Bihar Polls: Asaduddin Owaisi’s unreal project

The All India Majlis-e-Ittehad-ul-Muslimeen (AIMIM) chief Asaduddin Owaisi, who has been known to describe Ambedkar as a leader greater than Mahatma Gandhi, recently claimed that like in Telangana and Maharashtra, his party is launching similar efforts to form an alliance of Dalits and Muslims in poll-bound Bihar.

Owaisi’s electoral project throws up the pertinent question whether Bihar indeed has any space for such a socio-political coalition of Muslims and Dalits. Remember that the Dalits of Bihar, unlike in the case of Uttar Pradesh, have never reposed full faith in any leader from their own community. Not even in the former deputy prime minister, Jagjivan Ram, the youngest minister in the first Jawaharlal Nehru cabinet. Ram failed to emerge as a mass Dalit leader in his home state, Bihar, during the heyday of the Congress when Scheduled Castes tended to blindly vote for the Grand Old Party. For nearly three and a half decades, Jagjivan Ram held various important portfolios; yet he could hardly advance Dalit politics after Independence. Many political observers believed that Ram was inducted in the cabinet by the first Prime Minister only to serve as a counter-point to Ambedkar.

After the decline of the Congress, Dalit votes in Bihar gradually started disintegrating. Though in the early 1990s, Lalu Prasad and Nitish Kumar in their early years did succeed in attracting a sizeable section of Dalits to their fold. The Left parties, especially the CPI(ML), also managed to carve out their own votebank among Dalits. It may be conjectured that Lalu and Nitish could initially register some impact on this community only because they could work for them as heads of state. In contrast, Ram Vilas Paswan, who never made it to the chief minister’s post, was driven into joining hands with other parties to survive politically.

In such a situation, can Majlis successfully woo Bihar’s Dalits who, up till now, have not responded to such rallying calls issued even by veteran Dalit leaders like Kanshi Ram and Mayawati? Apart from Ravidas or cobblers –– who, unlike in UP, do not constitute such a sizeable community in Bihar, none of the other Dalit sub-castes have leaned towards the Bahujan Samaj Party in Bihar. Mayawati and Kanshi Ram did succeed in emerging as Dalit leaders in Uttar Pradesh, even though they were not born in that state. Kanshi Ram was born in Punjab’s Ropar and Mayawati in New Delhi. Both made Uttar Pradesh their ‘karambhoomi’ — site of work — in 1983.

In contrast, apart from paying lip-service, the Majlis, during the long 87-years of its existence, has failed to reach out to Dalits even in Owaisi’s home turf of Telangana. Neither has the organisation been able to mark its presence in Maharashtra, the state famous for the Dalit movement since the time of Ambedkar. In last October’s assembly election, the Majlis put up candidates in Muslim-dominated pockets of Maharashtra, especially in the region which was part of the erstwhile Nizam state, but it bypassed Vidarbha despite its sizeable Dalit population. Vidarbha is the site where, in 1956, thousands of Dalits converted to Buddhism under the leadership of Ambedkar. Consider that the Majlis has seven MLAs in Telangana and two in Maharashtra. But not a single one of them is Dalit; nor is there any Dalit representation in the Majlis leadership. 

Why then would Dalits respond to Owaisi’s call in Bihar, especially when Lok Janshakti Party (LJP), the outfit led by the tallest Dalit leader of the state, Ram Vilas Paswan, managed to secure only 6.4 per cent votes in last year’s Lok Sabha election. Remember that the LJP contested the elections in an alliance with the Bharatiya Janata Party and Rashtriya Lok Samata Party in Bihar. That it could win six out of the seven parliamentary seats it contested in 2014 was largely because more BJP votes got transferred to the LJP and not the other way round.

Let’s now consider some hard statistics. In Bihar, Scheduled Castes constitute 15.72% of the population. The largest Dalit party, the LJP in the last Lok Sabha polls could not get even half of this percentage of votes. Not to mention that then LJP was riding the Narendra Modi wave. According to a post-poll study, 68 per cent of Dussadhs or Paswans, the caste Ram Vilas Paswan belongs to, had voted for the National Democratic Alliance in 2014. At around 4% of the population, the Paswans happen to be numerically, socially, educationally as well as economically, the strongest of the 22 Dalit castes. 

Given that the LJP has more often than not contested elections in alliance with different parties, it’s difficult to assess the party’s independent electoral strength. Yet it can be said that Paswan, the LJP leader, can at best be considered the undisputed leader of Dussadhs, and not the entire Dalit community of Bihar. 

Without any representation in the Bihar assembly, the LJP remains a minor player in the state’s electoral politics despite Bihar’s large Dalit population. The reason why the BJP this time has allotted a chunk of 41 seats to the LJP is because Dussadhs, known for their political aggression, could become an expedient electoral constituency in countering Yadavs in their strongholds. 

It’s important to remember that the political capability of another Dalit leader Jitan Ram Manjhi has not yet been tested. Not appearing to be too confident of Manjhi, the BJP has left just 20 seats for his outfit, the Hindustani Awam Morcha. The truth is that Manjhi was never really considered to be a Dalit leader till he became the Chief Minister, thanks to Nitish Kumar. Out of the 15 legislators — 13 MLAs and two MLCs — who have aligned with Manjhi, only one is a Dalit.

If such well-known Dalit faces have electorally failed in Bihar to make a real difference, how can Majlis — with no base whatsoever even among Muslims — dream of successfully wooing them?

Besides, Dalit politics is riddled with contradictions. Ram Vilas Paswan has prevented Mayawati from encroaching on his support base. Now he is not letting Manjhi, who represents Mushahars, the most backward of all Dalit castes, advance politically. Thus Owaisi’s somewhat unreal idea of forging an electorally effective Dalit-Muslim alliance can at best be described as a pipedream.

The author is a senior journalist