Kanshi Ram: from BAMCEF to the Bahujana Samaj Party

Kanshi Ram was born in 1934 as a
Raedasi Sikh, a community of Punjabi Chamars converted to Sikhism. The
family had 4 or 5 acres of land, some of it inherited and the rest
acquired through government allocation after Independence), a small
landed background is characteristic of many Scheduled Caste legislators
but remains a comparative rarity for Dalits in general. Kanshi Ram’s
father was himself ’slightly’ literate, and he managed to educate all
his four daughters and three sons. Kanshi Ram, the eldest, is the only
graduate. He was given a reserved position in the Survey of India after
completing his BSc degree, and in 1958 he transferred to the
Department of Defence Production as a scientific assistant in a
munitions factory in Poona. Kanshi Ram had encountered no
Untouchability as a child, and overt discrimination was not a
phenomenon within the educated circles of his adult life. But his
outlook underwent a sudden change in 1965 when he became caught up in a
struggle initiated by other Scheduled Caste employees to prevent the
abolition of a holiday commemorating Dr Anibedkar’s birthday.’4 During
this conflict Kanshi Ram encountered a depth of high-caste prejudice
and hostility towards Dalits that was a revelation to him. His almost
instant radicalisation was completed soon after by a reading of
Ambedkar’s Annihilation of Caste: he read the book three times in one
night, going entirely without sleep.

Kanshi Ram’s introduction to the political ideas of
Ambedkar - he has never been attracted to Buddhism - was through his
Mahar Buddhist colleague and friend at the munitions factory, D. K.
Khaparde. Together the two of them began formulating ideas for an
organisation to be built by educated employees from the Scheduled and
Backward castes. Such an organisation would work against harassment and
oppression by high-caste officers, and also enable the often
inward-looking occupants of reserved postions to give something back to
their own communities. So Kanshi Ram and Khaparde began to contact
likely recruits in Poona. At about this time Kanshi Ram abandoned any
thought of marriage, largely because it did not fit into a life he now
wanted to dedicate to public con-cerns. He had also quite lost interest
in his career, though he continued in the job until about 1971. He
finally left after a severe conflict over the non-appointment of an
apparently qualified Scheduled Caste young woman. During this conflict
he had gone so far as to strike a senior official, and he did not even
bother attending most of the ensuing disciplinary pro-ceedings. He had
already made up his mind to become a full-time activist, and the
movement was by then strong enough to meet his modest needs.

In 1971 Kanshi Ram and his colleagues established
the Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, Other Backward Classes and
Minorities Employees Welfare Association, which was duly registered
under the Poona Charity Commissioner. Their primary object was: To
subject our problems to close scrutiny and find out quick and equitable
solu-tions to the problems of injustice and harassment of our
employees in general and the educated employees in particular.

Despite the Association’s inclusive reach, its
aggressively Ambedkarite stance ensured that most of its members were
Mahar Buddhists. Within a year of its establishment there were more
than one thousand members and it was able to open an office in Poona:
many of the members were from the Defence and Post and Telegraph
Departments, and their first annual conference was addressed by the
then Defence Minister, Jagjivan Ram. Kanshi Ram’s next organisational
step was to create the basis of a national association of Scheduled
Caste government servants. As early as 1973 he and his colleagues
established the All India Backward and Minority Employees Federation
(BAMCEF), and a functioning office was established in Delhi in 1976.
BAMCEF was relaunched with greater fanfare on 6 December 1978, the
anniversary of Ambedkar’s death, with claims of two thousand delegates
joining a procession to the Boat Club Lawns in New Delhi (BAMCEF
Bulletin April 1979). Although the stated objects of the new
organisation were essentially the same as those of the earlier body,
the rhetoric had grown bolder. It was not merely the oppressors who
came in the line of fire, but also many of the reserved office holders
too:

