Ambedkar and RSS-BJP: How and why the Sangh began to invoke the Dalit icon

On Wednesday, as the Opposition demanded Shah’s sacking from the government, the Prime Minister pushed back, accusing the Congress and its “rotten ecosystem” of indulging in “every possible dirty trick to obliterate the legacy of Dr Ambedkar”.

Historically, how has the BJP and its ideological fount, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), related to the personality and ideas of Ambedkar?

How did the RSS begin to engage with Babasaheb’s ideas?

Several decades after the RSS was formed in 1925, two major incidents came as a setback to the organisation’s foundational commitment to “unite” Hindus.

The first was the large-scale conversion of Dalits led by Ambedkar. On Vijayadashami day in 1956, as the RSS Sarsanghchalak delivered his traditional annual address to swayamsewaks in Nagpur’s Reshambagh, in Deekshabhoomi, in another part of the city, Ambedkar embraced Buddhism along with nearly half a million followers.

But it wasn’t until another 25 years later, after the Meenakshipuram incident of 1981, when hundreds of lower caste Hindus in Tirunelveli district of Tamil Nadu converted to Islam, that the RSS began invoking Ambedkar and Dalits.

What happened after the Tamil Nadu conversions?

Rattled by lower-caste Hindus leaving their religion to become Muslims, the RSS (whose leadership had been dominated by Brahmins) began to organise Hindu Samagams or gatherings at various places.

One such event was held in 1982 in Bangalore, where thousands of uniformed swayamsewaks are said to have declared, “Hindavah sahodarah sarve (All Hindus are brothers).”

The following year, at a function in Maharashtra on April 14, the RSS marked the birthdays of both Ambedkar and K B Hedgewar, the founder of the RSS. (In 1983, Ambedkar’s birth anniversary by the Roman calendar coincided with Hedgewar’s by the Hindu calendar.)

The RSS then sought to build on that symbolism by taking out a Phule-Ambedkar yatra covering all of Maharashtra over 45 days.

In 1989, the centenary year of Hedgewar’s birth, under Sarsanghchalak Balasaheb Deoras and sarkaryawah H V Sheshadri, every RSS shakha was asked to run at least one education centre in Dalit localities in its area. This was followed by the establishment of sewa vibhags in the RSS to take care of such activities.

Then, in 1990, the RSS marked the centenary year of Ambedkar and the Dalit reformer Jyotiba Phule. The Akhil Bharatiya Pratinidhi Sabha (ABPS), the highest decision-making body of the RSS, passed a resolution saying, “These two great leaders dealt deadly blows to the evil practices and conventions prevailing in Hindu society, and…successfully persuaded Hindu society to do away with all the injustices it had perpetrated on its own members.”

Did the BJP gain from the RSS’s Dalit outreach?

The BJP was not able to derive much political mileage from the RSS’s wooing of Dalits, who remained a vote bank that the BJP struggles to win even today.

The emergence of Dalit leaders such as Kanshi Ram and Mayawati in Uttar Pradesh, and Ram Vilas Paswan in Bihar meant that the BJP remained trapped in its image of an upper-caste party.

However, as the BJP worked to expand its social base, it continued to make efforts to reach out to Dalits. In UP, it sought to counter Mulayam Singh Yadav by aligning with Mayawati in 1995, and supported her as Chief Minister.

During the 2015 Assembly elections in Bihar, the party got Paswan and Jitan Ram Manjhi on its side. After coming to power at the Centre, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has repeatedly invoked Ambedkar.