The Modi-Shah BJP is supposed to be pro-Dalit. So why didn’t they see the April 2 protests coming?

By all accounts, the Bharatiya Janata Party was simply not prepared for the outpouring of anger primarily from Dalit communities that was evident across India on April 2. On that day, tens of thousands of people came out on to the streets from Punjab to Madhya Pradesh to demonstrate against the Supreme Court’s new guidelines on the Schedule Caste/Scheduled Tribes Prevention of Atrocities Act, which, the protestors said, had rendered the law toothless. The protests led to violence, because of clashes between communities and nine deaths. The matter is yet to be laid to rest: Dalit BJP lawmakers have spent the last week complaining about how people of their community have been treated, and more protests and counter-protests are on the cards.

A few decades ago, when the BJP was still known as a primarily Brahmin-Bania party, this would not have seemed so unusual. But Prime Minister Narendra Modi and BJP President Amit Shah have taken pains to ensure that the party expands beyond its traditional strongholds. On the back of Modi’s own image, the party has managed to draw the Other Backward Class votes that had tended to go to OBC-led parties ever since the Mandal Commission reforms in 1990. Going beyond that, both Modi and Shah have sought to add Dalits into the fold as well, with the party trying hard to appropriate BR Ambedkar, even as it attempted to paper over his trenchant critiques of Hinduism and the Hindu Right.

This has led some to describe the new BJP as being “inclusive”, although that inclusivity is built on a programme of vilifying minorities, Muslims in particular. The simple argument for this approach is that Hindus, including Dalits, account for nearly 80% of the country’s population. If the BJP can build a pan-Hindu support base, unfettered by the constraint of caste identities, and get even half of that 80% – which is to say 40% of the population – it would be unassailable at national politics, without having to bother about minorities.

The so-called Modi wave of the 2014 General Election suggested this was a real possibility, at least in the Hindi-speaking states. As Suhas Palshikar wrote in the Economic and Political Weekly, “In 2014, not only did the largest proportion of the Other Backward Classes (OBCs) vote at the national level go in favour of the BJP, but it also constituted the largest share within the vote received by the BJP. The party also received a substantial proportion of the dalit and adivasi vote in different parts of the country. Thus, the party’s victory points towards a transformation of the BJP.”

It is one thing to win votes from a section of people, especially in a wave election, but it is another thing to battle casteism and entrenched identity beliefs within an organisation, The BJP under Shah may have gone the extra distance in bringing Dalits on board that year, and even in the Uttar Pradesh elections in 2017. But that has not immediately led to Dalit empowerment.

In Uttar Pradesh, for example, though many more Dalits seemed to have voted for the BJP, the actual number of Dalit MPs came down.

This is also borne out in the party’s internal leadership, which does not include a single person from the Scheduled Castes, despite a rule in its constitution saying the party should have three members from the community on its panel. Here lies the fundamental problem for the BJP: at the top, its leaders would like it to be a party that appeals to Dalits, but on the ground, it is often dealing with party workers that may not be as prepared to drop their prejudices or identity politics.

Many believe this to be especially true in Uttar Pradesh where Yogi Adityanath, a Thakur, was made chief minister, a move that is said to have alienated both OBCs and Dalits. Four of the five BJP Dalit lawmakers who spoke up over the last week are all lateral entrants to the BJP and first-time Members of Parliament from Uttar Pradesh who will now be worried about losing their seats if the Dalit-led Bahujan Samaj Party and OBC-led Samajwadi Party actually come together for general elections.

The intelligence failure on April 2, which saw massive, leaderless protests that the BJP-run governments of Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh were simply unprepared for, also suggests that Modi and Shah are not as attuned to the conversation among Dalits as they are with OBCs. They have attempted to make amends, with Modi bowing before a statue of Ambedkar, Shah trying to clarify that his party is not against reservations, and more such events planned for this coming week. Yet it has found it hard to shake off the image of being a party filled with people who do not treat Dalits well.

Losing the Dalit vote would not be a deathblow to the pan-Hindu plan for the BJP, but it does chip away at the image that Modi and Shah want of a party that is above caste and open to all Hindus. If one community is aggrieved enough and can look elsewhere, why not another? That indeed seems to be the BSP-SP argument in Uttar Pradesh where, combined with talking about communalism, the traditional voters of both parties seem to be jointly disempowered by Adityanath’s thakurvaad.

With Ambedkar Jayanti on the horizon on April 14, expect many more efforts from BJP leaders to reassert themselves as the party that truly represents Dalits as much as any other Hindu. But most of these are expected to be at the surface level. Will Modi and Shah be able to effect enough change to genuinely alter their party into one that encourages not just Dalit voters but also Dalit leaders?