As all the avenues of advance are closed to them in
the field of agriculture, trade, commerce and industry almost all the
educated persons from these [oppressed] communities are trapped in
Govt. services. About 2 million educated oppressed Indians have already
joined various types of sobs during the last 26 years. Civil Service
Conduct rules put some restrictions on them. But their inherent
timidity, cowardice, selfishness and lack of desire for Social Service
to their own creed have made them exceptionally useless to the general
mass of the oppressed Indians.The only ray of hope is that almost
everywhere in the country there are some edu-cated employees who feel
deeply agitated about the miserable existence of their brethren.
(BAMCEF Bulletin 2 1974)

By the mid-1970S Kanshi Ram had established a broad
if not dense network of contacts throughout Maharashtra and adjacent
regions. During his frequent train trips from Poona to Delhi, he adopted
the habit of getting down at major stations along the way - Nagpur,
Jabalpur and Bhopal, among others - to contact likely sympathisers and
to try to recruit them to the organisation (Kanshi Ram Interview:
1996). Once he had moved to Delhi he pushed into Punjab, Haryana and
Uttar Pradesh, as well as further into Madhya Pradesh. Parallel to his
work among edu-cated employees Kanshi Ram was also contacting a wider
audience with simple presentations of Ambedkar’s teachings. Thus in 1980
he put together a roadshow called ‘Ambedkar Mela on Wheels’. This was
an oral and pictorial account of Ambedkar’s life and views, together
with con-temporary material on oppression, atrocities and poverty.
Between April and June 1980 the show was carted to thirty-four
destinations in nine States of the north. Jang Bahadur Patel, a Kurmi
(Backward Caste) and President of the Uttar Pradesh Branch of the
Bahujana Samaj Party until late 1995, recalls meeting Kanshi Ram for
the first time when he brought his roadshow to Lucknow (Interview: 25
November 1995). Kanshi Ram talked persuasively about how Ambedkar had
struggled for all the down-trodden classes, and how the Scheduled
Castes, Tribes and also the Backwards and Minorities were all victims
of Brahminism. Because of their weight of numbers, these people had the
potential to convert them-selves from ‘beggars to rulers’. It was all a
matter of organisation. Patel immediately joined BAMCEF, though he was
in a distinct minority as a non-Untouchable: Untouchables constituted
about 90 per cent of the membership, with the other io per cent being
split between tribals and Backward Caste people.

BAMCEF’s motto, ‘Educate, Organise and Agitate’, was
adopted from Ambedkar, and its activities were formally divided into a
number of welfare and proselytising objects. But increasingly Kanshi
Ram’s agita-tional activities were leading him into politics. By the
late 70S he was no longer content with being the leader of reserved
office holders, a class for whom he had less than complete respect.
Kanshi Ram’s first attempt to create a radical political vehicle
capable of mobilising the larger body of Dalits was the Dalit
SoshitSamaj Sangharsh Samiti (DS4) formed in 1981. This was conceived as
a political organisation parallel to BAMCEF: it shared the same
President in Kanshi Ram, the same office, and many of the same members.
DS4 was a quasi- rather than fully fledged political party, partly
because government servants were forbidden to take part in electoral
politics. But DS4 made little concrete progress, and late in 1984
Kanshi Ram took the plunge and formed the Bahujana Samaj Party (a
variant on the name of Phule’s nineteenth-century organisation).
Inevitably, this caused major strains in BAMCEF ranks. Their agitational
activities had placed many of his colleagues from the Poona and early
Delhi periods in a delicate position as government servants and, in any
case, the political loyalty of many of them was to the several strands
of the Republican Party. There were also strains arising from Kanshi
Ram’s will to total domination of all three organisations. And the need
for money was rising with the push into politics: one of the
Maharashtra workers recalls delivering Kanshi Ram a purse of forty
thousand rupees collected from Maharashtra in 1984. These several
strains grew more severe over the next two years, and early in 1986 a
major split took place. Kanshi Ram announced at that time that he was
no longer willing to work for any organisation other than the Bahujana
Samaj Party. His transition from social worker to politician was
complete.

