<p>On September 30, 2010, as the Lucknow bench of the Allahabad High Court gave its verdict in the Ram Janmabhoomi case, candles and earthen lamps popped up briefly in the temple town of Ayodhya. But the celebratory illuminations did not last long. Police went around extinguishing the candles, nudging Hindu families to keep their joy confined within the four walls of their homes.</p>.<p>Mayawati, the then chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, earned praise for ensuring the day passed without any untoward incidents. Three years before that, Mayawati had led her Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) to an unprecedented majority in the Assembly polls. Not just Dalits, but Muslims and Brahmins had supported her.</p>.<p>A decade is a long time. On Friday, BSP general secretary Satish Chandra Mishra was in Ayodhya to unveil Mayawati's Brahmin outreach. Mishra, his party's Brahmin face, hollered at a meeting organised on the outskirts of the district, "<em>Ek saal se mandir nahin bana paaye hain. Kab banega mandir?</em> (It's been a year since the foundation laying ceremony, but the temple is still incomplete. How long will it take?)." He promised that a BSP government in Lucknow after the Assembly polls would expedite temple construction.</p>.<p>Kanshi Ram founded the political movement that stoked Dalit consciousness among the Scheduled Castes by invoking Shambuka and Eklavya, seen as victims of Brahminism in Hindu mythology. Forty years later, the BSP has taken to invoke Ram and Parashuram and promises to work for the "betterment of Sudama", a symbolism for the poor and marginalised among the Brahmins.</p>.<p>Electoral considerations have undoubtedly triggered the BSP's currently weeklong Brahmin outreach. Its hope of increasing its vote share in UP rest on netting Brahmin support. The community is nearly 12-13 per cent of the electorate in UP and is said to be angry with the Yogi Adityanath government's alleged tilt towards Thakurs.</p>.<p>The BSP's is an intriguing strategy when many see it as a declining force in the state and the Samajwadi Party as the real challenger to the BJP in the 2022 Assembly polls. The Adityanath government's mismanagement in handling the Covid-19 spread has led to anger against it. Chandra Shekhar Aazad, the upcoming Dalit leader of the Azad Samaj Party, has insinuated that the BSP's strategy would eventually help the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). He has alleged Mayawati is under pressure from the central probe agencies.</p>.<p>Aazad, who is 34, projects himself as Mayawati's successor in the Dalit movement in UP. He has questioned how a party that claims to fight for Dalits has Brahmins as respective leaders of the two Houses of Parliament – Mishra in the Rajya Sabha and Ritesh Pandey in the Lok Sabha.</p>.<p>The BSP's ideological confusion and its continuing decline come along with the Lok Janshakti Party (LJP) split, the passing away of its founder Ram Vilas Paswan and its poor Assembly poll result. It indicates an inexorable weakening of the unfettered Dalit assertion in electoral politics since the 1980s.</p>.<p>A much-forgotten Lok Sabha by-poll in 1985 in Bijnor, western UP, had symbolised this blossoming. The death of the sitting Congress MP from that seat necessitated the by-poll. The Congress fielded Meira Kumar, the daughter of Jagjivan Ram and who had quit the Indian Foreign Service to plunge into politics. Lok Dal's Paswan was her main opponent. Few had given the third candidate in the fray, Mayawati, any chance.</p>.<p>Kumar's win turned out to be underwhelming. She bested Paswan by less than 6,000 votes. Mayawati was number three but bagged a creditable 61,000 votes as an independent candidate, votes which would have mostly gone to the Congress. In 1987, Mayawati contested the Haridwar Lok Sabha bypoll. She emerged a close runner up behind the Congress candidate but ensured Paswan forfeited his deposit, never to contest from UP again.</p>.<p>A year later, Kanshi Ram contested the Allahabad Lok Sabha by-election after superstar Amitabh Bachchan vacated the seat. Joint opposition candidate Vishwanath Pratap Singh and Congress party's Sunil Shastri were Kanshi Ram'sRam's principal opponents. VP Singh defeated Shastri by over 200,000 votes. While Shastri failed to get even one lakh votes, Kanshi Ram bagged almost 70,000, most of which would have gone to the Congress.