It may be the first concrete sign of the impact the suicide of Dalit research scholar Rohith Vemula will have in poll-bound Uttar Pradesh. Dalit villagers, who fought aggressively against their Muslim neighbours on the question of mounting a loudspeaker on a village temple in Moradabad two years ago, are fighting again – to ensure that the saffron party is routed in the 2017 Assembly elections.
The villagers hold the Bharatiya Janata Party responsible for Vemula’s death at Hyderabad Central University in January.
‘BJP responsible’
“Everyone knows. Everyone stays silent, but the decision has been taken,” said 22-year-old Vikas Bharati, a Dalit resident of Nayagaon Akbarpur Chedri village in Kanth block of Moradabad district. “The BJP would be fooling itself if it thinks that Rohith is dead. He is not. He lives in our hearts and will be resurrected when polling takes place in UP.”
These words of Bharati, an undergraduate student of science from RSM Degree College at Dhampur in nearby Bijnor district, may appear to reflect the anger of only that section of young Dalit voters who are aware of the developments outside the state.
However, that may not be the case. “UP is changing,” said Arvind Bharati, an agricultural labourer and another Dalit resident of this village. “Although most Dalits are still illiterate and poor, they are no longer ignorant. They are constantly receiving information of all kinds – through their children and neighbours or simply by TV channels. Rohith Vemula is one name every Dalit is aware of.”
Arvind Bharati added: “Often Dalits won’t feel encouraged to talk openly about their political preferences, but one thing that has entered into their mind is that Rohith was forced to commit suicide because he was a Dalit. And all of us know which party was responsible for his death.”
Communal pot
It is significant that Vemula has become a dominant issue among this particular group of Dalits, whose loyalty the BJP took for granted in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections. Two months after those elections, Dalits in this village acted as the saffron party’s foot-soldiers during a spat with their Muslim neighbours over the question of mounting a loudspeaker on a village temple.
The temple controversy kept Nayagaon Akbarpur Chedri village in the news for almost a month starting June 2014 after the local administration removed a loudspeaker mounted on the temple.
While the BJP claimed that the loudspeaker had been at the temple for the last 40 years and was removed arbitrarily, the administration argued that there was no tradition of the loudspeaker being mounted on the temple on any day other than Mahashivratri, which falls in February or March every year.
In protest, the BJP called for a Hindu Mahapanchayat at the nearby Kanth town on July 4 that year. But the police acted swiftly. It took a large number of BJP leaders and workers into custody and chased away the rest of them. Some Dalit members of the village were also put behind bars. A string of incidents that followed thereafter kept the communal pot boiling in the region for months.
“The situation has changed now,” said Anis-ur Rahman, the Kanth MLA who won the seat in 2012 as a candidate of the Peace Party, but has now got a ticket from the ruling Samajwadi Party. “For a short while they [Dalit residents of the village] had gone in the BJP camp. But they have realised that the BJP is only interested in dividing the society and have come out of it now.”
However, that may not exactly be the case. The ego war over the temple loudspeaker may not be over as Dalit residents still feel that the loudspeaker should not have been removed.
But the thinking of the Dalit residents of this village has changed due to several factors of which the Rohith Vemula case is the most important. Vemula’s suicide and the events that followed have so thoroughly exposed the BJP in the eyes of the villagers that they want nothing but a crushing defeat for the saffron party.
BJP wooing Dalits
These developments may well come as a surprise for those who thought the furore around Vemula’s suicide had died down and that it wouldn’t have resonance among the majority of Dalits in Uttar Pradesh.
At the moment, the BJP appears guided by this very understanding, with its leaders concentrating on Dalits and the most backward among the Other Backward Classes as they prepare for Assembly elections in this politically-important state.
On July 9, BJP president Amit Shah, while addressing a “Dalit-Backward Mahapanchayat” at Mau in eastern Uttar Pradesh, sought to woo Dalits in the area, who have traditionally backed the Bahujan Samaj Party. Shah praised the party’s founder Kanshi Ram but hit out at his successor Mayawati for turning the party into a “money-making machine”.
Similarly, one argument within BJP circles on the reason their party colleague Smriti Irani was moved out of the Human Resource Development ministry, which handles education, to the low-profile Textiles Ministry was that it was done to assuage the grievances of Dalits in the poll-bound state.
In 2014, the apparent shift of Dalits to the BJP is believed to have helped the saffron party bag an impressive 71 of Uttar Pradesh’s 80 Lok Sabha seats.
But if Rohith Vemula has indeed entered into the consciousness of the state’s Dalits – as has happened at Nayagaon Akbarpur Chedri village – the BJP may just be in for a major shock next year.
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