Rahul (12 page)

The surprise visit to Aligarh in August 2010 was one of the many such trademark visits Rahul has made in Uttar Pradesh. In Tappal, a village in Aligarh which had become the epicentre of the protests, he backed the farmers’ demand for higher compensation for land acquired by the state government to build the 165-kilometre Noida–Agra Yamuna Expressway. The expressway is a project dear to Mayawati. He stood listening to the farmers in the heavy downpour and assured them that the Congress was on their side.

If there are outright confrontations, there are also subtle statements. In both cases, the purpose is often dual: to connect with the common man and, at the same time, ruffle the opponents. Despite the jibes, Rahul does not spare any chance to show himself as the ordinary man’s leader—whether that means sitting in the stands rather than the VIP enclosure in the stadium during the Commonweath Games, or turning down the offer to spend the night in a plush suite at Yadavindra Gardens, Pinjore, opting, instead, for a regular room. Or, stopping on a busy Delhi road to help an accident victim and rush him to hospital.

With time and repeated efforts, Rahul’s confidence has grown. Malcolm Gladwell’s theory—if you want to shine, spend 10,000 hours honing your skills—seems to have worked for him. For many who have seen him in action, Brand Rahul now stands for a silent, serious man who wants to pull up the India that is lagging behind. He may be an outlier, but the question is whether the brand he has slowly built can outlast the contempt and the cynicism that twenty-first century India reserves for its politicians.

A small, weathered portrait of Babasaheb Bhimrao Ambedkar overlooks the entrance to Savita Saroj and Radhe Shyam Pasi’s house. Their village, Hasua Survan, lies in the Jagdishpur block of a district that was created on 1 July 2010 and named Chhatrapati Shahuji Maharaj Nagar. The portrait hangs above the picture of the Hindu god Shiva. It has been there for years. It was there when Savita became the village
pradhan
, the chief, in 2000. It was there when the young, first-time MP of Amethi, Rahul Gandhi, came calling on 12 October 2004 and spent an entire afternoon in the Pasi-dominated village. He learnt some important lessons that day: One, Ambedkar’s portraits are common in this village with three out of every four homes belonging to a Dalit family. Two, Ambedkar’s place in a Dalit home is a notch above that of a god.

‘He sat with us and talked to the village women. There were more women than men and he refused to sit on the chair we brought him. He said he was there to know our problems and would know them better only if he sat on the ground like us,’ recalled Savita, pointing to the white plastic chair on which Rahul Gandhi had declined to sit. Instead, he had squatted on the cement floor surrounded by the women of the village. She spoke about how ‘Rahul bhaiyya’ listened patiently and took notes. The government primary school in the village had had only one teacher for 200 students. It had four now. Radhe Shyam believes the improvement has something to do with the young MP’s visit. But a lot more, he said, remains to be done. His children now go to private schools because the government school has classes only up to Class V. They have outgrown it and must cycle or walk to another school some distance away if they wish to study further. ‘The village still doesn’t have an
anganwadi
centre. [Successive] state governments have not done enough,’ Radhe Shyam said in April 2010, on the eve of Rahul Gandhi’s rally at Ambedkarnagar.

It was no ordinary rally and, in organizing it, Rahul was applying the lessons he had learned years ago at Radhe Shyam Pasi’s village. The rally was held on 14 April, on Ambedkar Jayanti, in a town not only named after the Dalit icon but also considered the UP Chief Minister Mayawati’s bastion. It had flagged off ten chariots which fanned out into Uttar Pradesh to take on her might and break the success formula of the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP). The idea was to replace that with the Congress’s own formula: To rule UP, play the Ambedkar card and divide the Dalit vote.

The visit to the Pasi village had happened a long time ago, when Rahul was just starting out as a politician, a few months after he fought and won the Lok Sabha election of 2004. This was long before the Opposition parties accused him of visiting Dalit homes for political gain (only to ape him later). It was long before the Congress began working on regaining power in UP in 2012. But it was because of visits like these that the Congress eventually found the courage to take on the BSP.

The rally was a direct affront to the BSP and its politics, showcasing the Congress intention to overthrow it. ‘We plan to oust Mayawati from her seat of power in the next assembly elections. We plan to make the Dalits and all the other communities in the state aware of her misrule and to save the state from a tyrant,’ said Rita Bahuguna Joshi, UP Congress chief, revealing for the first time her leader’s grand plan to wrest power in the state. ‘Corruption and anarchy have halted the development of UP. No wonder Mayawati is uncomfortable with our
rath yatra
,’ she added.