</p>.<p>The BSP became a thorn in the flesh of the Congress, which started smelling a ''foreign hand'' in the BSP's success. But the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) was no less worried about the BSP. The Illustrated Weekly of India in 1988 quoted RSS chief Balasaheb Deoras describing the BSP as "one of the real problems for the RSS in north India".</p>.<p>Much water has flown down the Ganga since. The RSS cadres have worked tirelessly among Dalits in the last couple of decades to wean them away from the Ambedkarite assertion of their Dalit identity and bring them under the umbrella of Hindutva.</p>.<p>The decline of the BSP in UP and LJP in Bihar is comforting news, not just for the BJP but also for Congress. In the recent reshuffle and cabinet expansion, Prime Minister Narendra Modi was careful to increase the representation to Scheduled Castes, particularly from UP and Bihar and Bihar. Congress leader Priyanka Gandhi Vadra has consistently raised issues of atrocities on Dalits in UP.</p>.<p>So, would this phase mark the fall into the oblivion of independent Dalit politics? It was the political genius of Kanshi Ram to have knitted a patchwork of alliances between various Dalit and EBC (Extremely Backward Castes) in UP. In Bihar, Paswan tried something similar until Nitish Kumar scuppered the effort by carving out a separate Mahadalit category.</p>.<p>Can young leaders such as Aazad and Chirag Paswan repeat those feats, or will the two big national parties, the BJP and Congress, subsume Dalit politics? Or will efforts of Mandal parties - the SP in UP, JD (U) and RJD in Bihar - succeed in appropriating the space of independent Dalit parties?</p>.<p>The results of the 2022 Assembly polls in UP would be an indicator. However, Dalit activists believe the current phase is a gestation period before dynamic leaders emerge to voice issues that concern EBCs, including among Muslims, and Dalits.</p>.<p><strong>Check out DH's latest videos:</strong></p>
<p>On September 30, 2010, as the Lucknow bench of the Allahabad High Court gave its verdict in the Ram Janmabhoomi case, candles and earthen lamps popped up briefly in the temple town of Ayodhya. But the celebratory illuminations did not last long. Police went around extinguishing the candles, nudging Hindu families to keep their joy confined within the four walls of their homes.</p>.<p>Mayawati, the then chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, earned praise for ensuring the day passed without any untoward incidents. Three years before that, Mayawati had led her Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) to an unprecedented majority in the Assembly polls. Not just Dalits, but Muslims and Brahmins had supported her.</p>.<p>A decade is a long time. On Friday, BSP general secretary Satish Chandra Mishra was in Ayodhya to unveil Mayawati's Brahmin outreach. Mishra, his party's Brahmin face, hollered at a meeting organised on the outskirts of the district, "<em>Ek saal se mandir nahin bana paaye hain. Kab banega mandir?</em> (It's been a year since the foundation laying ceremony, but the temple is still incomplete. How long will it take?)." He promised that a BSP government in Lucknow after the Assembly polls would expedite temple construction.</p>.<p>Kanshi Ram founded the political movement that stoked Dalit consciousness among the Scheduled Castes by invoking Shambuka and Eklavya, seen as victims of Brahminism in Hindu mythology. Forty years later, the BSP has taken to invoke Ram and Parashuram and promises to work for the "betterment of Sudama", a symbolism for the poor and marginalised among the Brahmins.</p>.<p>Electoral considerations have undoubtedly triggered the BSP's currently weeklong Brahmin outreach. Its hope of increasing its vote share in UP rest on netting Brahmin support. The community is nearly 12-13 per cent of the electorate in UP and is said to be angry with the Yogi Adityanath government's alleged tilt towards Thakurs.</p>.