Sadhvi Savitri Bai Phule is just the kind of MP the Bharatiya Janata Party should have been taking around the country to speak at rallies. The 37-year-old has renounced the householder’s life, is always dressed in saffron, boasts of terrific oratorical skills, and the Bahraich reserved constituency, from where she was elected in 2014, is not a family fiefdom. Phule’s Dalit identity is seemingly yet another advantage for the BJP, keen as the party is to break the upper caste mould in which it is fundamentally cast.
Yet, independent of her party, Phule has been presiding over meetings and holding rallies to highlight the oppression and suffering of the Bahujan Samaj (literally, people in the majority), which includes the Dalits, the religious minorities and the Other Backward Classes.
If the mission of the BJP’s other sadhvis – Rithambara and Uma Bharti for instance – is to liberate temples that were allegedly converted into mosques centuries ago, Phule’s focus is different. In the drawing room of her 65, North Avenue flat in Delhi, where on every sofa was seated a visitor with a petition, she spelt out her mission: “To bring an end to the injustices and atrocities committed daily on the Bahujan Samaj”.
The remarkable difference between Phule’s world of saffron and the BJP’s can be gleaned from her response to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s reiteration on May 27 to sub-categorise the Other Backward Classes for reservation. “I am against dividing the Other Backward Classes into backward and more backward, the Scheduled Castes into Dalits and Ati-Dalits [lowest of the low],” she said. “They think by dividing us they can get our votes. It is a divide and rule policy. They have been doing this since Independence, of breaking the unity that Babasaheb [Dr BR] Ambedkar forged among us.”
Charting her own path
It is rare to find a person in the BJP who has the chutzpah to publicly criticise a policy endorsed by Modi, such is the control he exercises over the party, so deep the fear of him among its MPs. Phule refrains from taking Modi’s name, but she does not leave her audience in any doubt that she is very upset, and angry, at the happenings that fall under the rubric of the party’s programme.
Nor is she afraid of being outspoken. “Afraid? Is it sin to speak out against the humiliation heaped on you?” she asked. “There have been so many MPs who cared only about their families’ well-being. Does anyone remember them?”
For sure, Phule’s refusal to lace her criticism of the BJP in diplomatese has been getting her headlines ever since the Supreme Court diluted the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act in March. She held a rally on April 1 in Lucknow to demand that the Union government reverse the apex court’s judgement. She spoke out against the incarceration of Dalits who participated in the Bharat bandh of April 2 against the Act’s dilution. She breathed fire as BJP MPs, on Modi’s instruction, took to dining at Dalit homes.
“Those MP insulted us Dalits,” she said, her voice rising. “They did not eat food cooked at Dalit homes, did not use our utensils, did not drink water from our glasses. They ate food cooked by non-Dalits at the threshold of our homes.”
She added: “It only establishes that they think Dalits are untouchables.”
She drove home her point further. “They had their photos taken eating at Dalits homes and made it go viral,” she said. “How come when they dine with other castes, they don’t think the moment is worth capturing on camera?”
Her logic is, indeed, irrefutable, as is her parsing of the motive underlying the spurt in the disfigurement of Ambedkar statues in Uttar Pradesh. One such incident took place in Matiala village in Bahraich. Two months later, in April, even the broken statue of Ambedkar was whisked away at night, Phule held a rally and organised a dharna, but the culprits are yet to be nabbed. “I even made a representation to the Chief Minister [Adityanath], still no action has been taken,” she said.
She then quickly tossed a question at her listeners: “Why do you think the Ambedkar statues are being desecrated and Dalits thrown in jail for participating in the Bharat bandh?” Phule launched her sally: “It is because they want to break our morale to fight for our rights. It is being openly said that the Constitution needs to be revised, as also the reservation policy.”
In case the connection between such demands and the desecration of the Ambedkar statues was missed, Phule emphasised, “It was Babasaheb who framed the Constitution. It is because of him we have reservation, it is because of him I am an MP.”
Phule sniffs a conspiracy to reverse the reservation policy, highlighting its inherent hypocrisy. “They want to end reservations even though they cannot fill the job quota, even as they are privatising jobs,” she said. “You have people appropriating quota jobs on fake caste certificates. I demand that the government must investigate the implementation of the reservation policy.”