In the run-up to the rath yatras, there was tension between the workers of the two parties. They almost fought over the placement of posters and billboards in the district. An early set of posters for Rahul’s 14 April rally—which featured Congress leaders prominently, but not Ambedkar—was criticized by the BSP. The second set of posters from the Congress organizers included not only Ambedkar but also the Party’s long-standing Dalit face, Babu Jagjivan Ram. Seniors leaders hurled accusations at each other. The state president of the BSP and state cooperative minister Swami Prasad Maurya, said: ‘The people of the country are aware of the Congress conspiracy to keep them ignorant and poor. So, such rath yatras don’t bother us.’ Despite its nonchalance, the BSP launched a counter agitation. Maurya described it as ‘a movement across the state to expose the Congress and tell the people how the Centre is using the CBI and the income tax department to victimize Behenji’.

While the Congress launched a drive to connect with the Dalits, the BSP launched a state-wide campaign against Sonia Gandhi’s dream legislation, the Women’s Reservation Bill. Party leaders went around telling the BSP’s core constituents—the Dalits—that the bill would harm their interests. In July 2010, Mayawati struck back at Rahul Gandhi for daring to begin his battle to oust her in Ambedkarnagar. She carved out a new district that included parts of Rahul’s and his mother’s constituencies, Amethi and Rae Bareli, and christened it Chhatrapati Shahuji Maharaj Nagar.

The Congress hopes that as the 2012 assembly elections approach it would have done enough to ensure that Dalits weren’t just Dalits anymore—that they would be split into groups—and that not all groups would be equally committed followers of the BSP. Take the example of Ram Tirath Pasi, a small-time but committed politician in Jagdishpur. At the Public Works Department’s
dak
bungalow at the block headquarters, he spends time listening to the woes of fellow Dalits. Meeting people, discussing their problems and attempting to solve them has been a way of life for Ram Tirath since 1978 when, as a young undergraduate at the Ganpat Sai Degree College, he had gone to Pratapgarh to listen to Mayawati’s mentor Kanshi Ram, then the BSP chief. Kanshi Ram has spoken of a Dalit revolution. After graduation, Ram Tirath joined Kanshi Ram first as part of his social outfit, the Dalit Shoshit Samaj Sangharsh Samiti, and later as a full-time activist of the All India Backward and Minority Communities Employees’ Federation.

It was from the Jagdishpur assembly constituency in 1984 that a young Ram Tirath—not even thirty then—had contested on the ticket of the newly formed BSP. He lost, but he managed to get over five thousand votes. Politics became a part of his life. While Kanshi Ram was still alive but ailing, and as Mayawati slowly took control of the Party, Ram Tirath moved out forever. He said, ‘The BSP today is not the BSP I was part of. There is unrest among the Dalits over Mayawati’s approach to politics. Her formula of building a
sarvjan samaj
is obviously at the cost of the Bahujan Samaj.’ Kanshi Ram referred to the Dalits and the downtrodden as the ‘
bahujan samaj
’ because their numbers exceeded the population of the upper castes. He looked to the consolidation of the oppressed to wrest power for the Dalits. Mayawati, however, realized that Dalit votes alone were not enough. During the 2007 assembly elections, she adopted the slogan of ‘sarvjan samaj’ and roped in the Brahmins and the Muslims to get the clear majority she needed to become chief minister of UP. Ram Tirath insists that it is the Dalits who have brought Mayawati to power each time she won, while it is the Brahmins—far fewer in number—who have been responsible for the woes of the Dalits. ‘How can this equation ever make sense to a poor, marginalized Dalit?’ he asks.

As Ram Tirath delved deeper into the reasons for his disenchantment with Mayawati’s politics, it emerged that Mayawati had been partial to her own caste, the Jatavs or the Chamars, he said. ‘We did the hard work but the benefits went to others. When Mayawati filled the backlog of vacancies left behind by the Congress and the BJP governments, she filled them with Jatav candidates.’ Ram Tirath had no proof of his allegation, but in politics, perception is enough to tilt the scales. Statistics and proof are for analysts, not voters.

One out of every five people in UP is a Dalit. Besides being of Mayawati’s caste, Chamars or Jatavs form the biggest chunk of UP’s Scheduled Caste population: 56.3 per cent according to the 2001 census. The Pasis, at 16 per cent, are the second largest group of Dalits in the state. Together with the Dhobi, the Kori and the Balmiki, the two castes form the bulk of UP’s Dalit population—87.5 per cent, to be precise.

Among the Dalits, too, caste matters. When the Congress’s P.L. Punia won the Lok Sabha seat in 2009 from Barabanki, newspapers widely reported that the BSP chief had spent more than half an hour of a meeting held to assess the Lok Sabha results talking about Punia. ‘I wonder if you know that Punia is not a Chamar. He is a Dhanuk from Haryana,’ Mayawati is said to have told her party leaders. A former bureaucrat, Punia had been Mayawati’s principal secretary during her earlier stints as chief minister in 1995, 1997 and 2002. Differences developed between the two at the time of the Taj Corridor case. Taj Corridor was a project to upgrade tourist facilities near the Taj Mahal in which Mayawati’s government was charged with corruption. Rahul Gandhi and his advisers on UP pulled off a coup of sorts by getting Punia on their side. The latter had worked closely with Kanshi Ram and Mayawati. Rather too closely for Mayawati’s comfort. He moved from being Mayawati’s trusted lieutenant to becoming a crucial player in Rahul Gandhi’s 2012 assembly election plans in UP. On 14 April 2010, he led one of the ten yatras flagged off by Rahul through Dalit-dominated areas.

