The Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) appears passive and disengaged in political action today. There are growing apprehensions about its capacity to emerge as a significant force in the upcoming Assembly elections in Uttar Pradesh and Punjab. It is assumed that BSP's continued inaction under Mayawati's leadership, especially to mobilise its conventional Dalit-Bahujan support base, would not only damage its prospects in the state’s electoral battles, but will also dethrone it as the leading vanguard of the Dalit movement at the national level.
The Dalit-Bahujan politics aspires to place the marginalised sections as an independent political class. Ambedkar viewed social justice as not merely a welfare policy framework to secure certain material doles from the State but also a dynamic tool to generate revolutionary political consciousness among the socially marginalised group. In the post-Ambedkar period, it was Kanshi Ram, the founder of the BSP, who reintroduced the agenda of social justice as a transformative ideology to bring political change.
Kanshi Ram utilised the ideas of social justice to unveil the oppressive caste hierarchies and inspired the marginalised groups to build a political opposition against the Brahmanical hegemony. He imagined an antagonistic majoritarian block (Bahujan) against the minority powerholders (often represented as Manuwadis) and wanted that such binary to be the deciding factor in democratic battles. The politics of social justice thus ruptures the idea of Hindu unity and suggests that the ruling social elites are responsible for the precarious and degraded condition of the vast majority.
Kanshi Ram argued that national political parties retain their domination over legislative bodies by relegating lower caste groups as a passive vote bank. He imagined that under the BSP, the socially marginalised communities form a robust political alliance and defeat the traditional ruling castes. Replacement of the conventional ruling elites by Dalit-Bahujan collective would bring a revolutionary change in governance and policy matters.
Whither social justice agenda? The BSP emerged as a dynamic force in the late 1990s and introduced Dalits as the most influential social category in democratic processes. Mayawati led a powerful state government several times and ensured that the issues of caste discrimination, representation of Dalits and OBCs in state institutions and communal riots shall not become challenges against her government. Her regimes are valued for providing effective law and order, rapid infrastructural development and for implementing effective social justice policies for the marginalised groups. However, the BSP failed to retain its momentum of political success as its social and cultural strategies to preserve its support base, especially the non-Jatav voters of the party, was unimpressive and non-engaging.
Imagining the Dalit-Bahujan mass as the ruling class was a radical version of social justice agenda. Forming social and political alliances is the foundational requirement to build robust politics of social justice. It is also true that the OBCs often showed resistance to join and work under the BSP under the prejudice that it serves mainly the Dalit counterparts. Such stereotypes corner the BSP as a Dalit party and the SP eventually becomes a Yadav-dominated party.
The crude rivalry between the BSP and the SP and the division between socially marginalised communities defeated the objective of social justice politics. Importantly, the BSP has also hesitantly refused to bridge the socio-cultural divisions between the Dalits and OBCs and proposed political alliances with social elites (mainly Brahmins) and nationalist parties (initially the Congress and later the BJP) and thus moved away from the foundational principles of the social justice movement.
The BSP is further criticised for its deep attachment to specific communitarian identity and there is a charge that the worst-off Dalits have not been given legitimate space in mainstream politics. Such trust deficit motivates various caste segments to flag separate political demands, undermining the possibility of collective political action. Such caste-based segmentation allowed right-wing politics to enter Dalit groups with creative cultural strategies and successfully engaged them into the Hindutva agenda.
The BJP challenges the agenda of social justice with alternative cultural politics. The right-wing engages with the lower caste groups as the cultural and religious subject and exploits their association with Hindu rituals and traditions. The divisionary caste segments are celebrated as ruminants of Hindu civilisation with new iconography and social history for each fragment is invented. The right-wing underplays the lower caste identities as socially deprived classes and reprimands their political assertion as a disruptive force against Hinduism. Instead, the domination of the social elites over political and public institutions are legitimised under the rubric of ‘social harmony’ and not seen as the continuation of Brahmanical hegemony.
Further, propagating communal hatred against Muslims has been the most potent tool for the BJP to mobilise the Dalit-Bahujan sections. Further, vast sections within the Dalit-Bahujan survive under precarious economic conditions. Knowing this well, the BJP has launched powerful rhetoric of development, anti-corruption politics and euphoria of nationalism that often bewitch the aspirational groups and motivate them to support right-wing politics. Most important, the maverick leadership of Narendra Modi effectively controls the ship of propaganda and makes BJP a dynamic force amongst vulnerable social groups.
The social justice politics wanted to elevate the Dalit-Bahujan masses as the new political elites. Instead, the BJP’s Machiavellian cultural politics exploit caste divisions and relegates the lower caste groups as the militant participants in the Hindu renaissance under the aegis of social elites. The BJP appears influential and successful in the democratic battle today; However, it has no roadmap to empower the vast majority of impoverished communities from the burden of poverty, social discrimination and political powerlessness.
Hindutva’s hegemonic cultural politics can be defeated by reinventing the ideology of social justice. The proponents of social justice have to demonstrate substantive accountability towards the vulnerable worst-off groups and have to ensure their dignified presence in the mainstream political process. There is a need to craft creative strategies to organise cultural and social diversities and invent new methods to inspire the most vulnerable sections to join the politics of social justice.
(The writer teaches at the Centre for Political Studies, JNU)
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