Kanshi Ram is more an organiser and political
strategist than an innov-ative thinker or charismatic public speaker.
While his Ambedkarite ideol-ogy has remained constant and lacking in
any innovation, there has been a progressive sharpening of his
rhetoric. The early issues of BAMCEF’s monthly magazine, The Oppressed
Indian, were full of his didactic exposi-tions of Ambedkar’s views on
Indian society. These have now given way to simpler formulations,
repeated in numerous newspaper accounts and both public and private
speech. The central proposition is that Indian society is characterised
by the self-interested rule of io per cent over the other 90 per cent
(the bahujan samaj or common people). Although the ruling io per cent
is composed of several castes, they derive their legiti-macy and ruling
ideology from Brahminism. All the institutions of society reflect this
ruling ideology and distortion, including the press. These
institutions can therefore be termed Manuwadi (after the great
Brahmin-inspired text) or Brahminwadi. In the marketplace of elections,
such simplicity has been further reduced to crudeness and epithet. A
slogan coined after the formation of DS4 was, ‘Brahmin, Bania, Thakur
Chor, Baki Sab Hem DS-Four’. Loosely translated, this rhyme states that
Brahmins, Banias and Rajputs are thieves, while the rest of society are
their victims. The epithets reached their height during the election
cam-paign for the UP Assembly in 1993, the most notorious being:
‘Tilak, Taraju, Talwar. Maaro Unko Joote Char’. This slogan, with its
insistent rhythm in Hindi, advocates that Brahmins, Banias and Rajputs,
each identified by a slighting term, be beaten four times with a shoe -
a tradi-tionally demeaning form of punishment because of the ritual
impurity of leather. While Kanshi Ram and Mayawati denied authorship of
such slogans, they served as a simple and dramatically offensive
marker of the party’s ideological position.

Kanshi Ram’s strategy and his larger understanding
of social change are now considerably evolved. He no longer believes in
the primacy of social reform. Rather, expenditure of effort on any
object other than the capture of government is seen to be superfluous.
It is administrative power that will bring about desired social change,
not vice versa. So he declines to spell out policies on basic issues
such as the liberalisation of the Indian economy or on land reforms.
His view is that such issues are irrelevant to the project of gaining
power, and that the appropriate poli-cies will fall into place once
power is attained. His picture of India is of a kind of holy war on the
part of the bahujan samaj against their Brahminwadi oppressors. In the
context of this war debates about policy are almost frivolities. This
is a stance of pure fundamentalism, but it also frees him to engage in
the most ruthless pragmatism in the name of capturing power.

Consistent with this stance, Kanshi Ram has become
increasingly critical of the institution of reservation in government
employment. Reservation is a ‘crutch’ - useful for a cripple, but a
positive handicap for someone who wants to run on his own two feet
(Kanshi Ram interview:1996). He now throws off the line that once the
bahujan samaj get to power throughout India, it will be they who can
condescend to the Brahmins by giving them reservation proportional to
their own meagre population. There is more than a little bravado in
this, but there is no doubt that Kanshi Ram is now hostile to the
system of institutional preference that was the indispensable basis of
his own personal and polit-ical career. It seems that he believes that
reservation has now done enough for the Scheduled Castes. He notes that
of some 500 Indian Admin-istrative Service (LAS) Officers in Uttar
Pradesh, 137 are from the Scheduled Castes. By comparison, there are
only seven lAS officers from the Backward Castes, six of them Yadavs
(Hindustan Times, 6 April 1994). His point is not that there are now
too many Scheduled Caste officers -their number conforms strictly to
the legal quota - but too few from the Backward Castes. He apparently
assumes that the capture of political power will automatically
transform the composition of the bureaucratic elite.

