The rapid decline of the Bahujan Samaj Party over the years has led some to believe that Dalit politics lacks a suitable road map. Rebuilding the Bahujan movement will be difficult if the political agenda and electoral strategies are not improvised. In such a crisis, the Dalit-Bahujan leadership could learn from B.R. Ambedkar’s political experiments.
Ambedkar’s social movement and political thoughts are heralded for making Indian society sensitive towards the ideas of social justice and democracy. Ambedkar was keen to find a dignified place for the ‘Untouchables’ in modern institutions, including legislative bodies. He appealed to the ruling classes to recognise the ‘Untouchables’ as a new social and political minority, and demanded special safeguards for them from the state. He thought community-based political representation would liberate the ‘Untouchables’ from the hegemony of the social elites and help them bring their issues to the mainstream. But Ambedkar was not interested in framing the Dalits as a political force for the Dalits alone; he expected them to unify vulnerable caste groups, religious minorities and the deprived working classes and bring about revolutionary political change.
Forming political parties
Ambedkar’s first political party, the Independent Labour Party (ILP), was committed to the welfare of the working classes. The socially marginalised castes, especially the ‘Untouchables’, formed a significant part of modern industry, especially in Bombay. Ambedkar noticed that parties claiming to represent the interests of the working class did not pay attention to the concerns of ‘Untouchable’ labour. He reprimanded the socialist-communist leadership for betraying the trust of lower caste workers. The ILP, he proposed, would highlight the class-caste relationship and contest coercive “Brahmanism and Capitalism” together.
In 1942, Ambedkar established his second political party, the Scheduled Castes Federation (SCF), in Bombay. This was when hectic deliberations were taking place between the Congress, the Muslim League and the representatives of religious minorities over India’s Constitution. In new constitutions in the world then, different religious communities and groups were granted political safeguards and cultural rights according to their numerical strength and historical location. Ambedkar wanted to establish the Depressed Castes as one of the prime actors in the nation-building process. The SCF demanded that the ruling classes cherish the values of socially diverse groups and integrate the different aspirations of marginalised people in their plans for a new India. Further, the SCF meant to promote the interests of the diverse ‘Untouchable’ castes on a single national platform. Ambedkar introduced the SCF as a rival of the Congress and a harsh critic of M.K. Gandhi’s leadership. The Congress was depicted as an association of the social elites that mainly served the interests of powerful caste groups and rich capitalists.
Both the ILP and the SCF had a comprehensive political programme, attractive leadership and the zeal to challenge the hegemony of the social elites. However, in electoral battles, they failed. The non-Mahar caste groups remained distant from these parties and presented them as single caste-centric parties. Ambedkar contested the Bombay (North Central) Lok Sabha seat in 1952 and the by-election in Bhandara in 1954. He lost both times to Congress opponents.
To overcome the stereotype that the SCF only represented the Mahars, Ambedkar launched the Republican Party of India (RPI) in 1956. He envisaged the RPI as a secular-socialist front drawing its ideological motives from Buddhist principles and representing the poor agrarian classes and the socially marginalised castes. Ambedkar’s aim with these experiments was to establish a caste-less societal order: free from upper caste control, superstitions and social prejudice.
The BSP’s limitations
However, the RPI and later, the BSP also failed to escape the image that they represented only one community. Instead, for the BSP it even become imperative to roll out a social engineering formula, a method that exploits caste stratifications to achieve electoral victories and invariably drifts from the values that Ambedkar envisaged. Till the recent past, the BSP mobilised the Dalits effectively, but its engagement with other deprived communities has remained limited. It has not mainstreamed the problems of the poor working classes and landless labour. Unfortunately, today, there are no powerful movements to contest the ills of caste divisions, atrocities and violence or to raise a powerful challenge against the domination of ruling caste elites. Instead, it is right-wing politics that has attracted sections of the Dalit-Bahujan castes with cultural strategies.
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Ambedkar’s capacity to learn from experiences helped him formulate better alternatives. Only with such deliberations can a new version of social justice politics emerge.
Harish S. Wankhede is an assistant professor at the Centre for Political Studies, JNU, New Delhi
