Kanshi Ram in a seller’s market

Former Prime Minister Chandra Shekhar with friends Devi Lal and Om Prakash Chautala represented the Samajwadi Janata Party (SJP). Bharatiya Kisan Kamgar Party chief Ajit Singh was there. Even Prime Minister I.K. Gujral turned up, knowing fully well that he would be rubbing his United Front (UF) colleague, Defence Minister Mulayam Singh Yadav the wrong way. If the BJP leaders didn’t turn up, it was only because they prefer to do their political dealings in the dark.

His proven unreliability as an ally has not deterred his suitors. Even those whom he has jilted repeatedly. In Uttar Pradesh, BSP fought the 1993 Assembly elections in alliance with Mulayam’s Samajwadi Party and the 1996 Assembly elections with P.V. Narasimha Rao’s Congress. It also shared power with the BJP in 1995 and 1997. In Punjab, the BSP contested the 1995 Assembly elections in alliance with Shiromani Akali Dal (Badal) only to ditch it in the 1996 Lok Sabha elections in preference to Akali Dal (Mann).

And Kanshi Ram is not shy of being branded an opportunist. In fact, he makes a virtue out of it. “We are an opportunist party,” he bluntly told scribes in Raipur last week. “We want to benefit from every opportunity which gives the Bahujan Samaj Party an opportunity to share power.”

One of the BSP slogans explains the importance of being Kanshi Ram: “Duniya ki mazboori hai/ Kanshi Ram zaroori hai (It is everyone’s compulsion because they need him.”)

There is no doubt that the vote-bank of Kanshi Ram’s BSP is unwavering and, seemingly ever-expanding. Formed in 1985, unlike the earlier Ambedkarite formations like the Scheduled Caste Federation and the Republican Party of India (RPI), the BSP has forged a distinct identity in Uttar Pradesh and parts adjoining Madhya Pradesh, Haryana and Punjab (see chart).

In Uttar Pradesh, which forms its core command area, the BSP’s vote share in the electoral arena has grown by nearly 150 per cent during the 1989-1996 period and the party has tasted power during two short stints in 1995 and 1997 with the help of the BJP.

What makes Kanshi Ram particularly attractive to political suitors is the near total `transferability’ of his support base to his electoral allies. This was proved in the 1996 assembly elections when the BSP allied with the Congress. In the 1996 Lok Sabha elections, when Congress went alone and contested all the 85 seats, the party could win only five seats (6 per cent of the total) and its vote share in Uttar Pradesh worked out to a meagre 8 per cent.

In the Assembly elections held a few months later, the Congress contested only 125 of the 425 assembly seats in alliance with the BSP. It won one out of every three seats it contested“It was like a miracle,” a grateful Uttar Pradesh Congress leader said after the last Assembly polls. “In the Lok Sabha elections our candidates had lost their security deposits in 70 of the 85 seats we contested. In the Assembly polls, Congress didn’t forfeit its security in any of the 125 seats.”

In terms of commitment to the organisation, Kanshi Ram’s BSP is somewhat akin to cadre-based outfits like the Communists and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). Sections of the Communists had partially succeeded in bolstering Indira Gandhi’s Congress Party in the late Sixties and the RSS tacitly supported Indira Gandhi in the early Eighties when Atal Behari Vajpayee sang the swan song of Gandhian socialism during the rebirth of the erstwhile Bharatiya Jana Sangh as the BJP.

However, unlike the Communists and the RSS, Kanshi Ram’s BSP is not committed to any specific socio-economic or cultural agenda. It is obsessed with the theme of Dalit empowerment and is ready to try any permutation and combination to grab political power.

One reason for its preoccupation with power is that the BSP grew out of an all India trade union of lower-middle class government employees called the Backward and Minority Community Employees Federation in 1978, which later broadened its social base in rural areas with the formation of the Dalit Soshit Samaj Sangharsh Samiti in 1982.

No doubt Kanshi has combined the three mobilisational strategies to build up the BSP. But the nucleus around which he formed the organisation was provided by the Dalits of the Jatav or Kureel castes which went under the derogatory epithet of `Chamars’ earlier. The Uttar Pradesh Jatavs, incidentally, account for 46 per cent of the total Jatav population in India and this explains why the BSP’s growth in this State has been phenomenal.

Apart from the Indo-Gangetic plains of Uttar Pradesh and Bundelkhand, the jatavs are also the first- ranking scheduled caste in parts of Madhya Pradesh, Punjab, Haryana, Delhi and parts of Bihar and Rajasthan.

Socio-cultural movements like Radha Soami Satsang and Adi Dharma (UP, Punjab and Haryana) and Satnami sect (Madhya Pradesh) in the late 19th century had awakened sections of Dalits. Sections of these Dalits were also attracted towards Amedkarism in the 1940s and later joined the RPI.

By using the lower-middle Dalit bureaucracy whose ranks swelled during post-Independence job reservations as a tool, Kanshi Ram sowed the seeds of militant Dalitism during the Eighties when the Dalits were coming out of the Congress Party’s protective umbrella. BSP’s two stints in power in Uttar Pradesh showed the Dalits that power can be grabbed through selective deployment of a consolidated Dalit vote bank, Kanshi Ram is now all set to reap the harvest. It also demonstrated how power could be used to accelerate the process of Ambedkarisation.

Given the inherently unstable social configuration of political forces in India, the days ahead are full of promise for Kanshi Ram and his BSP. Despite his ideological and political somersaults, Kanshi Ram will be in a seller’s market after 1998 the Lok Sabha polls.

But his de-ideologised thrust for power through electoral channels also makes the BSP essentially a party of establishment, a status quoist party. This makes the BSP leadership comprising the new Dalit elite vulnerable to the country’s ruling elite. No wonder, while Kanshi Ram’s rank-and-file supporters have stayed with him, his BSP leaders have deserted him time and again for spoils of power. In Uttar Pradesh, the BSP leadership split up thrice during the 1993-95 period of the SP-BSP bonhomie. And recently, Kalyan Singh has weaned away 12 BSP legislators to remain in power after the break-up of the BSP-BJP tie-up.