Dalit Movement and Bahujan Samajwadi Party

Indian social system is influenced by Dharmashastras, which establishes the Chaturvarna Ashram system created by Brahmins and Kshatriyas. Any social movement 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. it is 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 meagre and these movements vapourised 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 scholarship on Dalit and Dalit movements relied heavily on the concepts of 'relative deprivation', 'sanskritization' and 'social mobility'. Sociologists finds that it is possible to discern the dominant ideological currents of Dalit movements and there are different trends in this domain to study these movements. Gopal Guru, in his article Dalit Movement in Mainstream Sociology (1993), talks about the 'liberal trend' in the study of Dalit movements. He finds sociologists like M. S. A. Rao, Barbara Joshi, Harold Issac, Owen Lynch, James Silverberg, Sachidanand, Anil Bhatt, Singer and Cohen, Nanduram and Patwardhan are relating relative deprivation as the major frame of reference for discussion on the emergence of reform, protest and movement among the dalits(1993: 570). These studies suggests that dalits suffer from relative deprivation because their attempts to attain higher status or to overcome relative deprivation is restricted by the caste groups of higher status. Here the reference group is upper caste groups which are still socially dominant in some regions of the country. However, the articulation of relative deprivation among the dalits might happen with reference to westernized middle class dalits from within the same social situation. Therefore, Oommen states that the deprivation among Dalits is multi faceted(1990: 255).

Social mobility and relative deprivation can provide the picture of social reality of a certain phase of historical juncture when Indian Society was transforming itself from feudal ethos to modern ethos based on mental imagery of rationalisation and logic. In this phase, if Dalits were restricted to achieve the status then the path of protest movement were taken like in 1930s in Maharashtra, Dalits challenged the feudal ethos through “Sanskritization”. This attempt to imitate upper castes values among Mahars of Maharashtra contributed to the development of negative consciousness(Guru 1993: 570) which according to Gramsci “may not constitute a mature and fully developed class consciousness”. Gramsci argues that the lower classes, historically on the defensive, can only achieve self-awareness of the identity and class limits of their enemy(Guha 1983: 20). Therefore, Ranjit Guha says that only attacking the material symbols of government and landlords authority can upset the established order as the sanskritising movements are fraught with danger by higher castes and they try to counter all the attempts made by Dalits. Also, the present scenario of total marginalisation of rural Dalits, Hinduisation of dalit masses and the crisis of Indian welfare state questions the theoretical validity of relative deprivation both as conceptualisation and as a form of consciousness(Guru 1993: 571).

Structural approaches to social movements covers an enormous terrain that takes us from questions about the nature and causes of inequality to the creation of social groupings to the causes of institutional change(Smith and Fetner 2010: 13). The role of state in the redistribution of resources allows groups to mobilise and articulate grievances and organize in support of social change goals. Two concepts that have emerged from what is largely a state-centric body social movements research—political contexts and mobilizing structures—provide useful analytical tools for helping scholars analyze the ways states and other actors and structures shape social movement dynamics. The idea of 'political context' talks about the ways in which formal political institution and informal alignments of relevant political actors forms the prospects for relatively powerless groups to effectively challenge the existing order. This context is shaped mostly by the temporal dimension as favourable political conditions of a certain time and openness of democratic system and division among the elites are the main conditions for this. As Charles Tilly (1978) argues that if the windows of opportunity for access to political system is open then the social movements are likely to emerge. Dough McAdam’s (1982) “Political Process Model” of social movement emergence and decline says that shifts in the structure of political opportunities promote the expansion of social protest and the emergence of social movements.

After Indian Independence in 1947, Indian constitution adopted provisions for social justice and also laws to maintain equality and equity in the society. Ambedkar also joined the interim government and called for social struggle through democratic methods. In his letter to the people, which was published after his death in 1958, the principles of democracy were elaborated and he called for Republican Party of India to aim at a society which is free from oppression and exploitation of one class from another (Morkhandikar 1990: 586). The whole letter is written with a belief in liberal democracy, and its principles like rule of law, equality of opportunity, and freedom of individual as a goal and state as a means to achieve that goal. Therefore, he called for 'democratisation of democracy' which is also seen in the work Untouchable Citizens: Dalit Movement and Democratisation in Tamil Nadu of Hugo Gorringe. Gorringe(2005) gives three arguments in support of his work and the first is dalits were deprived of basic rights in Tamil Nadu and how their movement is asserting pride, dignity and honour and although poverty among dalits is one of the constraints for their mobilisation. Second is how dalits have put pressure on non-Brahmin parties like Dravid Munnetra Kargham to accept the fact that Dalits are main oppressed in the caste system and third is Dalit political activism is reconfiguring the political system by contributing to 'deepening of Indian democracy”.

So, Post-Ambedkar phase of Dalit politics gave thrust for democratic politics and inclusion of Dalits in the political system of the country. The system for electing representatives from constituencies in the India is “First-Past-the-post”, in which, candidate getting the highest number of votes are chosen as winner. So, Indian democracy became the 'number game' and groups started to assert their dominance in the political arena. Christophe Jaffrelot calls the rise of other backward Castes as 'silent revolution'. In Uttar Pradesh, Kanshiram tried to mobilize dalits under one identity and later on this social engineering resulted Dalit chief minister in the state. The BSP's first step in the politics was establishment of an “independent dalit political leadership” instead of a “dependent political leadership”(Kumar 2003a). Other political parties which were also taking the cause of dalit emancipation had high caste leadership and a politics of patronage was visible in the working of this movement. The formation of “independent dalit political leadership” made these parties strategies for garnering dalit votes redundant.

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 subsequents election 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 hierarchied 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.

The victory of BSP in the elections were projected by media as the victory of the coalition of Brahmin and Dalits but the moot question was why Brahmins of UP supported BSP ? Vivek Kumar finds that when Brahmins became sure of the victory of BSP then they supported and BSP accepted this support to increase the base of their ideological campaign. This coalition of Brahmin and Dalits was further improved by Mayawati in the subsequent elections. She gave more number of tickets to Brahmins in the subsequent elections and also organized the “Brahmin Maha Rally” on June 9, 2005. Mostly, she tried to get the support of poor people in upper castes. Also, BSP got some support base in Muslim population of UP. BSP always tried to bring out minority in its definition of “Bahujan”.

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. The case made by Ambedkar through conversion of all identities into one “Buddhist” identity could have played better role in the mobilization process of dalits.