POLITICS-INDIA: Caste Equations Upset in Hindu Heartland

By Ranjit Devraj Reprint | | Print |

Ranjit Devraj

NEW DELHI, May 8 2002 (IPS) - Many think that there must be divine retribution in India’s western Uttar Pradesh state, the heartland of conservative Hinduism that is ruled by a woman member of an untouchable caste.

But while the state’s chief minister Mayawati — who was sworn in Monday — belongs to the an untouchable caste, she is supported by her most bitter opponent, the right-wing, pro-Hindu and mostly upper-caste Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

The BJP, led by Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, leads the coalition that rules India’s central government.

Until February, when elections to Uttar Pradesh’s provincial legislature were held, the BJP government in the state seemed to have but one agenda — to build a grand temple to the warrior deity Ram in the temple town of Ayodhya, where he was supposed to have been born 10,000 years ago.

But Ram ignored the BJP’s exertions and favoured the Samajwadi Party (SP) or Socialist Party, which represents the interests of people belonging mainly to the middle peasant castes and the Bahujan Samaj Party (Everybody’s Party), a party with the avowed aim of promoting the interests of the ‘Dalits’ (broken people) at the bottom of the caste hierarchy.

While both the SP and the BSP opposed the Ram temple campaign, Mayawati went out of her way to criticise Ram as a symbol of the upper-caste social hegemony, bolstered by religious sanction, that her party is sworn to destroy.

At the end of the February elections, none of the three parties had the numbers to form a government on its own.

After more than two months of vacillation, the BJP, though predominantly upper caste, decided that the only way it could hang on to power was to share it with Mayawati’s openly opportunistic BSP.

The BSP and the BJP both fear the Socialist Party, which emerged as the largest single party. Likewise, as on two previous occasions, in 1995 and in 1997 when hung assemblies were elected, castes at either end of the Hindu hierarchy made common cause in staving off the SP, which represents powerful intermediate groups like the Yadavs.

Ayodhya had its reverberations in western Gujarat, another BJP-ruled state, where a Muslim mob set on fire a train carrying people returning from the temple campaign on Feb. 27, triggering a pogrom against Muslims that has left a thousand dead and more than 100,000 homeless.

When the issue of the Gujarat state’s complicity was put to vote in Parliament, the minority BJP government at the centre, led by Vajpayee, desperate for the votes of 14 BSP members agreed to the installation of Mayawati as chief minister — largely on her terms.

Mayawati’s first stint as chief minister lasted four months and the second six months. Each time, upper castes connived to thwart her continuance in office and the BSP and the BJP bitterly fought each other during campaigning for last February’s elections.

“Our agenda is clear and that is to promote the interests of the Dalits

– we are not too particular how we achieve that aim,” said the assertive Mayawati soon after she was sworn as chief minister leading an unlikely BSP-BJP combine for the third time.

The move to align with the BJP angered many Muslim BSP legislators and also upper-caste grandees in the BJP.

In the past, the BSP has made opportunistic alliances not only with the BJP and the SP, but also with the Congress party, which considered Uttar Pradesh to be its bastion from the time of its founding in 1886 until the emergence of caste and communal politics in the early 90s.

The very first thing that Mayawati did after assuming office was to visit the 26-acre Ambedkar Park in the heart of Lucknow, which she began during her second stint as chief minister in 1997 at a cost of 20 million dollars.

The park is dedicated to B R Ambedkar, a champion of the Dalit cause during India’s independence movement from the British. After independence in 1947, he became the main architect of the new republic’s Constitution which outlawed caste discrimination.

Ambedkar also converted to Buddhism, saying ‘Dalits’ could never get a fair deal as low-caste Hindus.

Despite constitutional provisions against it, caste persisted and even thrived along with the resurgence of Hindu fundamentalism, which marginalised the Congress party in Uttar Pradesh and enabled the BJP to gain national power in 1998.

The Constitution also prescribed affirmative action for the ‘Dalits’, reserving for them electoral seats in Parliament and the state legislatures and in government jobs. But their plight continues to be a matter of concern, brought out in for a like the World Conference on Racism at Durban in September 2001.

According to the international group Human Rights Watch, caste-based discrimination is in fact “hidden apartheid” and affects more than 250 million people in several South Asian countries.

But those who think otherwise defend the system. “It is a violation of human rights to abolish caste,” says Acharya Giriraj Kishore, leader of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) or World Hindu Forum, an affiliate of the BJP which has been spearheading the Ram temple campaign.

Mayawati is confident that this time, her government will survive long enough to go beyond symbolic gestures toward the ‘Dalits’, such as building parks to Ambedkar and setting up numerous statues of him, acts for which she has earned the criticism from her own kind.

In January this year, the ‘Dalits’ organised a conference in the central Indian city of Bhopal, where intellectuals from the community such as Chandrabhan Parsed, voiced the need to go beyond electoral gains and build a ‘dalit bourgeoisie’.

A Bhopal Declaration at the end of the conference sought the “redistribution of land” and the “democratisation of capital” as the next steps to affirmative action in the shape of reservations that the ‘Dalits’ have benefited from.

The declaration demanded a fair share of the country’s resources, assets and institutions for ‘Dalits’.

During her previous stints in power, Mayawati has ensured that key positions in the bureaucracy were given to ‘Dalits’. At the moment the bureaucracy in the state, which is overwhelmingly upper caste, is bracing for a fresh round of transfers.

But first, Mayawati will have to win a vote of confidence as chief minister in the Uttar Pradesh assembly. That is by no means certain given the fact that a large number of legislators are opposed to the alliance both within her party and in the BJP.