Pages

Friday, October 3, 2014

Dalit Movement and Bahujan Samaj Party



Indian social system is influenced by Dharamshahstras, which call for the Chaturvarnashram system created by Brahmins and Kshhatriyas. Any social movements defines opposition classes or groups, generally exploiter and exploited but dalit movement is based against the classical notion of “purity and pollution” and the notion of purity and pollution comes from the individual’s birth in a family i.e., totally ascriptive in nature. Dalit movements challenge it as Periyar challenged the Brahminical hegemony in cultural, social, religious and political spheres. challenging the Brahminical notion of hierarchy was the first step in Dalit movements through Temple Entry Movement, social justice movement etc. These movements talked for the enforcement of freedom, justice, liberty in the place of ritualistic traditional system where humans are deprived of basic rights to live decent life. Therefore, these movements were giving the model for alternate society based on ‘modern’ and rational values and end the oppressive social order and establish a new social order based on libertarian values.


The movement for the emancipation of Dalits in india in the early phase of modern India was started by social reformers like Raja Rammohan Roy, Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar and others but the reach of these movements were very meager and these movements vaporized very rapidly. Generally, dalit movements can be arranged in two paradigms; first Ambedkar era Movement and Post Ambedkar era movement. Ambedkar tried to bring the ‘dalit’ question at the centre stage of freedom movements. The communal award of 1932 and subsequent revision in it after Mahatma Gandhi’s fast paved the way for more fruitful political actions. The main impetus in Dalit Movement came after the independence when democratic processes took the centre stage of Indian polity and group action became more prominent strategy to achieve the goal.

The Bahujan Samaj Party under the leadership of Kanshiram has brought the most significant change in the psyche of dalit masses by providing umbrella identity, futuristic visions, myths, social ideology and political strategy to become one of the most significant player in the game of power politics in contemporary India (Kumar, 2002, Page 168-69). The politics of Kanshiram had deep philosophical imprints of previous dalit movements and he understood dalits as a community which is racially subjugated, economically exploited, culturally marginalised and politically untouchable in the realms of power. Therefore, his strategy was to capture power from elites to emancipate dalits as Jaffrelot(2006) has put in his work. As a torchbearer in Ambedkarite social struggle in the political arena of contemporary india, he gave the idea of revolution on the basis of social engineering. He coined the term “bahujan” and made it one of the most imaginative political categories. Bahujan identity is the political alliance between the politically deprived castes of Indian history under the leadership of most deprived caste group i.e. “dalits”. It profess through the meta narrative of “guru-killi” that it is the master key to end all the exploitation and made “dalitness” the core value of the party.

The victory in subsequent elections in UP have shown the reach of the idea of Bahujan among the deprived communities of modern India and it also showed that they are second to none of any political outfits. The victory had a revolutionary spirit to change the political power game in the other parts of the country. But, this movement after some time turned into petite-bourgeois politics and these were the results of the limitations inherent in most of the dalit movements. The BSP was successful in providing leadership to multi-caste, multi-religious political alliance but lacked in providing social milieu for dalits in the state. The political socialisation of dalits had limited impact on their social conditions. A critical examination of Dalit movements shows that most of these movement’s are antagonistic to each other and that is one of the reason why the strategy was not able to convert itself to any potential outputs.The politics of caste is carried out with the baggages of the paste and if we create a imaginative category where multiple caste groups are its members then the problem starts with the unequal baggage of the history with different caste groups and give birth to conflict among them. The notion of purity and pollution has added hierarchy in the society in such a way that the quality and quantity of exploitation is different for different caste groups depending on their social position spatially and temporally.

Therefore, BSP was able to provide political leadership by displacing political elites but it could not transform its movement in the direction of transformation of social status of dalits. The capturing of power in politics in India requires alliances from other caste group based parties, which are, generally, against the whole ethos of dalit movements. Such alliances, under the power, does not remain under one caste group and but remains under many additional power blocks with a capacity to bargain. Thus, Political power face strong challenge from the “civil society” in the transformation to ideal socio-political order.Political socialisation is the first step to gain inputs from society about the needs of the people. Political, social, and economic domains are interconnected public paradigm and through political socialisation, the state can understand the needs and aspirations of the society. These needs should be evaluated on rational basis to provide social justice to every individual of the society.

These political alliances in Mayawati reign destroyed the basic question of dalit emancipation and subalternity of the dalit movement. In order to regain power in the state, She gave a new imaginative community of “sarvjan” where antagonistic castes came under one umbrella and the “dalitness” of the movement lost its imperative. The political culture in the state of UP, ridden by a conservative, orthodox and regressive social practices, converted leaders to ‘new’ political elites. Brahminism is not only the attribute of certain castes; in contemporary India, it also became the attribute of certain class. The neo-buddhist movement, therefore, wanted to create a secular, alternative community identity so that the antagonistic trends in Dalit movements can be discarded and annihilation of caste becomes possible.


No comments: