Congress leader Rahul Gandhi has made a huge retrospective claim about what his great-grandfather, India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, would have done for caste justice had he been alive at the time of Kanshi Ram’s rise as a Dalit political pioneer.
“If Jawaharlal Nehru had been alive, Kanshi Ram would have been a Congress prime minister,” Rahul Gandhi said on Friday, speaking at the Samvidhan Samlan held in Lucknow ahead of Kanshi Ram’s birth anniversary.
Nehru died in 1964, while Kanshi Ram rose to prominence by founding the pioneering BAMCEF party in 1978, and subsequently forming the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) in 1984.
Read also | Ahead of Kanshi Ram’s birth anniversary, parties are vying to link to his political legacy
The BSP, under the protection of Kanshi Ram and former multi-term CM Mayawati, currently has a tense relationship with the Congress, and in turn faces political allegations of reaching a “compromise” with Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party.
Kanshi Ram, who died in 2006 at the age of 72, did not assume executive power directly, preferring to hand it over to Mayawati instead as he focused on building cadres.
‘Congress made mistakes’
Paying tribute to the social justice icon, Rahul Gandhi said Kanshi Ram never compromised on principles. Mahatma Gandhi and Bhimrao Ambedkar were named after others like him.
“The path we were taking, we should have moved at a faster pace. There were shortcomings on the part of the Congress party,” the Leader of Opposition said in Lok Sabha.
“Gandhi ji (Mahatma) went to prison for 10 to 15 years, but he did not abdicate. Babasaheb Ambedkar sacrificed his life, but he did not abdicate. Did Kanshi Ram ji abdicate? The question is not there. He could not have done it,” Gandhi said.
Where does the BSP stand?
The BSP under Mayawati’s leadership currently finds itself in a sharp electoral decline. After last being in power in UP in 2012, the party has lost ground to the BJP, Samajwadi Party and Congress.
As for her nephew and sometime designated heir Akash Anand, whose rhetoric about Prime Minister Modi went viral two years ago, she has seen a furious series of turnarounds, ousting and reinstating him several times. Its strategy is clearly to project the BSP as a stand-alone third force in UP politics ahead of the 2027 Assembly elections.
As for Kanshi Ram’s legacy, the other recent claimant is Nagina Lok Sabha MP Chandrashekar Azad, whose party is called the Azad Samaj Party (Kanshi Ram), which was founded in 2020.
The BSP’s vote share was just over 27% in 2009, but had fallen to less than 10% by 2024. In the 2022 National Assembly elections, the party finished fourth with less than 13% of the vote. The BSP has kept its distance from both the opposition India Bloc and the ruling BJP-led NDA ahead of the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, the results of which were the worst in the party’s history with no seats left. Observers pointed out that one of the main reasons was the collapse of the BJP’s non-Jatav Dalit base, which moved to the SP-Congress alliance.
UP Pitch Poll
Rahul Gandhi has been promoting the ‘Sanvidhan’ or Constitution, and its guarantees of equality, as the basis of his outreach to Dalits.
Mayawati strongly criticized this, asking whether “it would be in the interest of SCs, STs and OBCs to ally with these anti-reservation parties, like SP and Congress”.
She also attacked Congress for its failure to conduct a caste census during the years it was in power. The Modi government is conducting a caste census as part of the much-delayed comprehensive census following repeated demands by Rahul Gandhi and others.
The next UP Assembly elections are scheduled to be held any time now. While the BJP’s core base is upper caste Hindus as well as non-Yadavs, the SP’s counter-strategy is its PDA formula – pichhda (backward), Dalit, and alpsankhyak (minorities) – which has cemented its 2024 Lok Sabha comeback.
