The Eknath Shinde-led Shiv Sena group has got a vociferous Dalit voice in the form of the People's Republican Party (PRP), at a time when the rival Sena faction of Uddhav Thackeray looks set to stitch up an alliance with Prakash Ambedkar's Vanchit Bahujan Aghadi. Interestingly, the PRP founder-president, Jogendra Kawade, 79, has throughout his decades-old political career been a fierce critic of the BJP-RSS. Until October last year, the PRP was an ally of the Congress and a part of the Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) coalition. The PRP was one of the many groups championing the cause of Dalits that emerged in the late 1990s from a split in the Republican Party of India (RPI), the inheritor of the political legacy of Babasaheb Ambedkar's Scheduled Castes Federation. Nagpur-born Kawade honed his political skills in Maharashtra's cotton-growing Vidarbha region, fighting for the rights of the oppressed and underprivileged, and leading rallies against the BJP, seeing in the Sangh rise both a threat to the Constitution and the rights of Dalits. A professor of commerce, Kawade was a frequent contributor to the weekly Marathi magazine Jai Bheem, which he also edited for a while, before turning to politics. In the mid-1980s, Kawade, RPI leader Ramdas Athawale, and Prakash Ambedkar together worked for the Dalit cause, before differences led them to go different ways. Since then, attempts to unite the various splinter groups into one organisation under the RPI umbrella have repeatedly failed. In 2009, Athawale's decision to align his RPI (A) with the BJP had been severely criticised by Kawade, who accused the senior Dalit leader and current Union minister of “compromising” on Ambedkarite ideology. In 1998, Kawade entered electoral politics for the first time, winning the Chimur parliamentary seat. However, that Lok Sabha was curtailed and the country saw another general election a year later. In 2014, Kawade got elected to the state legislative council and was its member till July 2020. Breaking off its alliance with the Congress last year, Kawade said the party took them for granted. "The PRP was loyal to the Congress for more than two decades. But the Congress failed to keep its promises, forcing us to sever our alliance,” he had said, in an apparent reference to the setback received by the then MVA government over OBC reservation for local civic polls. Justifying his new company, Kawade told The Indian Express: "An incident like Khairlanji (where a Dalit family was massacred) happened during a Congress-NCP regime too." Claiming that his tie-up with Shinde was meant to bring justice to the underprivileged, the PRP leader admitted that the change was also reflective of the churning in the state, resulting in new political permutations and combinations. A senior Nagpur-based leader played down the development involving Kawade, though. "His move to the Shinde faction does not make any difference to the Congress or the MVA. Kawade is a highly respected leader and committed to the Dalits, but he does not have a mass base." Moreover, the leader added, “If Kawade is willing to compromise ideologically and shake hands with right-wing Hindutva parties, it won't go down well with his own Ambedkarite supporters." The Vanchit Bahujan Aghadi, meanwhile, has been inching closer to the Uddhav Sena. Its leader Prakash Ambedkar, who was aligned with the AIMIM in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, has declared that the two parties are committed to contesting together in the coming municipal polls.
