by the rising tide of dissatisfaction amongst younger supporters. They were angered by the organizational atrophy of the party and its electoral impotence. Most of all they were also seeking a more aggressive assertion of an identity in a rejuvenated movement. In part this was manifested in a renewed enthusiasm for the Adi-Hindu conviction that Dalits were the original autochthonous inhabitants of the sub-continent and the assertion that Hindus were later invaders. In pursuit of this some activists had begun to look towards B. Sham Sunder (1968) with his formulation of the ‘Mool Bharatis’ and the ‘Bhim Sena’, which was gaining ground at this time. B. Sham Sunder maintained close contact with the leaders and members of the RPI and was a regular participant in discussions at 15 Janpath. He regarded himself and Gaikwad as the two most senior national leaders in the scheduled caste movement. B. Sham Sunder believed that his ideas were becoming widely accepted and was convinced he could get them adopted by the RPI as official policy. ⁴ Much of the discontent amongst younger activists was to come to fruition in the emergence of the Dalit Panthers. As the manifesto of the Dalit Panthers later protested, the followers of Ambedkar had ‘simply renamed SCF as the Republican Party [and] started to pursue casteist politics … that is why today we have to announce with deep pain that we are no relatives of the Republican Party’ (Murugkar, 1991, pp. 236–237).

Finally, the party was suffering from the prolonged serious illness of its leader Dadasaheb Gaikwad. He was a very close associate of Ambedkar and had served as the Bombay provincial President of the SCF. From 1957 until 1962 he was a member of the Lok Sabha, and he was subsequently elected to the Rajya Sabha. In 1964 he became the national President of the RPI. 15 Janpath was his official residence in New Delhi. In the latter months of 1971 his health was giving rise to increasing concern and finally he passed away on 29 December. Gaikwad’s death intensified the tensions within the RPI leadership as individuals and groupings manoeuvred to secure the succession.

In 1971, the operation and daily business of 15 Janpath were in the hands of Hoti Lal Pipal, a long serving worker in the Dalit movement. Hoti Lal Pipal had joined as a young man in Aligarh city where his father, Badri Prasad, was associated with Dalit welfare in the Depressed Classes League. He attended Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) and after leaving in 1954 started to assist Dr Ambedkar in Delhi. He worked closely with him right up to his death. ⁵ When B. K. Gaikwad was elected as an MP in 1957 he asked Hoti Lal Pipal to join him at 15 Janpath. Officially Hoti Lal Pipal was the Office Secretary of the RPI, but he performed a role far wider than that suggested by his title. He certainly drew up the reports and settled agendas for meetings of the senior office holders and governing bodies of the party. He was the record keeper, the archivist, the librarian and much more. For callers at Janpath enquiring about the Republican Party, Hoti Lal Pipal was always ready with literature, documentation, advice, contacts, suggestions and a wealth of background knowledge. He helped everyone from the casual visitor just curious about the Dalit movement to professional academics like Owen Lynch. When Lynch (1969) embarked on his path breaking research on the Jatavs in Agra, he was assisted by Hoti Lal Pipal. From September 1971 until June 1972 Hoti Lal Pipal was also a mentor to this researcher and his guide through the many of the details and complexities of the scheduled caste politics of the time.

The RPI in UP: The Role of B. P. Maurya

The collapse of the RPI in UP was a calamity for the party. Although the party did not have the sort of roots it had developed in western India, its disintegration in the state in the late 1960s was a severe blow. The party had grown from origins during the colonial period and in these struggles the role of the Chamars was crucial (Rawat, 2011). As a movement, and especially as an electoral force, the RPI in UP had been directed by B. P. Maurya.

Maurya was the most significant figure in the Dalit politics of UP in the era before the rise of the BSP. He had grown up in Aligarh district and later attended Agra University where he first met Ambedkar in 1946. He went on to AMU where he was determined to apply the lessons from Agra. ⁶ He played a prominent role in the movement initiated by Ambedkar to convert Dalits to Buddhism, and presided at a ceremony in 1957 when tens of thousands converted. Maurya later claimed an attendance of 80,000 (Brass, 2003, p. 422). When the neophytes began converting temples, violence erupted. The Dalits in defiance of police orders responded with demonstrations and large numbers, including Maurya, were arrested. In the disturbances two converts were killed. ⁷ Such was his reputation by 1961 that he was able successfully to petition the High Court in Allahabad to transfer a case against him out of his home district. He had been charged with assaulting a police constable who had been trying to arrest a rickshaw puller. He claimed he was the victim of ‘a deeply hatched conspiracy amongst Congress leaders’. Maurya contended that he had alienated powerful local influences to such an extent that he would be unable to obtain a fair trial. ⁸ He had also become further identified with the Dalit leadership in the state when he married into the family of Manik Chand Jatav Vir, widely regarded as one of the ‘founding fathers’ of Dalit politics in UP. ⁹