‘Hold caste census’
It is her other demand that would horrify the BJP. She wants a caste census to be undertaken to determine the percentage of different social groups in India’s population and their socio-economic profile. Phule is opposed to the Supreme Court’s mandated 50% cap on reservation. “It is because of the 50% cap that the Other Backward Classes, though 52% of the population, were assigned just 27% reservation. Why? A group’s share in power should be according to its share in the population.”
All her formulations pale in comparison to her hailing Muhammad Ali Jinnah as a mahapurush or great man during the recent controversy over the presence of his portrait in Aligarh Muslim University. None in the BJP can praise Jinnah and still hope to flourish. Ask BJP stalwart LK Advani, whose career nosedived when he described Jinnah as a secularist in 2005. Yet Phule declared, “Jinnah, like so many others, fought for the country’s independence. Why should anyone have problems hanging his portrait?”
This brings us back to the question: What makes Phule so fearless, so unmindful of the consequences of being so forthright? Perhaps she unlearnt fear during her childhood. Or perhaps it is because of the oath she took many years ago.
In her home village of Husenpur Mridangi, Bahraich, nobody, whether of high or low caste, would send girls to school. Her father, an agricultural labourer, decided otherwise. Phule, who was earlier named Savitri, would walk one-and-a-half km to school every morning to attend Junior High School in the adjoining Gokulpur village. She was the school’s only female student, perhaps a compelling reason for her to overcome the fear of standing apart.
In Class 8, she had the temerity to ask her principal why he was not handing to her the scholarship money for Scheduled Caste students. “The principal said, ‘It is because of me you have got a first division,’” Phule recollects. “I retorted, I got a first because I studied.” In pique, the principal refused to hand over her transfer certificate and marksheet. Phule sat at home for three years during which she tried to persuade the principal to hand over her documents, to no avail. “Then my guru, Akshyavar Nath Kannojia, who is also my uncle, decided to take me to [Bahujan Samaj Party leader] Mayawati,” she said.
First glimpse of politics
It was 1995, and Mayawati had become the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh – a stint that eventually lasted just five months. Phule narrated her woes in Mayawati’s public durbar. Mayawati asked her to meet the district magistrate, who got the principal to hand over her certificates. “Behenji [Mayawati] became an inspiration,” recollected Phule. “I thought if she could become chief minister, why couldn’t I?”
Phule enrolled at the local inter-collegiate and then went on to do her BA. But politics was her new mission now. Months after President’s Rule was imposed in Uttar Pradesh in October 1995, Phule joined a protest Dalits had organised in Lucknow. The Provincial Armed Constabulary opened fire, a bullet was lodged in Phule’s calf and she fainted. “I revived only in hospital and, subsequently, I was jailed,” she reminisced. “It was then that I decided I would not be a bride, bound to a husband and his home, but work for the Bahujan Samaj.”
Bride? Phule had been married when she was six years old, an event of which she has no recollection. As is the custom, the marriage ceremony is considered complete only when the child, on growing up, goes to her husband’s home. “After the spell in jail, I told my parents that I do not want to marry but wanted to work for my samaj,” Phule said. Her parents and the husband’s parents met and agreed he would marry her younger sister instead.
When the marriage procession came to their door, Phule told the gathering that she was divorcing her childhood husband, and took an oath that she would never marry but would work for the uplift of Dalits. “I took the oath that my samaj was my family, that I would not own a house or an inch of land,” she said. “I don’t have any possessions. Whatever I have, even the money for elections, comes from the Bahujan Samaj.”
In 2000, Phule was suspended from the Bahujan Samaj Party. She claimed she did not have any clue why this happened. She joined the BJP, and after two failed attempts, became an MLA in 2012, and then Bahraich’s MP in 2014. Given her penchant to voice views that are anathema to the BJP, Phule is perhaps preparing to take the high road, once again, alone.
On such a road, fear is perhaps a luxury. There is only the pain of others to experience, to live in the torment of it. “Look at the atrocities committed on my people, how their villages are burnt, how they are killed for riding a horse or growing a moustache, how our women are raped and killed,” she said. It is the torment of her people that makes Phule stand up for the rights of the Bahujan Samaj, regardless of whether it displeases Modi and his party.