05-11-2007, 09:27 PM
<b>The victory of caste arithmetic</b><!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->That confrontation was always a bit artificial in the context of Uttar Pradesh. <b>Anyone who goes down to the grassroots finds that the Dalits' real battle was not with the upper castes as much as with the 'Other Backward Castes'.</b>
This is a point that was grasped very early on by the late Kanshi Ram, founder of the Bahujan Samaj Party. (We were friends for decades, going back to a time when the Bahujan Samaj Party had not yet been founded.) And he discussed his long-term plans with me a couple of times.
Kanshi Ram put it very simply.<b> The landless labourer, he said, would never be accepted as a partner in power by the middle castes, the OBCs, that had come to the forefront as the owners of the land.</b> The Dalits could not come to power on their own, no matter that they constituted roughly 25 per cent of the population. It thus made sense to join hands with the Brahmins, using that term as a shorthand for all those at the very top of the caste hierarchy.
Mayawati's antipathy for Mulayam Singh Yadav is famous, but it would not matter even if the latter were one of the former's rakhi brothers. The bedrock of the Samajwadi Party is the Yadav sub-caste, the dominant OBC group in Uttar Pradesh. The natural constituencies of the Samajwadi Party and the Bahujan Samaj Party were always going to clash.
Kanshi Ram's plans called for forging the Dalits into a coherent formation as a first step. Once the Bahujan Samaj Party was certain of its Dalit votebank, it was time for the second step, namely the alliance with the upper castes.
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To paraphrase a quotation famous in French history, this was not just a crime, it was a blunder. <b>It left the upper castes, traditional supporters of the party, with the impression that the BJP was working hand in hand with the Samajwadi Party. This was to prove costly for the BJP given the caste politics of Uttar Pradesh.</b>
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This is a point that was grasped very early on by the late Kanshi Ram, founder of the Bahujan Samaj Party. (We were friends for decades, going back to a time when the Bahujan Samaj Party had not yet been founded.) And he discussed his long-term plans with me a couple of times.
Kanshi Ram put it very simply.<b> The landless labourer, he said, would never be accepted as a partner in power by the middle castes, the OBCs, that had come to the forefront as the owners of the land.</b> The Dalits could not come to power on their own, no matter that they constituted roughly 25 per cent of the population. It thus made sense to join hands with the Brahmins, using that term as a shorthand for all those at the very top of the caste hierarchy.
Mayawati's antipathy for Mulayam Singh Yadav is famous, but it would not matter even if the latter were one of the former's rakhi brothers. The bedrock of the Samajwadi Party is the Yadav sub-caste, the dominant OBC group in Uttar Pradesh. The natural constituencies of the Samajwadi Party and the Bahujan Samaj Party were always going to clash.
Kanshi Ram's plans called for forging the Dalits into a coherent formation as a first step. Once the Bahujan Samaj Party was certain of its Dalit votebank, it was time for the second step, namely the alliance with the upper castes.
...................
To paraphrase a quotation famous in French history, this was not just a crime, it was a blunder. <b>It left the upper castes, traditional supporters of the party, with the impression that the BJP was working hand in hand with the Samajwadi Party. This was to prove costly for the BJP given the caste politics of Uttar Pradesh.</b>
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