#dnaEdit: Wooing Dalits

One of the intriguing factors of the results of the 11 assembly bypoll results in Uttar Pradesh last week was about the Dalit vote. The Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) did not field candidates in this round of electoral contest. The BJP had won just three of those seats, while the Samajwadi Party (SP) had won the rest. The question then is: did the Dalit/BSP vote go to the SP then? The BSP did not win any of the 80 seats from the state. But the BJP leaders acknowledged that the Dalit vote went to the BSP, and it was not split as had happened with the traditional voters of the SP, the Congress and other parties. In some ways, Mayawati and her party have then resisted the BJP tidal wave.

It is a well-known fact that the BJP is keen to get the whole of the Hindu vote, cutting across the caste divide. As a matter of fact, one of the claims made by party patriarch LK Advani was that his Somnath-to-Ayodhya yatra was meant to keep the Hindu society in the face of the Mandal challenge, which was seen as an attempt to accentuate caste divisions. So, it should not come as a surprise that the BJP is keen to get on board the Scheduled Caste (SC) and Scheduled Tribe (ST) voters. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) has been reaching out to the STs in Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Gujarat and Maharashtra through the Vanvasi Kalyan Ashrams. The RSS argument has been that the tribes are part of the Hindu society and they figure prominently in the epics, Ramayana and Mahabharata. 

While the BJP is looking for ways to connect with the Dalit section, the RSS is doing its own bit to reach out to the most oppressed section of Hindu society. While the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), a RSS affiliate, has been working in different parts of the country, facilitating Dalit participation in temple festivals in the rural areas, there is now an attempt to construct a narrative that shows the Dalits of today to have been placed at the higher end of the caste hierarchy before the arrival of the ‘Muslim invaders’. Bizay Sonkar Shastri, a BJP member of Lok Sabha from UP and part of the panel of party spokespersons, has come out with a three-volume work, trying to show that the Muslim conquerors had demeaned some the ruling caste members by pushing them into menial jobs, and that this was the origin of the Dalits. The attempt qualifies to be called pseudo-history because Shastri uses Sanskrit texts with references to castes and shows how spelling errors in them had occluded the higher caste status of the Dalit sections. He seems to overlook the many references to the Panchama or the fifth caste in the Sanskrit texts which were written at least 500 years before the arrival of the Turks in the 12th century of the Common Era (CE). 

Whatever its lack of historical veracity, it is clear that the RSS feels compelled to re-integrate the SCs and the STs into what they consider to be mainstream Hindu society. The BJP as a political party has come to realise the importance of an inclusive society. The difference between the RSS and the BJP over inclusiveness remains. The RSS views the Christians in the case of STs, and the Muslims in the case of the SCs, as the ideological enemy.

The BJP, on its part, would want to include Christians and Muslims as well. But the rhetorical emphasis seems to be going wrong somewhere.