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| The debt we owe Kanshi Ram | | |
Harish Khare
The BSP is a potent advertisement that numbers, not violence, work in democratic India. For this alone, modern India needs to be thankful to the party founder.
— FILE PHOTO: S. Subramanium
LEADING CHANGE: Kanshi Ram and Mayawati at a rally in New Delhi.
LAST WEEK, the original reformers — including Manmohan Singh and P. Chidambaram — travelled to Mumbai to celebrate 15 years of the journey they began in 1991. Last Sunday, the original rath yatri Lal Krishna Advani drove up Raisina Hill to give one more memorandum to President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, this time demanding death for Mohammed Afzal. A day later, the original caste politician Kanshi Ram, who died after a long illness, was taken out on his last journey. The three disparate sets of players can be said to constitute the core of the dramatis personae in the struggle over the soul of modern India. But had it not been for Kanshi Ram, the reformers would never have been able to come as far as they have; and, similarly, had it not been for Kanshi Ram, the rath yatri would not have been reduced to a forgettable chapter in our collective saga.
Our middle-class discourse manufacturers tend to judge — and judge harshly — Kanshi Ram by Mayawati, her presumed character flaws and political frailties. Some are even prone to regard Ms. Mayawati as the very anti-thesis of the Kanshi Ram legacy and an epitaph for his ultimate failure. Irrespective of whether or not Ms. Mayawati is able to sustain the Bahujan Samaj Party as the instrument of the marginalised Dalits, history will judge Kanshi Ram as much a sustainer of the Indian state as was the original constitutionalist, Babasaheb Ambedkar. If Dr. Ambedkar can be credited with putting in place a constitutional edifice for the Indian state, it was Kanshi Ram whose organisational devices and political stratagems ended up shoring up the democratic legitimacy of the state system, that too at a time when anti-democratic forces had mounted an offensive against the egalitarian order.
It needs to be recalled that Kanshi Ram did not register his first substantial electoral victory till 1993 — in the Uttar Pradesh Vidhan Sabha election when the BSP won 66 of the 162 seats it contested (in alliance with the Samajwadi Party). Since then the party has gone places. This is in sharp contrast with its three earlier electoral innings. In the 1984 Lok Sabha elections, the BSP drew a blank; in 1989 it won only two seats; and in 1991 it had to be content with just one seat. Yet within a space of 30 months, Kanshi Ram and his party became consequential players in the political scheme of things.
So, what happened in India between 1991 and 1993 that helped Kanshi Ram gain traction? Two seminal developments forced a re-alignment of forces and ideas. First, in New Delhi, Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao gave the go-ahead to Dr. Manmohan Singh to put in place a new economic order. The new regime, for better or for the worse, was anchored on a premise that the Indian state must turn its back on the masses, and that the polity must reverse the 30-year-old experiment in populism, and that the decision-makers must hitch their policy wagon to distant investors, creditors, and chambers of commerce. Suddenly, the very matrix of democratic legitimacy and popular accountability was being redefined — to the disadvantage of vast sections of Indian society.
The second development that helped Kanshi Ram become relevant was the sangh parivar's assault on the secular order. The assault began when Mr. Advani set out on his rath yatra from Somnath in 1990 and culminated in the demolition of the Babri Masjid on December 6, 1992. More than the destruction of a medieval mosque, the sangh parivar was out to roll back the Ambedkarite constitutional order, with its promise of a place for everyone under the Indian democratic sun. Assorted sadhus, mahants, and shankaracharyas were sought to be elevated to the status of arbiters of our collective destiny. The Hindutva juggernaut was meant to use the democratic space to hijack the Indian polity away from large segments, especially the vulnerable and the marginalised.
Crisis of legitimacy
The twin agenda — of economic reforms in New Delhi and of the Ram temple in Ayodhya — triggered a crisis of democratic legitimacy for the Indian state. The Congress, the party of economic reforms, was unable to connect with the masses and was soon rebuffed by the voters in Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka. But that was in October 1994; before that the sangh parivar's challenge had to be met in Uttar Pradesh, the site of the medieval animosities that Mr. Advani insisted had to be addressed. This was a dark moment for democratic India. And, it was in this hour of crisis that Kanshi Ram forged as an alliance with the Samajwadi Party to deny the Bharatiya Janata Party power in Uttar Pradesh. Had the BJP been able to come back to power in the State after the vandalism at Ayodhya, its national leadership would have seen it as a licence to try to dismantle the secular constitutional order.
It is almost impossible to discern with any degree of confidence Kanshi Ram's calculus, in 1993 or later. May be it was nothing loftier than plain, simple electoral calculations that prompted the BSP leader to join hands with Mulayam Singh Yadav (or subsequently with the Congress or with the BJP, the two parties he regularly denounced as manuvadi outfits). But the ultimate outcome of his or Ms. Mayawati's (much maligned) "opportunism" was that the Dalits stood co-opted as partners in democratic India. It is perhaps no coincidence that the arrival of Ms. Mayawati as Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh at the very young age of 35 paralleled the rise of the Sushmita Sen/Aishwarya Rai phenomenon. Beautiful India could not rise and sustain itself without the advent of Dalit India that Kanshi Ram plotted.
That he twice allowed Ms. Mayawati to team up with the BJP in no way detracts from the judgment that he helped clamp down on extremist Hindutva. True, like its other allies, the BSP too helped the BJP gain power and sustainability at the Centre; but it is equally true that, like the BJP's other allies, the BSP not only diluted the sangh parivar's fundamentalist impulses, it also extracted its pound of flesh in terms of respectability and acceptance. That the Vajpayee-Advani duo was reduced to countenancing all the excesses (political or personal) that Ms. Mayawati is accused of having committed only added to the BJP's ordinariness. The strategy of political accommodation the Vajpayee-Advani team put in place to prevent the BSP's defection to the "secular" camp only ended up eroding the BJP's claims to a different political morality. The only time the BSP-BJP alliance took on an unhealthy hue was when Ms. Mayawati decided to align with Narendra Modi after the 2002 anti-Muslim riots. Otherwise, on balance, the BSP helped tame the Hindutva crowd.
Whatever exasperation or disdain the middle-class discourse mongers may exhibit towards Ms. Mayawati and her penchant for a non-Dalit lifestyle, the fact remains that the BSP's electoral successes and aura of political indispensability have deepened the efficacy of Indian democracy. The net result of all the experimentation and innovation Kanshi Ram has shown is that the Dalits too have a chance of reasonable returns, in terms of prestige, position, patronage, and power. This message of reassurance has facilitated the rise and rise of consumerist India, without inviting any violent backlash from the lowest strata.
In the era of economic reforms — including when India was supposed to be shining — the Indian social order has become more unequal and less tolerant. The state system is finding it increasingly difficult to make the dissatisfied as well as the ambitious believe in its fairness; the political processes are no longer able to connect with the masses, inducing a crisis of governability. This, in the long run, is bound to produce a crisis of legitimacy. The very success that Kanshi Ram's BSP has been able to notch up helps the political system recover some of its popular acceptability.
The Dalits remain the only "ethnic" group in India that has not experimented with the idiom of violence; nor have they challenged the constitutional arrangement. Violence against the state or against other ethnic groups is an everyday phenomenon in India. Many extremist groups have tried to enlist the Dalits in their "struggles" against the Indian state but rarely do we hear of the Dalits arming themselves. Instead, Kanshi Ram's BSP is a potent advertisement that numbers, not violence, work in democratic India. No mean achievement, and for this alone modern India needs to be thankful to Kanshi Ram.
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