The Bahujana Samaj Party first made headway in
Punjab, Kanshi Ram’s home State, but his primary political task was to
wean the Chamars of Uttar Pradesh from Congress. It was Kanshi Ram’s
fortune that he built the party at the historical moment that the
long-term Congress decline became a landslide. The formal entry of his
party into Uttar Pradesh was in a by-election in 1985 for the Lok Sabha
seat of Bijinor, in which its candidate was Mayawati. She is a Jatav
(or Chamar), the daughter of a minor government official in Delhi, and
had completed a BA and LLB from the University of Delhi. Mayawati had
made contact with Kanshi Ram in 1977 while she was a student, and had
gradually been drawn into his organisation. Her opponents in Bijinor
included Ram Vilas Paswan - the two have had poor relations since this
contest - and Meira Kumar, Jagjivan Ram’s daughter, representing
Congress. Rajiv Gandhi was at the height of his popularity at the time,
and Meira Kumar won the seat easily. But by 1989 the Bahujana Samaj
Party had put in five years of solid organising work in UP and also in
the neighbouring regions of Madhya Pradesh, Punjab, Delhi, and parts of
Haryana. And mean-while the Congress Party had slumped in popularity.
Kanshi Ram had prepared the ground carefully. He had selected
organisers and candidates from a variety of social backgrounds. One of
his organisers was Dr Mahsood Ahmed, a temporary lecturer in history at
Aligarh Muslim University. Mahsood had become disillusioned with
Congress when Indira Gandhi made her infamous tilt towards the Hindus
in the early 1980s (Mahsood interview: 27 November 1995). He joined
BAMCEF and then switched to DS4 in 1983 as a full-time organiser and
fund raiser. Mahsood was later put in charge of the whole of eastern
Uttar Pradesh for the Bahujana Samaj Party.

The years of organisation bore fruit in 1989 and
1991. In the four State Assembly and Parliamentary (Lok Sabha) polls
for Uttar Pradesh between 1989 and 1991 the Bahujana Samaj Party’s
share of the vote varied only marginally between 8.7 and 9.4 per cent.
But this impressive vote produced a disappointing number of seats - in
1989 the party won thirteen out of 425 State Assembly seats, and in
1991 it won twelve. The party won only two Parliamentary seats in 1989,
and one in 1991; Kanshi Ram himself subsequently won a by-election
from UP in 1992. Both the strength and the weakness of the party is
that its primary ‘vote bank’, the Chamars, are relatively evenly spread
across the State. This spread gives the Bahujana Samaj a chance in a
large number of seats, but also make it logically impossible to win
even a single seat without strong support from other communities.
Although it has attracted a measure of Muslim, Backward Caste and other
Scheduled Caste support, it has encountered considerable resistance in
these target communities. We need to look more closely at this
problem.

First, there is the question of why the majority of
Jatavs of western UP deviated from their kinfolk in the eastern part of
the State, and continued to vote Congress in 1989 and 1991. The answer
to this question is not entirely clear. Some have blamed the result on
the poor organising capac-ities of Mayawati - she was in charge of
this region - but the deeper reason may be the Jatavs’ historical
association with B. P. Maurya. In a move of some desperation, Congress
resurrected the 70-year-old Maurya as one of four national
Vice-Presidents in the run-up to the 1996 elections. But by then
Mayawati had become an electorally popular figure in eastern UP. As to
the Scheduled Castes other than the Chamars/Jatavs, only Pasis appear
to have voted for Kanshi Ram’s party in large numbers. The Valmikis
(formerly known as Bhangis) voted solidly for the BJP in the 1993
Assembly elections, and the sole Valmiki in the Lok Sabha elected in
1991 represented the BJP (though in 1980 he had been elected for the
Janata Party). Mangal Ram Premi MP - his biography is sketched in
chapter 8- accounts for the Valmiki support of the BJP by simply
advert-ing to the community’s dislike of the Chamars (Interview: 4
November 1995). The Chamars are more numerous, better educated and more
successful in acquiring reserved positions than the Valmikis, and this
tends to produce resentment. Many of the Dhobis too have recently
voted for the BJP. In short, Kanshi Ram’s party has not solved the
problem of how to mobilise all or even most of the Scheduled Castes.
The problem that dogged Ambedkar has thus repeated itself in Uttar
Pradesh, though Kanshi Ram’s Chamars are both more numerous and
numerically more dominant among the Untouchables than were Ambedkar’s
Mahars in the western part of the country.