Maurya was a leading figure in many campaigns and fought a number of notable election contests, starting in 1957, when in his home tehsil he came close to unseating the incumbent rival, a prominent Congress grandee. In the late 1950s and early 1960s he orchestrated the surge in the newly launched Ambedkarite Republican Party that saw it achieve major successes in western UP. The importance of Maurya was reflected in his appointment as the ‘RPI General Secretary Northern Zone’ and the choice of Aligarh as the venue for the third national conference of the party (Rosenthal, 1970, p. 213). By the early 1960s, Maurya had become the ‘hero of his community’ (Brass, 1965, p. 104). But this raises the question of what precisely did he regard as ‘his community’?

Community, Caste and Political Mobilization

The electoral alignment of the RPI in UP with the Chamar caste, and more specifically the Jatavs, was a logical choice. The caste group was numerically dominant amongst the scheduled castes, tended in some places to have modest economic means at their disposal, and they had enthusiastically embraced educational opportunities although participation remained woefully low. All of these factors had combined over a long period, particularly among the Jatav sub-caste, to produce a persistent and assertive political presence (Duncan, 2019). But rather than acting as a springboard to recruiting support more widely among other Dalit groups, the reliance on the Jatavs and Chamars became more like a dependence on communitarian identity politics.

The management of the relationship between electoral politics and caste is a complex problematic issue for any party. It can be the case that by emphasizing the aspects of a caste that it has in common with others and by creating continuities and similarities, more generalized identities and political collectivities can be constructed through social and political action. On the other hand social movements and political parties can become so obliged to emphasize the particularistic characteristics of a single caste group, in order to establish themselves or to survive in the world of electoral competition, that they remain ensnared and trapped within the confines of a narrow caste identity.

A close examination of the campaigns of the RPI in western UP finds the party caught in the latter condition. Particularly noticeable was the reputation of B. P. Maurya in his early days. As one senior communist activist put it there could be no doubt about the economically and socially progressive views of the RPI but locally he was sure that ‘it was Maurya’s abuse of Brahmans and Thakurs that earned him the adoration of his caste’. ¹⁰ The evidence from petitions and tribunal hearings arising from contested 1962 election results support this view. Leaflets, distributed by RPI candidates, warned against voting for the Congress candidate in the following terms:

Down trodden and backward brothers! It is clear that during the ten years the Congress has done only for the advancement of the Brahmans and it has done nothing for the Jatav community. They have after winning spread black marketing, bribery, dacoity, controls and excessive taxes in broad daylight and brought about ruin in the country and Jatava in particular….̣ Vote for him [the Congress candidate] means hanging the badge of Brahman rule on one’s neck. If any Jatav brother commits this mistake under any inducement of the Congress, he will never be excused by the soul of the Late Baba Saheb, and he will have to suffer penalty for it and it shall be a blot for the entire Jatav community. (Government Gazette of UP, 1964, p. 892)

Other leaflets were distributed in which a constituency was referred to as ‘this Jatav seat’, and ‘Jatav brothers’ were urged to vote together with the rallying call of ‘Jai Bhim’ (Government Gazette of UP, 1964, p. 905). It is difficult to avoid the impression of a campaign-based on communitarian appeals, not just to the scheduled castes or even to the Chamars, but exclusively to the Jatavs alone. More evidence for this can be found in the way the RPI concentrated its electoral efforts overwhelmingly on the tracts of the Ganga–Yamuna doab where there is a preponderance of the Jatav population. Remarkably of the 22 candidates fielded by the RPI in UP for the Lok Sabha elections in 1962 more than half came from just seven districts in the west. The distribution of the 123 candidates for the assembly elections was even more skewed. ¹¹

Maurya, despite all his public claims, and there were many, that he wanted to represent the broader community of all Dalits, or even a more general class interest, often showed a remarkably narrow perspective and little inclination to seek wider support. On one occasion, discussing the failure to establish a foothold in Saharanpur district he declared it was due to the RPI activists being unable to establish a base amongst the voters there. When probed on the detail he expanded that the problem was that the voters were not ‘our people there … there are no Jatavs in Saharanpur … they are all Chamars’. ¹² Similarly his accounts of the early campaigns in the colonial period always emphasized the vanguard role of Jatavs in Dalit politics. As he once put it, explaining the early Dalit movement in UP, ‘There were two waves to the movement during British period one around Arya Samaj the other Adi-Hindu … but in Agra and north India our boys led both’. ¹³ The statement probably had some truth but it is hardly the sort of assertion one would expect from someone seeking a wider audience.

