There is a long way to go before the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh (UP) can become “Uttam Pradesh” (a better place) — as Prime Minister Narendra Modi had promised after his party’s massive victory in the assembly elections.
The recent caste violence in Saharanpur and the gang rape and murder on a highway near Bulandshahr have followed the depredations of the love jihad and anti-Romeo squads and the Allahabad High Court’s intervention in favour of the Muslim meat traders when it told Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath’s government to issue licences to the abattoirs that it had summarily shut down.
The government’s crackdown on the slaughterhouses, on the grounds that many of them were unlicensed, was seen as a step specifically aimed at the Muslim community that has been traditionally associated with the industry. The high court, however, said that a “check on unlawful activity should be simultaneous with facilitating the carrying of lawful activity, particularly that relating to food, food habits and vending thereof that is undisputedly connected with the right to life and livelihood”.
But even as meat is again available in Lucknow and other cities and there has been a marginal decline in the targeting of those involved in inter-faith romances, an even greater challenge has emerged for the law-enforcing authorities in the caste conflicts between Dalits (people of lower caste) and Thakurs (upper caste) in the Saharanpur area of UP.
The fact that chief minister Adityanath himself is a Thakur hasn’t helped in restoring amity between the two communities, especially when overzealous officials told the Mushahars, another Dalit group, to wash themselves with soap and use deodorants before Adityanath visited their Mainpur Kot village in Kushinagar district. A similar incident occurred when Adityanath visited the home of a martyred BSF jawan, when an air-conditioner was temporarily installed and a sofa put in place during the visit.
Together with the violence in Saharanpur, these incidents have caused a further strain in India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) relations with the Dalits, which suffered a major setback when a bright Dalit scholar, Rohith Vemula, committed suicide in Hyderabad Central University in January last year, following skirmishes between his group, the Ambedkar Students’ Association, and the BJP’s student wing, Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad.
There was a further blow to the BJP’s outreach to Dalits when the gau rakshaks (cow vigilantes) lynched a group of Dalits for skinning a cow, their traditional occupation, in Una, Gujarat.
The fallout of these incidents has been the emergence of a new generation of Dalit leaders like the 30-year-old lawyer, Chandrashekhar Azad “Ravan”, who led the so-called Bhim Army (named after the Dalit icon, Babasaheb Bhimrao Ambedkar) for protests against the Saharanpur violence in Delhi’s Jantar Mantar. Apart from anything else, his call for a Dalit-Muslim-backward caste alliance against the BJP aims at undercutting Modi’s tactic of bringing the non-Jatav Dalits and non-Yadav backward castes to the BJP’s fold, which yielded handsome dividends for the party in the UP assembly election by leaving only the Jatavs and Yadavs with Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) leader and former chief minister Mayawati and Samajwadi Party (SP) leader and former chief minister Akhilesh Yadav, respectively, thereby fracturing the Dalit and OBC vote banks of the BSP and SP.
Irrespective of how politically successful will be young idealists like “Ravan” and Jignesh Mevani, who led the Dalit protests against the Una floggings, they appear to have succeeded so far in at least sidelining established leaders like Mayawati, who no longer seem to be able to reach out to the youths in the community.
For the BJP, the worry will be that its hope of showcasing UP as a model state, especially where law and order and the safety of women are concerned, may come a cropper. Already a minister, Suresh Khanna, has said that the state is too big to ensure “zero crime”, which can nullify the party’s charges against the previous government.
The expectation that Adityanath will live up to his reputation of being tough has been nullified up to now, even as the Dalit-Thakur violence has reinforced the BJP’s image as an upper caste party.
While the Muslims initially bore the brunt of saffron aggression, it is the Dalits who now have reasons to be aggrieved. The fairly large gathering at Jantar Mantar showed how members of the community from states other than UP have become agitated over the Saharanpur incidents.
The possibility, therefore, of an incipient Dalit-Muslim-backward caste combine being formed cannot be ruled out. Moreover, the fact that such an alliance will not be a quiescent one is evident from the flaunting of epithets like the Great Chamar, a previously pejorative term that has now become a badge of honour.
For the BJP, the developments in UP have cast a shadow over the third anniversary celebrations of its assumption of office at the Centre. It is obvious that the party simply cannot afford to alienate yet another community, the Dalits, when the Muslims may have already distanced themselves even further from the party in the wake of the ghar wapsi (homecoming) and love jihad campaigns by the saffron brotherhood, aimed at making them “return” to Hinduism and against Hindu-Muslim affairs and marriages.
— IANS
Amulya Ganguli is a political analyst.