<p>The BSP's is an intriguing strategy when many see it as a declining force in the state and the Samajwadi Party as the real challenger to the BJP in the 2022 Assembly polls. The Adityanath government's mismanagement in handling the Covid-19 spread has led to anger against it. Chandra Shekhar Aazad, the upcoming Dalit leader of the Azad Samaj Party, has insinuated that the BSP's strategy would eventually help the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). He has alleged Mayawati is under pressure from the central probe agencies.</p>.<p>Aazad, who is 34, projects himself as Mayawati's successor in the Dalit movement in UP. He has questioned how a party that claims to fight for Dalits has Brahmins as respective leaders of the two Houses of Parliament – Mishra in the Rajya Sabha and Ritesh Pandey in the Lok Sabha.</p>.<p>The BSP's ideological confusion and its continuing decline come along with the Lok Janshakti Party (LJP) split, the passing away of its founder Ram Vilas Paswan and its poor Assembly poll result. It indicates an inexorable weakening of the unfettered Dalit assertion in electoral politics since the 1980s.</p>.<p>A much-forgotten Lok Sabha by-poll in 1985 in Bijnor, western UP, had symbolised this blossoming. The death of the sitting Congress MP from that seat necessitated the by-poll. The Congress fielded Meira Kumar, the daughter of Jagjivan Ram and who had quit the Indian Foreign Service to plunge into politics. Lok Dal's Paswan was her main opponent. Few had given the third candidate in the fray, Mayawati, any chance.</p>.<p>Kumar's win turned out to be underwhelming. She bested Paswan by less than 6,000 votes. Mayawati was number three but bagged a creditable 61,000 votes as an independent candidate, votes which would have mostly gone to the Congress. In 1987, Mayawati contested the Haridwar Lok Sabha bypoll. She emerged a close runner up behind the Congress candidate but ensured Paswan forfeited his deposit, never to contest from UP again.</p>.<p>A year later, Kanshi Ram contested the Allahabad Lok Sabha by-election after superstar Amitabh Bachchan vacated the seat. Joint opposition candidate Vishwanath Pratap Singh and Congress party's Sunil Shastri were Kanshi Ram'sRam's principal opponents. VP Singh defeated Shastri by over 200,000 votes. While Shastri failed to get even one lakh votes, Kanshi Ram bagged almost 70,000, most of which would have gone to the Congress.</p>.<p>The BSP became a thorn in the flesh of the Congress, which started smelling a ''foreign hand'' in the BSP's success. But the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) was no less worried about the BSP. The Illustrated Weekly of India in 1988 quoted RSS chief Balasaheb Deoras describing the BSP as "one of the real problems for the RSS in north India".</p>.<p>Much water has flown down the Ganga since. The RSS cadres have worked tirelessly among Dalits in the last couple of decades to wean them away from the Ambedkarite assertion of their Dalit identity and bring them under the umbrella of Hindutva.</p>.<p>The decline of the BSP in UP and LJP in Bihar is comforting news, not just for the BJP but also for Congress. In the recent reshuffle and cabinet expansion, Prime Minister Narendra Modi was careful to increase the representation to Scheduled Castes, particularly from UP and Bihar and Bihar. Congress leader Priyanka Gandhi Vadra has consistently raised issues of atrocities on Dalits in UP.</p>.<p>So, would this phase mark the fall into the oblivion of independent Dalit politics? It was the political genius of Kanshi Ram to have knitted a patchwork of alliances between various Dalit and EBC (Extremely Backward Castes) in UP. In Bihar, Paswan tried something similar until Nitish Kumar scuppered the effort by carving out a separate Mahadalit category.</p>.<p>Can young leaders such as Aazad and Chirag Paswan repeat those feats, or will the two big national parties, the BJP and Congress, subsume Dalit politics? Or will efforts of Mandal parties - the SP in UP, JD (U) and RJD in Bihar - succeed in appropriating the space of independent Dalit parties?</p>.<p>The results of the 2022 Assembly polls in UP would be an indicator. However, Dalit activists believe the current phase is a gestation period before dynamic leaders emerge to voice issues that concern EBCs, including among Muslims, and Dalits.</p>.<p><strong>Check out DH's latest videos:</strong></p>