BJP, RSS holding several community programmes to woo Dalits ahead of UP elections

Home Minister Rajnath Singh enjoys a meal with women belonging to different castes during the 'Untouchability No More' event in New Delhi on Monday.

In a serious bid to woo Dalits in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is all set to mark the 124th birth anniversary of B.R. Ambedkar as 'Samrasta Divas'. The party will hold a massive rally in Patna on Tuesday to coincide with it .

While the party had steamrolled social divisions in the general elections riding the Modi wave, increasing realisation that the upcoming polls in the Hindi heartland would be a different ballgame altogether seems to have galvanised the party into co-opting the Dalit icon and claiming the constituency of the marginsalised.

On the other hand, the RSS and its affiliates have hit the ground running in the hinterland. The Sangh Parivar has been running several programmes or 'sewa prakalps' centred around community dining, socialising with Dalits, mainstreaming manual scavengers and holding awareness drives through pamphlets or 'Jagaran Patraks' in Dalit 'bastis' and villages.

"Dalit leaders too will share the dias with party president Amit Shah and Home Minister Rajnath Singh. The massive response that we have got from UP and Bihar in the membership drive that is still on is very encouraging. We will go all out for direct contact and uplift of the Dalit community," said BJP national secretary Srikant Sharma.

Earlier in the day, Home Minister Rajnath Singh broke bread with members of the Valmiki community who have left manual scavenging at Mavalankar Hall in the Capital on Monday.

The internal thinking of the party has been to stem the shifting of the Dalit vote bank in favour of the Congress or the Samajwadi Party (SP) as it feels that the community is no more under the aegis of the Mayawatiled BSP in UP. The same holds true for the newly-founded Janata Parivar, with Nitish Kumar and Lalu Yadav joining forces, which poses the danger of a formidable Yadava-Kurmi-Muslim combination for the upcoming Bihar Assembly polls. "The challenge for the party is to attract the Dalit vote bank to its side or fracture it," said a party source.

While the BJP is pursuing the political agenda of Dalit politics at the Centre in a big way, it is the RSS and its affiliates that have been toiling on the ground to affect the social aspect of it

Rashtriya Sewa Bharti, the welfare of Sangh that is running several programmes for social uplift of Dalits and tribals across the country, maintains that there has never been any disagreement between the RSS approach in the matter and that of Ambedkar. It claims a deep friendship between Ambedkar and one of the most prolific RSS pracharaks, late Dattopant Thengdi. "The two were in fact very good friends and used to discuss the problem of casteism in their private conversations. In fact, caste has never been a part of our social discourse," said Sundar Laxman, national convenor.

The Rashtriya Sewa Bharti is going to every village and slum to educate people against casteism and mainstream Dalits and other poorer sections of the society. Communal or social dining has been the mainstay of these efforts. "In shakhas, people from the Valmiki community were entrusted to serve food as a symbol of their equality with others," said a senior RSS functionary.

"We have asked the shakhas not to go just for communal dining but to organise a monthly event in which people from all the communities and castes are invited to dine together. The local shakhas have been told to maintain a complete list of members in their vicinity," said Rajiv Tuli, Delhi state prachar pramukh.

"We have also started 'kutumb prabodhan' or family meetings in which we invite people across the social spectrum to meet along with their families for a deeper and more complete interaction," Tuli added. "Shakhas that are operating around bastis or slums have been especially reinvigorated," he said.