It was these sorts of attitudes that led the veteran Dalit campaigner Bhagwan Das to complain of the ‘RPI’s failure to reach out to other SC jatis and minority communities…and its continuing domination by Jatavs’ (Hunt, 2014, p. 51). Sometimes he went even further and claimed that ‘in the end all Ambedkarite parties become victims of casteism’. ¹⁴ The solid base among the Jatavs may have provided the RPI with an initial electoral advantage but the narrow identification with the caste was to prove detrimental in the long run. ¹⁵ Of course the alignment of Ambedkarite parties with the Mahars in western India had been even more pronounced. S. N. Shivtarkar, Ambedkar’s faithful ally, ‘who stood by him for over twenty years’ (Keer, 1971, p. 47) complained that his ‘primary disappointment was that Ambedkar failed to allot enough seats to non-Mahars’ (Zelliot, 2004, cited in Paik 2011, p. 235).

The Price of Disunity: The Case of Aligarh District

Aligarh district in western UP provides a startling example of the price the RPI paid for the breakdown of discipline and the emergence of factionalism. The electoral dominance established in Aligarh district by the RPI in 1962 was squandered away within a few years.

Maurya had recruited the support and services of Chandra Pal Shailani to organize the RPI in Aligarh. Shailani had been his student at AMU and prominent in university politics. He also came from a well-known family from Naurangabad mohalla in Sikandra Rao town where his father, Chaudhari Chunni Lal, had been a member of the municipal board. He also studied law at AMU where he met Maurya and began to work for the SCF. ¹⁶ In 1967, Shailani became the most spectacular casualty of disunity within the RPI.

Both major factions of the RPI in UP, as well as various other claimants, had sought to represent the official party in the 1967 election. One group obtained a high court injunction preventing any others using the name. As a result in the absence of an agreed candidate the nominees from contending camps were officially instructed they could only stand as independents and none could use the traditional and universally recognized elephant symbol (Government of India, Election Commission, pp. 35–36). In Aligarh the consequences were a chaotic rush and fight for approval as the official candidate and the right to use the RPI elephant symbol. In one assembly constituency (Koil) no less than four candidates claimed to be the official republican candidate. Their combined vote far exceeded that of the winning Jan Sangh candidate. In Aligarh city three claimants sought the official imprimatur but all were forced to stand as independents (Usmani, 1968, p. 70). Arguably Shailani was the most grievous electoral victim of the breakdown of Republican Party discipline. Shailani stood for the Lok Sabha from Hathras constituency but a leading member of the opposing Republican faction also contested taking away far more votes than Shailani’s losing margin. Without the rebel intervention Shailani would probably have been elected to the Lok Sabha by more than 10,000 votes. Even Shailani’s rival from the dissident RPI camp agreed that his intervention had been a disaster and claimed that he had only campaigned in two assembly segments and stopped working altogether after a ‘short period’. ¹⁷ Thus, the district that in 1962 had been the setting for the most successful republican campaign in the entire country had, by 1967, becomes the scene of an electoral rout as a result of the breakdown in communication and discipline.

Factionalism in the RPI

To deny that factionalism was rampant in the RPI would be to fly in the face of the evidence. However, the problem is that personalized factionalism is all too often deployed as the explanation of conflicts and disputes rather than utilized as a starting point for an analysis of their causes and contributory factors. Typical of this sort of approach was the opinion that the RPI was ‘riven by intense factionalism, which was most based on personal ambitions, jealousies and rivalries’ (Phadke, 1978, p. 28).

An examination of factional conflict at this time undoubtedly reveals individual animosity, cliques of followers cemented together with the patronage distributed by would be leaders and rivalry between groups showing all the signs of personalized factional conflict. It would, for example, be difficult to find anything other than personal ambition and rivalry surrounding the factional conflicts which followed Maurya’s attempt to have his wife nominated to the UP Legislative Council in 1964 (Rosenthal, 1970, p. 213). However, as one of the original contributions to the study of factionalism pointed out ‘an explanation of political alignments in terms of personal loyalties is really no explanation at all, but a description at best’ (Carras, 1972, p. 7). One does not have to accept totally the rather mechanical and economistic framework of factionalism that Carras proposes to see the value of her approach. Closer examination and analysis reveal the deeper roots of these disputes: the causes rather than the surface manifestations. Without doubt, the most common cause of factional strife in the RPI was the question of political collaboration and electoral alliances with other parties. Especially intense and acrimonious were debates about cooperation with the Congress.

