Assertion & confrontation

The board that started it all for Chandrash­e­khar Azad Raavan, now winner from the Nagina Lok Sabha constituency in Uttar Pradesh, is still there.
 

It proclaims proudly: “The Great Chamar Dr Bhimrao Ambedkar Village Gharkauli Welcomes You.” Near Saharanpur, Gharkauli has Brahmins and Rajputs as well as a large number of Dalit — Chamar — and Muslim residents. The board calling it (Gharkauli) a “Great Chamar” village was put up in 2016. The upper castes in the village objected to it. The Dalits refused to remove it. Talks between the upper castes and Dalits failed. One day, the sign was found defaced.
 

In came Chandrashekhar Azad with his posse of motorbike-borne riders amid roars of “Jai Bhim” and “Jai Bhim Army”. Tensions rose, stones were thrown by both sides and the policemen who were sent to investigate the matter were thrashed.
 

Thus began a phase of direct confrontation and Dalit agitational politics of a kind the younger generation had not seen. This led to more Thakur-Dalit clashes in the district that very month — on the birth anniversary of Rajput king Maharana Pratap.
 

The state government held Azad’s Bhim Army responsible for inciting violence. Azad claimed the government was targeting it to malign the movement and shield upper-caste offenders. The state administration arrested Azad. The matter went to court and the high court acquitted him.
 

But within hours, the Yogi Adityanath government ordered his re-arrest under the National Security Act. He was incarcerated amid massive protests from civil rights groups and was released partly as a result of that pressure. Upon coming out of prison, in 2020, Azad formed the Azad Samaj Party (ASP) with the intention of contesting elections. The ASP fought the 2022 Assembly elections in Uttar Pradesh amid stiff resistance, obviously from the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) but also from the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), which saw its citadel under threat. He contested the 2022 state polls from Gorakhpur against Yogi Adityanath. He ended up fourth with just over 7,000 votes. But it was enough to establish him on the political scene.
 

Priyanka Gandhi called on him when he was in jail (and hospital). Azad’s announcement earlier this week that he would support the INDIA bloc is a result of the rapport that was built then.
 

Chandrashekhar Azad was born in Saharanpur, in Gharkauli village, in a Chamar family, studied at a Thakur-owned and -run college in nearby Chhutmalpur, saw the discrimination against Dalit students, and vowed to fight it. His father was a government schoolteacher who advised Azad to be judicious about the battles he was fighting. This is not widely known but Azad began his political career in the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad, the student wing of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. He joined the BJP but left it when he saw, he has said in interviews, that when there were clashes between Dalits and Muslims, the BJP was there to fight for Dalits. But when the clashes were between upper castes and Dalits, it quietly disappeared.
 

Being an Ambedkarite and an admirer of Kanshi Ram (but not of Mayawati) he tried to follow the same principles of organising the Dalits as Kanshi Ram: Via education, through the bureaucracy, and in self-defence. The Bhim Army, which was the precursor of his political party, asks Dalits over 18 to join them. Most members belong to the Chamar community or its sub-caste Jatav but it also welcomes Muslims. It lacks a formal structure but claims to have thousands of members in and around Saharanpur. Its stress is on direct action based on confrontation to preserve, protect, or restore the dignity of the Dalits. It runs more than 300 Bhim Army schools in Saharanpur district, and provides free-of-cost primary education to children irrespective of caste and gender. It also runs self-defence classes and encourages Dalits to visit all scenes of caste conflict on motorbike convoys as a gesture calculated to rile upper castes through defiant assertion.
 

Ahead of the 2022 Assembly polls, Azad did talk to Akhilesh Yadav of the Samajwadi Party (SP) for some kind of adjustment. However, talks broke down because of distrust on both sides: Azad felt the SP wanted access to the Dalit vote bank and was not particularly interested in the problems of the Dalits. He decided to contest the 2024 elections on his own. His triumphant electoral victory shows you cannot keep a determined leader down.
 

For obvious reasons, the BSP considers him a blot on the landscape. But the Bhim Army and the Azad Samaj Party are reporting growth while the BSP is showing decline and decay. It is too early to say whether Chandrashekhar Azad’s tactics will lead to a strategy of wearing the BSP down with the final aim of replacing it. It has emerged as a social force to represent Dalit interests. But the transformation into a political force beyond western UP is still awaited.