Among Backward Castes, Kanshi Ram’s strongest
support has come from the Kurmis. In Bihar, this is an upwardly mobile
peasant commu-nity responsible for several of the worst atrocities
against Dalits. But in Uttar Pradesh the Kurmis are comparatively low on
the scale of prosper-ity. Moreover, they have had a history of
anti-Brahmin radicalism - Shahu Maharaj of Kolhapur remains a source
of inspiration to some of them. And a sprinkling of them had been
members of the Republican Party. The Kurmis could see advantage in being
associated with a party that was not dominated by the more numerous
Yadavs (whose firm affiliation is with Mulayam Singh’s Samajwadi
Party). As to the large number of other Backward Castes in UP, over the
last several years there has been an intense three-way tussle between
the BJP, the Bahujana Samaj Party and the Samajwadi Party to capture
their support. All three have had some success, but perhaps the larger
part of this vote is a floating one that will flow with the main
political current of the time. The last community to consider is the
Muslims. In the aftermath of the destruction of the Babri Masjid the
Muslims have been politically leaderless. They have shunned Congress
for what they see to have been its culpable failure to prevent the
demolition of the mosque, and have given considerable support to
Mulayam Singh’s Samajwadi Party and some support to Kanshi Ram. Thus in
the municipal elections of Uttar Pradesh in November 1995 and in the
national and UP elections of 1996 it seems that UP Muslims were
prepared to vote for whichever party was locally the strongest anti-BJP
force. In short, the politics of post-Congress Uttar Pradesh are
currently cast largely in terms of community vote banks. Political
strategy is a matter of positioning one’s party so as to retain one s
core vote bank and also attract others at the margins. At least as much
as any other player, Kanshi Ram has adapted to this game with
calculating skill.

The great change in the politics of
the Untouchables is that over large parts of India they can no longer
be taken for granted as a dumb vote bank. To a much greater extent
than even a decade ago they have begun to shape their own politics. The
biggest change has been in the north, and the single most potent factor
has been Kanshi Ram. He has given encour-agement to Dalits across
India, even though he has failed to have a major electoral impact
outside a few States of the north. But Kanshi Ram did not fabricate his
own political success from nothing. The times have emi-nently suited
him. While the V. P. Singh Government’s adoption of the Mandal
principles of reservation initially served to displace Kanshi Ram as a
strong advocate of the oppressed, the Mandal factor later worked in his
favour. The Mandal decision served to create and legitimate a new
politics of the disadvantaged, and Kanshi Ram’s later electoral
alliances were creatures of this new political environment. Meanwhile,
the rise of the BJP has obligingly sapped the capacity of Congress to
compete for the Dalit vote.

While Kanshi Ram and Mayawati have been
spectacularly successful in Uttar Pradesh, the success has been built
on dubious foundations and has appeared in danger of collapse at every
point. His strategy has been to build an organisation of his own, and
to use this body to draw votes and even active support from social
groupings beyond his own caste. But major electoral success has
depended on the construction of alliances with other parties, and these
alliances have lacked both principle and stability. Ram Vilas Paswan,
by contrast, has pursued the more cautious route of climbing the ladder
in a broader, socially more heterogeneous, party on the mild left of
Indian politics. He has projected himself as the special leader of
Dalits within this national party. Paswan’s fortunes have risen and
fallen with the position of his party, but his strategy is eminently
more risk averse than that of Kanshi Ram. Like Ambedkar before him,
Kanshi Ram has plotted a difficult route to power.

More generally, it is now abundantly clear that
there can be no single political strategy for Dalits throughout India.
If India had developed a dominant national politics constructed on the
basis of class and relative disadvantage, the situation might be
different. But it is also a mistake to assume that such a politics
would necessarily have taken a form advanta-geous to the Dalits. In
this chapter we have interrogated the record of Indian Marxism in
relation to the Dalits, and found that considerations of caste have
obstinately clung to its processes (as well, for that matter, to those
of the similarly egalitarian faiths of Christianity and Sikhism). The
current fragmentation of party politics means that no party can
realisti-cally hope to command a national majority of the Dalit vote.
But this too is not necessarily unfavourable for the Dalits. It will be
recalled that in the era when they voted overwhelmingly for Congress
their political and social power was considerably less than it is
today. The common political task of the Dalits is to add to their
collective power, but there can be no single strategy that will deliver
this objective.