The 1952 elections had been a disaster for the SCF and by late 1956, shortly before his death, Ambedkar had decided ‘he did not wish to see a repetition of that in 1957’ (Gokhale, 1993, p. 224). After a period of mourning the Working Committee of the SCF had met in April 1957 and decided to convene a general meeting of the party to consider a resolution to found the new party. H. D. Awole, General Secretary of the SCF, announced that the step was being taken to fulfil the wish of the late Dr Ambedkar. ¹⁸ The founding meeting was held on the 3 October 1957, at the site of Ambedkar’s conversion to Buddhism in Nagpur and was attended by more than 3,000 delegates who ratified a decision to found the RPI.

When Ambedkar had announced the establishment of the RPI, he had given a clear signal that he wished to move away from the earlier narrow communitarian strategy of the SCF. Ambedkar pointed out that the SCF, although it had created self-respect among the scheduled castes, at the same time it had raised a barrier between them and the rest of society. Although attempts had been made to build wider alliances across other oppressed groups, to create a wider alliance of the bahujan (majority), they usually had come to nothing. ¹⁹ Ambedkar was anxious to bring this state of affairs to an end and called for the formation of a party that could embrace those who had sympathy for the grievances of the scheduled castes. At the same time, he urged his followers to be prepared to work with the leaders of other communities and parties. He was painfully aware that previous strategies had paid very few electoral dividends:

Matters had come to such a pass that other people did not vote for the scheduled class candidates; nor did they themselves vote for the candidates of other parties. So they would have to form a party with the help of those who had sympathy for their grievances; and they should try to do work with the leaders of other communities. (Keer, 1971, pp. 502–503)

This solution seemed straightforward but Ambedkar had died before many of the detailed implications could be given proper consideration. What were the consequences for those communities on which the SCF had previously relied so heavily? What was the future relationship, for example, with the Mahars in western India and the Chamars and Jatavs in UP? Were there limits to the cooperation with other parties? A close relationship with Lohia’s socialists was one thing, but could an alliance even extend as far as the Congress party? Because these issues were not clarified, and particularly because Ambedkar had passed away before declaring a judgement on them, they carried the potential to be the source of endless disagreements and disputes in the future.

In 1957 the Ambedkarites, standing as the SCF, contested Bombay state as part of the alliance campaigning for a linguistic state of Maharashtra and achieved considerable success. By 1962 the pattern of electoral alliances had become more complicated and less advantageous to the RPI. In what had by now become Maharashtra, it performed very poorly. However, in western UP Maurya and his followers had fashioned electoral alliances and local coalitions that produced the best ever results. In elections there the RPI returned three MPs and eight MLAs.

However, the practice of seeking alliances came under immediate severe scrutiny and criticism. Even as Maurya was delivering his winning strategy, objections were raised locally against his cooperation with ‘Muslims and Congress’ that was attacked as his ‘personal policy’ and it was claimed it had been allowed only because he had established a ‘dictatorship’ within the party. ²⁰ Maurya admitted that some differences originated in no more than minor personal squabbles but then become amplified when they became embedded in factional differences about tactics and strategy. ²¹ The factional conflict in UP increased over time but had its origins primarily in, and was sustained by, disagreements, sometimes principled at other times merely tactical, about electoral alliances. The issue of cooperation with the Congress was the source of particularly deep divisions. Thus we find by the mid to late 1960s dissidents within the party resisting any moves to cooperate with the Congress and, for example, seeking to close down the city and district units in Meerut on the grounds they had been ‘hobnobbing’ with the Congress party. ²²

