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Its 2018 Assembly election victory in Rajasthan had also seen the Congress regaining the support of a large section of the Dalit community, which has for long being considered as one of the party’s core vote banks in the state. The Scheduled Castes (SCs) account for 17.83% of the state’s population.
The Dalit support had come as a breather for the Congress, because in the 2013 Assembly elections, the community’s voters had largely voted for the BJP, making the latter victorious in 32 of the 34 SC-reserved seats in Rajasthan. At that time, the BJP had won 163 seats while the Congress’s tally had plunged to just 21 MLAs in the 200-member Assembly.
In the 2018 elections, the Congress won 19 out of the 34 SC-reserved seats. The BJP won 12 of these seats and the Rashtriya Loktantrik Party (RLP) got two seats, while in one constituency a Congress rebel won as an Independent.
In the upcoming Assembly polls, while the Congress hopes to repeat its 2018 performance and win most of the SC seats, the BJP is raising the issue of increasing Dalit atrocities in the state to counter the grand old party.
In its present term, the Ashok Gehlot-led Congress government has tried to take steps that would help it retain its core vote bank. Last year, the government passed The Rajasthan State Scheduled Castes And Scheduled Tribes Development Fund (Planning, Allocation And Utilization Of Financial Resources) Bill, 2022 in the Assembly.
This law, which earmarks a certain amount for the Scheduled Castes Development Fund (SCDF) and the Scheduled Tribes Development Fund (STDF), is being seen as a Congress’s bid to retain the SC/ST votes that had helped it to come to power in 2018.
The Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), which got 4 per cent votes and won six seats in 2018, is facing a challenge of credibility among its supporters. Many BSP voters have in recent years felt disillusioned with the party after twice — in 2008 and 2018— its MLAs switched to the Congress.
In 2019, after all six BSP MLAs merged their legislative party with the Congress, angry BSP workers had garlanded party leaders with shoes, blackened their faces and paraded them on donkeys.
The BSP’s shrinking support base has meant that Dalit voters may primarily vote for the two main parties, the Congress and the principal Opposition BJP.
The BJP has made atrocities against Dalits one of the rallying points in its campaign against the Gehlot government.
According to the crime figures for 2021 released by the NCRB, the second highest number of Dalit atrocities in the country took place in Rajasthan in 2021. Rajasthan was earlier ranked third on this score in 2020, the data reveals.
Lately, the BJP has been sending delegations, fact-finding teams and protesting after each such case of atrocity, while the Congress government has been accusing the saffron party of using the issue for political gains, citing various measures introduced by it such as compulsory registration of FIRs and creation of hate crime monitoring unit to curb such atrocities.
Back in 2018, the BJP’s poor performance in reserved seats was particularly notable in places where the state had witnessed violence during and after the April 2, 2018 Bharat Bandh, which was called by the Dalit and Adivasi outfits in protest against the Supreme Court order on the SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act.
Five years later, the withdrawal of cases registered during the 2018 agitation is still part of the agenda of the Dalit groups.
Recently, these SC groups under the banner of the Anusuchit Jaati Adhikar Abhiyan Rajasthan (AJAR) released the Dalit manifesto before the polls, which includes their demands such as withdrawal of all cases registered during the 2018 stir, giving constitutional status to the state SC Commission and opening of residential schools for Dalit students at the district level.
“We will take this historic document to every Assembly of Rajasthan and decide the responsibility and accountability of the election candidates towards the community. We will also do a social screening of all the candidates to see if the person is associated with any cases of Dalit atrocities or helped the accused in such cases. We will not accept such candidates and will inform all parties demanding that they should not be allowed to contest elections,” said Dalit rights activist Bhanwar Meghwanshi, the AJAR co-convener.
