Opinion: Dance of Dalit vote - BJP invokes Sant Ravidas ahead of Madhya Pradesh polls

By Milind Ghatwai: It’s not possible to know whether Sant Ravidas, a medieval saint-poet who championed the cause of equality and social harmony, would have approved the idea of a Rs 100 crore temple dedicated to him, but it has definitely found favour with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in Madhya Pradesh that goes to the polls a few months later.

Sant Ravidas has a huge following in several states, especially among the Scheduled Castes (SC) that comprise nearly 16 per cent of the population in MP. The temple will come up at Badtuma near Sagar, the gateway to the Bundelkhand region of the state where the followers of the saint live in large numbers.

Five Samrasata (harmony) yatras flagged off from Singrauli, Balaghat, Sheopur, Dhar, and Neemuch areas of the poll-bound state on Tuesday by senior BJP leaders – Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan, Union minister and election management committee chairman Narendra Tomar, national general secretary Kailash Vijayvargiya, urban development minister Bhupendra Singh, and national president of SC Morcha Lal Singh Arya and culture minister Usha Thakur -- will culminate in Sagar on August 11. Prime Minister Narendra Modi will lay the foundation stone of the temple on August 12. The temple walls will be replete with couplets and teachings by the saint.

In the next 18 days, the harmony yatras will pass through 46 of the 52 districts in the state, holding dialogues with the public at 244 places in the presence of national leaders, regional leaders, and saints. Participants will carry earth and a fistful of grain from 55,000 villages in the state, and also carry water from rivers and reservoirs. The earth and water will be used in the construction of the temple.

The chariots as part of the procession will have the saint’s portrait, charan-paduka, and a kalash. Folders with details of schemes by the central and state governments for the Scheduled Tribes (ST) will be distributed during the yatra, in an elaborate exercise timed ahead of elections.

In feudal pockets of Bundelkhand as also other parts of the state, caste discrimination is still rampant. It’s not uncommon for Dalit grooms to be made to dismount the horse when their wedding processions pass through localities dominated by the upper castes, even in places like Ujjain district, located close to urbanised Indore.

On the eve of the yatras, quoting the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge alleged that MP accounts for the highest cases of atrocities against Dalits and tribal communities. Referring to the recent video showing a Brahmin BJP activist urinating on a tribal man in Sidhi district and an instance in Chhatarpur where a Dalit man alleged that a man from another caste smeared his face with human faeces, the Congress leader alleged that the lower castes were insulted in the BJP rule for a long time. The BJP, however, countered him saying Congress-ruled Rajasthan reports the highest cases of atrocities against the Dalits.

Political parties leveling allegations and counter-allegations against each other over atrocities on Dalits are routine. When Chief Minister Chouhan made the announcement about the proposed temple at Sant Ravidas Mahakumbh in Sagar in February this year, he accused his predecessor Kamal Nath of insulting saints at an event held during the short-lived Congress government. The Congress government had organised a similar Ravidas Mahakumbh in February 2020 to woo the Dalit community. Chief Minister Chouhan said Kamal Nath not only did not felicitate the saints gathered on the occasion but also refused to show reverence.

MP has 35 constituencies reserved for Scheduled Castes but the community has a sizable presence in 20-odd more seats. The BJP and Congress had nearly shared honours by winning 18 and 17 seats respectively in the 2018 Assembly elections unlike in 2013 when the saffron party had won as many as 28 of those seats.

The SC community had distanced itself from the ruling BJP in the Gwalior-Chambal region, where caste-related tensions are very common, ahead of the 2018 elections. On April 2, 2018, Dalit organisations had taken to the streets to protest against the alleged dilution of the SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act in a Supreme Court ruling. Seven people had lost their lives amid vandalism and arson in Bhind, Gwalior, and Morena districts. In the Assembly elections, held in November that year, the BJP lost all seats reserved for Scheduled Castes in Morena, Bhind, Datia, Shivpuri, and Gwalior districts.

Some candidates of the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) did get 10,000 plus votes but overall, the Uttar Pradesh-based party could win only two seats in the 230-member Assembly.

The BJP which has ruled the state since 2003, barring a brief period of 15 months from 2018-end and early 2020, had tried to woo the SC community even before. The BJP held the first Dalit mahakumbh in Mhow, the birthplace of Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar, near Indore in 2007. The town and the Assembly constituency now bear his name. Born in 1891, Ambedkar hardly spent any time in his birthplace as his father Ramji soon retired and returned to Maharashtra. By all accounts, Ambedkar had returned to the town only once in his lifetime but he was so short of time that he did not even visit the place where he was born.

Every year on April 14, the BJP organises a mahakumbh at the birthplace. This year, the ruling party included places associated with Ambedkar in the Tirth Darshan Yojana. The scheme covers Nagpur, where he converted to Buddhism, Delhi, where he died, and Mumbai, where he was cremated.

It’s not that only the BJP has tried to woo the SC community. While the Kamal Nath government’s tenure was so short that it could do little but former Chief Minister Digvijaya Singh towards the fag end of his 10-year rule from 1993 to 2003 had attempted something drastic. Singh tried to implement what was known as the “Bhopal Declaration”, and arrived at a two-day conclave of Dalit intellectuals and activists in January 2002. Titled 'Charting a new course for Dalits for the 21st century', the declaration came up with an idea like the distribution of surplus land among Dalits. The declaration never became an official document.

(Milind Ghatwai is a freelance journalist with over three decades of experience.)

(Views expressed in this opinion piece are that of the author.)