By the mid 1960s the leadership and particularly Gaikwad had begun to contemplate the possibility of more cooperation with Congress. At the fifth conference of the RPI in New Delhi in May 1966 Gaikwad confronted the question more openly than ever before. He announced that the party would be ready to ‘seek electoral alliances with all progressive parties including Congress’. ²³ Never before had the followers of Ambedkar officially considered cooperation with the Congress party so explicitly. The announcement immediately fuelled a major debate and those opposed to cooperation with the ruling party came together and claimed they had ‘expelled’ Gaikwad for his apostasy. ²⁴ The conflict intensified when the Republicans supporting Gaikwad did indeed forge their first-ever electoral pact with the Congress to contest the Zilla Parishad elections in Maharashtra in 1967. Gaikwad went to great lengths to defend this alliance and emphasized that with the ascendency of Indira Gandhi ‘the old Congress was no more’. ²⁵ Antagonism between the groupings increased and more litigation ensued until a split was announced. ²⁶ Even as hearings started at the Election Commission leading members were convinced that there would be no formal division of the party. ²⁷ Yet again the organizational capabilities of the party were inadequate and unable to rise to the occasion and deal with the dissent; within a few years no less than four rival Republican Parties existed (Gokhale, 1993, pp. 252–254).

The RPI and the Perils of Disorganization

The root of the problem for the RPI was that the party had never become an institutionalized and efficiently functioning organization. It failed to develop robust and respected mechanisms for conflict resolution or settling disputes. When disagreements arose there was simply no machinery to resolve them. The RPI proved unable to embed procedures for the resolution of differences within the party, or to establish a stable leadership after the death of Ambedkar. Because the party was so organizationally weak the question of succession was particularly troublesome. No single person could establish unchallenged leadership. As party workers remarked at the time ‘It is like brothers quarrelling over their inheritance. Each man is a little Ambedkar’ (Zelliot, 1966, p. 211). The result was that disputes about policy or strategy often led to splits in the party and endless recourse to the courts and legal judgements of the Election Commission in order to resolve the conflicts. When it had originally been decided to establish a new party the old leadership had appointed a committee headed by B. D. Khobragade to draw up a constitution. ²⁸ Yet it took nearly another two years merely to frame and ratify a new charter. The party was not even able to establish any sort of organizational coherence to allow it to finance its routine day-to-day activities. Disputes about funding and accusations about the misuse of funds became commonplace and a regular source of further divisive splintering. The general secretary reported to the fifth party conference in 1966 that the financial situation was dire, but he was ‘extremely sorry to mention that Central Office has received no contributions from the Pradesh units’ (RPI Report, 1966. p. 4). Such was the severity of party disintegration that the 1971 election manifesto openly acknowledged the disarray and admitted that the party profoundly regretted that some elements had ‘gone out of the Republican fold’ (RPI Manifesto, 1971, p. 2).

The reality, rarely acknowledged, was that Ambedkar himself had left a poor organizational legacy. He had little time for the niceties and detail of organization. The whole structure of his movement had more the characteristics of a moral crusade, to which the followers only needed to bring energy and devotion, than the attributes of a modern disciplined political party. To use the language of Max Weber, Ambedkar’s charismatic leadership had never become ‘routinized’ and succeeded by a more stable system of rational-legal authority. His style of leadership and his views on organizational structure left the party with no resources to deal with the inevitable crisis of leadership that followed his death. As his first serious (and sympathetic) biographer put it:

Ambedkar did not try to organize his political party on modern lines. He had no taste for individual organization. There were no regular annual conferences or general meetings of the organizations with which he was connected. Where and when he sat was the venue of conference and the time for decision. The President or the Secretary or the Working Committee had to fall in line with his arrangements. (Keer, 1971, p. 480)

Although the RPI proved an organizational failure, and the schisms multiplied as time went on, although its ventures into electoral politics were a complete disaster, its contribution to the development of Dalit politics should not be dismissed. It was the instrument by which the teachings of Ambedkar were kept alive immediately after he had died. The party provided the setting and the guidance for many who would later go on to serve Dalit welfare movements and political struggle with great distinction. There are many direct lines of descent and inheritance from the RPI to organizations like the Dalit Panthers, BAMCEF, DS4 and the BSP. The RPI, however, imperfectly, was the vehicle that enabled the later revival of Dalit politics and provided the continuity that led to the much more widespread phenomenon of ‘Ambedkarisation’ (Singh, 1998, p. 2611) in subsequent decades. The next generation spread the message of Ambedkar much more widely and the ‘1980s saw Ambedkarite mobilizations reach areas where the RPI and the Dalit Panthers had previously had little if any impact’ (Jaoul, 2006, p. 193).

Nor should we forget the contribution made by the likes of Hoti Lal Pipal who toiled away at 15 Janpath for so long keeping the Dalit cause alive. Sadly Hoti Lal Pipal passed away in November 2014 at the age of 88. But not before he had been presented in 2012 with the Dr Ambedkar Ratna award by the Chief Minister of Delhi. It was the recognition of his life-long service to the Dalit cause.