In Punia’s words:

Our agenda is clear: To talk about the Congress’s long-standing commitment to the Dalits. We will expose the BSP’s nefarious plots in caste politics, and its corruption during different stints. In the twenty-one years since the state last had a Congress government in power, things have gone bad. We will talk about this and expose Mayawati’s rule. We are also going to talk about the Congress’s contribution to the progress of the nation—economic development, the IT and telecom revolutions.

Punia thinks he was largely responsible for building up Mayawati’s image of an able administrator. ‘People say her first three stints as chief minister were good because governance was my responsibility,’ he said in a self-congratulatory tone.

Towards the end of 2010, the UPA government appointed Punia chairman of the National Commission for Scheduled Castes (NCSC). He assumed the role of a man on a mission. He proclaimed he was fighting with all his might to eradicate untouchability. Only, a large part of that might has been directed at catalyzing the process of making the Congress the principal challenger to Mayawati in the UP assembly elections of 2012.

Punia had taken it upon himself to educate the Dalits of the state about their rights and also about the policies of the Congress-led UPA government at the Centre. As chairman of the NCSC, he got the commission to organize awareness camps in every district of Uttar Pradesh where he met the Dalits and informed them about the schemes launched by the Centre and the safeguards provided for them in the Constitution. But more interestingly, through these awareness programmes, Punia also assessed the mood of the Dalit votes in the state and reported back to the Party high command. At the end of the exercise, he submitted reports to his party about its prospects in the coming elections.

Between December 2010 and February 2011, the commission conducted eighteen awareness camps in UP—one each at all the divisional headquarters, each division comprising a few districts. The commission’s report on the outcome stated that the local Congress had lost an opportunity by not using these camps to its advantage. ‘Schedule for the meetings was drawn in advance and intimation sent to the AICC general secretary/secretary-in-charge, UP Congress Committee president, all MPs, MLAs and important Congress leaders,’ Punia said in the report, lamenting the fact that Congress leaders and workers had largely stayed away from the awareness camps.

The report spoke of a strong ‘anti-Mayawati’ sentiment in the state ‘which the Congress must capitalize on. Very large number of cases of Dalit atrocities came which were not registered with the police and in most cases of atrocities BSP functionaries and leaders were the main culprits.’ When asked, Punia showed no qualms about using the commission’s machinery to further the interests of the party he belonged to. Recounting his meeting with the Gandhis, Punia said, ‘I submitted the report personally to madam (Sonia Gandhi) and Rahulji. He said, “Continue aggressively with your effort and let me know if you need my help, I am there.”’

To add to the BSP government’s woes, Punia enjoys the privilege of being a state guest when he visits the state because as NCSC chairman he is accorded the rank of a cabinet minister. In fact, the Mayawati government decided to amend the UP State Guest Rules, 1961, under which Punia enjoys guest status. Mayawati makes no bones about her dislike of Punia, and he makes no effort either to hide his contempt for her. Punia claimed that she has been gunning for him ever since they fell out.

She put eighteen of her ministers on the job to make sure that I did not win the election, but I did. The ministers were from all castes and religions. She wanted to influence the voters of Barabanki on the basis of caste and religion, yet I won by 1.68 lakh votes, and the BSP candidate was relegated to the third place.

Punia has accused the Mayawati government of misusing central funds meant for Dalit welfare, and the NCSC has issued notices. ‘When I was in the government, I used to look after the Dalit agenda. The villages were never starved of funds,’ he said. In his assessment, voters in UP were moving towards the Congress again but there was much to be done. ‘The Party has to work very systematically and project itself as a viable alternative that is fit to win in all constituencies,’ he continued, adding: ‘If the Congress projects a Dalit leader, that will quicken the process of weaning Dalits away [from the BSP].’ He didn’t need to say which Dalit leader he had in mind.

There was already a sense of unrest among the Dalits in the state due to Mayawati’s style of governance. Combine that with Rahul Gandhi’s visits to Dalit homes, and the Congress might just come up with a winning formula, said R.K. Chaudhary, a Pasi leader and long-time associate of Kanshi Ram. Chaudhary was once a minister in Mayawati’s cabinet, but was thrown out of the BSP in 2001. ‘When a leader goes to the people, he gains,’ Chaudhary said. He felt that the growing influence of Brahmins in the BSP had forced the Dalits to rethink their support of Mayawati and, with the right moves, the Congress might just be able to forge a new and effective alliance. Though Chaudhary did not join the Congress, Rahul got the Party to extend support to his candidature from Mohanlalganj during the 2009 elections. The seat went to the Samajwadi Party (SP), but the foundation was laid for an alliance between the Pasis and the Congress.