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Journalism of Courage
Azad Samaj Party (Kanshi Ram) leader and Nagina MP Chandrashekhar Aazad, the party’s lone parliamentarian, has said he will remain an independent voice in the House and not join ranks with either the Treasury benches or the Opposition.
“We are not sheep that must follow. We are the hope of millions of our people,” Aazad said at The Indian Express Idea Exchange programme on Friday.
“When I went to Parliament for the first time, I sat alone on a vacant bench. I was new, I didn’t know. I thought my friends in the Opposition would ask me to come and sit with them. I thought they would say, ‘We are both fighting against the BJP and we must work together.’ But after sitting there for three days, I realised no one was bothered that Chandrashekhar was sitting there,” he said.
He said when the Speaker elections came around, a senior Congress leader called him to say he must help them. “I told him, ‘Okay.’ But they didn’t press for a division (of votes). When that did not happen, the matter ended there. The leader went his way and I mine. Then I decided that I would neither be Right nor Left. I am Bahujan and will stand alone with my agenda. That is why I did not stage a walkout with the Opposition. We are not sheep that must follow. We are the hope of millions of our people. We may be small political workers but we are leaders of our society. If we keep following others, it will hurt the self-respect of our people,” he said.
Aazad, who won the Nagina seat in UP by 1.51 lakh votes, said he wanted an alliance with the Congress and the Samajwadi Party (SP) in the state but neither agreed to give him Nagina.
“I feel they do not want an independent voice among the deprived. They want whoever comes up should stand with them or under them. So that they can use him and not let him progress. They asked me to contest from another seat or on their symbol. I told them I will neither leave my constituency nor contest on someone else’s symbol,” he said.
“Then I thought if I do not contest this election with all my strength, irrespective of how many votes I get, it will be perceived that I am not fit to contest. Then, Time magazine had featured me among the 100 emerging leaders in India, so I had to prove myself,” he said.
“Even if the BJP offers me the PM’s post, I will not go with them. I understand that they only give posts, not power. And if you do not have power, you can do nothing for your people,” he said.
He said the Opposition’s position on the Constitution and the idea of proportionate representation in polity and administration was a repetition of the slogans of BSP founder Kanshi Ram. “We are already standing there. The goals of Kanshi Ram and Baba Saheb (Ambedkar) remain unfulfilled. As a good student, it is the responsibility of Chandrashekhar Aazad and his associates to complete their work. And that work will be completed when the Constitution will be fully implemented and social and economic inequality will end,” he said.
Aazad said since 2014 Dalits had the fear that the Constitution would be changed. “This has been the long-term plan of the BJP cadre base and its think tank, the RSS… They may say anything today but they were never in support of the Constitution. It started with 2014 and 2024 was its peak. So, if the BJP loses Ayodhya and the PM wins with such a low margin, then it shows it is no more easy to win elections in UP on the basis of communal politics,” he said.
He blamed the UP government for the July 2 stampede at a religious gathering in Hathras in which at least 121 people, mostly women, were killed. “First failure in this episode is of the administration. What arrangement did it make when it knew so many people were gathering? Was it dependent on the Baba and his army? The responsibility of the law and order is of the state government. The government is giving permission to such Babas to gather such massive crowds,” he said.
“Because of the system we have, there is tremendous misery in the lives of the poor and the deprived. They feel that by going to some religious place their problems can be solved. We see this on TV all the time where people see ‘magic’ happening. This is the reality of the Indian system,” he said.
