The trap at the centre

As the BSP inches closer to the political centre, it risks diluting its message for its core constituency. Mayawati8217;s attack on Rahul Gandhi must be seen in this context

The birth anniversary of Babasaheb Ambedkar was marked by a slew of advertisements issued by BSP chief and Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Mayawati in leading dailies. She also unveiled her own statue to mark the occasion. This renewed assertion of the BSP8217;s ownership of Ambedkar8217;s memory and legacy comes in the context of the BSP8217;s broader efforts to shift its mobilisation strategy 8212; not counting the short interlude when Mayawati seemed to go back to political square one as she took on Tikait recently 8212; from one that targets the 8216;bahujan8217; to one that speaks to the 8216;sarvajan8217;.

Those loyal to the BSP believe that this shift was necessary to tame Brahminism. After all, it8217;s for the first time that upper caste leaders are getting elected from and serving a party that essentially belongs to the Dalits and OBCs. Apart from enabling the BSP to wrest political power, this also helps in infusing confidence among Dalits. However, those Dalit scholars who think and work within a moral idiom and the more idealistic among Dalit youth feel shortchanged. They see this shift to sarvajan mobilisation as a form of political opportunism, if not a wholesale moral degeneration.

According to this argument, the BSP8217;s new strategy not only robs Dalits of their right to assert and protest but also betrays the fundamentals of Ambedkarite philosophy that emphasise on reclaiming the community8217;s dignity above everything else. In this paradigm, the achieving or sharing of political power was but one possible means, though an important one, of pursuing this large social and philosophical vision.

But the shift to the centrism that the sarvajan philosophy represents, while being new to the way the Dalit empowerment agenda has been pursued in the post-Independence period, has been integral to the way parliamentary democracy has evolved and survived in India. There is a sense of inevitability and even indispensability to the way a centrist framework needs to be worked out and followed to remain close to the portals of power, especially at the Centre.

The Congress party inherited the Gandhian legacy of the 8216;politics of accommodation8217;, the art of putting together contradictory and oppositional political and social forces and principles. The 8216;Congress System8217; or the 8216;umbrella party8217; built itself on the basis of the philosophy of Gandhian trusteeship, by managing industrialists and rich farmers on the one hand and the landless on the other. It came to proudly claim the trust of all castes, classes and regions.

In 1989, the resurgence of the BJP was marked by an aggressive sectoral mobilisation of upper caste Hindus against the Muslims around the demand of a Ram temple at Ayodhya. Yet when the BJP managed to cobble together a ruling alliance called the NDA, it had to not only keep in abeyance the core of its Hindu nationalist agenda, including the abolition of Article 370, implementation of the uniform civil code, and building of the Ram temple, but it also had to be seen to distance itself from the more brazen members of the Sangh Parivar including the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and Bajrang Dal. The requirement of a larger share of seats made it imperative for the BJP to spread in the south and therefore it dropped its insistence on Hindi as the national language. For similar reasons, the BJP is constrained to express jubilation over the recent Supreme Court verdict on the implementation of reservations for OBCs in institutions of higher education. This centrist churning continues to haunt the BJP in its renewed bid to come to power in the next general elections. The party must strike a balance between the gains from moving to the Centre and the losses it incurs by compromising on its ideological purity.

In this backdrop, the shift from bahujan to sarvajan is the BSP8217;s way of moving towards the Centre. Mayawati has grasped the significance of moving beyond exclusivist mobilisation. While such a strategy might bring a party to power it will not sustain it in power for long. In a polarised state like UP, Mayawati8217;s strategy to extend the BSP vote share by drawing in the upper castes has not only changed its image but may have made it a serious contender at the Centre.

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Undoubtedly, this shift has weakened the single-mindedness of its campaign against atrocities on Dalits and has blunted its aggressive mobilisation for recognition and redistribution of resources for the Dalits. By this reckoning, the BSP is losing its ideological purity like the BJP and attempting to emerge as an umbrella party like the Congress. While centrism allows you a new social base it also makes your traditional social base very shaky. Centrist parties simply have no language to keep any particular social base tightly with them. Thus, while the brahmin vote bank can shift to the BSP, the Dalit vote bank could as well shift to the Congress.

It is in this context that Mayawati is jittery about Rahul Gandhi8217;s appeal to Dalit youth in particular and Dalits in general. In essence, the appeal of Dalit rhetoric without substantive ground-level empowerment is not very different from the appeal of dynasty. More than anyone else, Mayawati understands this well.

The writer teaches at the Centre for Political Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University gajay99rediffmail.com