BJP’s doublespeak on caste

The Bharatiya Janata Party has chosen to employ rhetoric and trickery to camouflage its conflicted ideological position on caste which has acquired a new salience because of the INDIA alliancersquos demand for a caste Census This has created a chasm between the BJPrsquos attitude towards Dalits in Rajasthan and Prime Minister Narendra Modi trumpeting his concern for themAt a recent election rally in Sidhi Madhya Pradesh Modi applauded his government for appointing Heeralal Samariya as the first Dalit Chief Information Commissioner CIC He then said ldquoLook at the Congressmenhellip As soon as they came to know that a Dalit is going to become a CIC they boycotted the meeting convened for appointing him They hate Dalits so muchrdquoYet days before the BJP gave an election ticket to Girraj Singh Malinga who is an accused in an atrocity case in Rajasthan Until last week Malinga was in the Congress and was elected thrice on its ticket from Bari in Dholpur district There is a story behind Malinga jumping shipIn March 2022 there was a power cut in a Rajput basti or hamlet of Bari Malinga a Rajput and his men barged into the office of Harshadhipati Valmiki a Dalit engineer with Rajasthanrsquos electricity department and allegedly beat him up so mercilessly that he suffered 22 fractures A year later he is still in hospital barelyable to walkAlso read Amazing unforgettable PM Modi on Ayodhya DeepotsavEarlier this year the Anusuchit Jati Adhikar Abhiyan an umbrella group of Dalit organisations organised the Samajik Nyay Yatra through 37 out of Rajasthanrsquos 50 districts with the aim of pressuring political parties to adopt an agenda it considers vital to the community The top item of the agenda was that political parties should not nominate as their candidates those accused of perpetrating atrocities on Dalits The Congress denied the party ticket to Malinga whom the BJP has now fielded from BariWonder who hates Dalits moreAmong the drivers of the campaign against Malinga was Bhanwar Meghwanshi a Dalit writer and activist His life story vividly illustrates the BJPRashtriya Swayamsevak Sanghrsquos hypocritical position on caste At the age of 13 Meghwanshi joined the RSS shakha at Bhilwararsquos Sidiyas village Five years later in 1991 a procession was organised in Bhilwara to demand that the Babri Masjid be handed over to the Hindus Stones were hurled on the processionists as they wended their way through a Muslim colony The police opened fire killing two HindusThe RSSBJP then took out a procession carrying the ashes of the two deceased through villages Since they were to come to Sidiyas Meghwanshi had a meal cooked for them RSS leaders however said the sadhus accompanying them might have objections to eating in a Dalit household and requested Meghwanshi to have the meal packed so that they could have it at their next halt He later discovered they had thrown away the food by the roadside Meghwanshi left the RSS and wrote about his experiences in I Could Not Be Hindu The Story of a Dalit in the RSSAt the Sidhi rally Modi lit into the Congress for boycotting the meeting of the selection committee summoned to choose Samariya But the truth is that the government insisted on holding the meeting during the hours on a day it knew Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury the Congress representative in the selection committee would not be present in Delhi His absence in hindsight was crafted to spin the story of boycottSidhi acquired notoriety in July when Pravesh Shukla an upper caste man urinated on Dashmat Rawat a Kol tribal man The culprit Pravesh allegedly had links with the BJP With the Scheduled Tribes comprising nearly 28 per cent of Sidhi districtrsquos population Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan facing a tough electoral battle had himself photographed washing Rawatrsquos feet But such expiation neither ensures dignity for the tribals nor changes sociopolitical structuresThe BJP did deny the party ticket to Kedarnath Shukla its fourtime MLA from Sidhi In order to efface the Kol tribersquos memory of the humiliation of Rawat Modi also attacked the Congress in Sidhi for opposing a ldquotribal daughterrdquomdashDroupadi Murmumdashfrom becoming the President whom the BJP had nominatedIf pitting a candidate against Murmu in the presidential election is opposition to her tribal identity might it not be said that the BJP fielding Malinga is an endorsement of atrocities committed on Dalits Again Modirsquos promise of subcategorising Telanganarsquos Scheduled Caste quota has hogged media headlines Does the media remember that a report subcategorising the Other Backward Classes in Uttar Pradesh submitted to the state government in 2018 has yet to be implementedThe RSSrsquos counter to the demand for a caste Census is to undertake a countrywide programme on ldquosocial harmonyrdquo a decision it took last week This will involve RSS activists fanning out to villages to preach against caste discrimination and untouchability to build Hindu oneness a promise the Ayodhya campaign too had held out only to crush the expectations of Meghwanshi People such as him desire substantive equality not the tokenism of washing the feet of one who had been pissed upon and certainly not the doublespeak on caste They will also wait to see whether Samariya dams or facilitates the flow of information from the government before judging whether his appointment should be celebratedThe writer is a senior journalistSend your feedback to mailbagmiddaycomThe views expressed in this column are the individualrsquos and donrsquot represent those of the paper