How Will The BJP Now Ask For Support From The Dalits?
Editor-in-Chief of indiacommentary.com. Current Affairs analyst and political commentator.
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By Sunil Garodia
First publised on 2020-10-02 20:27:19
About the Author
Editor-in-Chief of indiacommentary.com. Current Affairs analyst and political commentator.
View all posts by this Author
As the protests against the Hathras brutality gather momentum and moves to Jantar Mantar in Delhi, ordinary citizens are being joined by politicians from most parties that oppose the BJP.Leaders of Left parties and Chandrasekhar Azad of the Bhim Army is there. Delhi chief minister is scheduled to join later in the evening. Thousands of ordinary people have also converged at the spot to register their protest at the way the Dalit girl was brutalized and the way the Yogi Adityanath administration cremated her body in the dead of the night without informing her family. Earlier in the day, a Trinamool Congress delegation led by Rajya Sabha MP Derek O'Brien was stopped from entering Hathras. O'Brien was pushed to the ground and woman members of the team were manhandled. Hathras has been turned into a fortress. The victim's family has alleged that their mobile phones have been confiscated by the police and they are not allowed to step out of their homes.
What is the UP government trying to do? A Dalit girl was gang-raped and grievously injured. She battled for her life for 15 days and then succumbed to her injuries. The culprits have been identified. They are upper caste men with a history of harassing the girl's family. Until now, their political affiliations have not been established. Instead of proceeding in the matter as per law, the UP police 'hijacked' the victim's body from a hospital in Delhi and cremated it hurriedly at 2.30 am in the morning. Due process was thrown to the winds. Who is the UP police trying to protect?
With the incident snowballing into a major controversy, it is now clear that the consolidation of the Hindu vote, for which Amit Shah worked so assiduously in 2014 and which produced amazing results in the general elections that year (with the BJP sweeping the state), is crumbling brick by brick under the stewardship of Yogi Adityanath. The BJP might see the incident as a one-off that has been hijacked by the opposition to give a bad name to the administration but the fact is that Dalit women are being regularly raped across UP. Justice is being denied to most of them. Perpetrators are roaming free and families are being pressurized into withdrawing their complaints. UP is turning into a upper caste bastion and a police state.
The BJP can thanks its stars that the opposition in UP is in no position to take advantage of its mistakes and start a people's agitation. Both the Samajvadi Party and the Bahujan Samaj Party are in a state of flux. They neither have the leadership nor the resources to take on the BJP. Have Akhilesh Yadav or Mayawati even thought about going to Hathras to meet the victim's family? The Congress has no one apart from the Delhi-based Rahul and Priyanka. Hence, the BJP can get away with turning Hathras into a fortress or bullying the victim's family or stopping politicians from going to Hathras. But the anger that is building up among the backward classes means that the BJP can kiss goodbye to Dalit votes. Or is it banking on the short memory of the people and the innate ability of the politicians to provide lollipops before elections to swing them back?
