New Delhi: In the summer of 2019, Shravan Kumar Nirala ended his two-decade-old relationship with the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP). Nirala had served as a zonal coordinator of the Mayawati-run party for many years in eastern Uttar Pradesh when he quit a few weeks after the Lok Sabha election in which the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) got the better of a combined challenge by the Samajwadi Party (SP) and the BSP. Nirala was disgruntled with the party after it abruptly changed his role, practically ending his electoral prospects in the 2022 assembly election. But there was more to it. There had been brewing disenchantment with the lacklustre functioning style of party supremo Mayawati and the dilution of the Bahujan ideology under her watch.
AJM National President Shravan Kumar Nirala. Photo: Facebook
Nirala went on to form his own little outfit. Staying true to his Ambedkarite moorings, he named it the Ambedkar Jan Morcha (AJM). “The BSP under Manyawar Kanshiram Saheb honoured the party worker. The BSP under Mayawati treats its coordinators as agents tasked with collecting funds,” Adarsh Nirala, Sharavan Kumar’s brother, said talking to The Wire. “Behenji attends election rallies in helicopters but doesn’t participate in the dukh dard (difficult times) of the Dalit society. She has no sympathy left for the community. And if any Dalit group tries to do something, she labels it a BJP-RSS agent.”
Since its formation in 2019, AJM has been active in raising the issue of land distribution for Dalits and has spoken against atrocities targeted at the community, in and around Gorakhpur, chief minister Yogi Adityanath’s political bastion. But it still remained relatively unknown at the state level.
All that changed on October 10, when a peaceful demonstration organised by the AJM – to demand one acre of land for each landless Dalit, Other Backward Class (OBC) and Muslim family – was met with criminal proceedings by the local administration.
Gorakhpur police arrested Nirala and at least eight other activists and journalists, almost all of them from the Dalit community, on charges of unlawful assembly, vandalising official property, abusing, threatening and assaulting the staff inside the divisional commissioner’s office premises where the demonstration was held.
The demonstration – ‘Dera dalo, Ghera dalo andolan’ – had a huge presence of women from rural Dalit communities waving blue Ambedkarite flags. Even though the demonstration was conducted peacefully, with no overt signs of any violence, the activists were booked for rioting, criminal intimidation and causing damage to public property, and other sections of the Indian Penal Code. The more serious charges of attempt to murder and criminal conspiracy – which ensured they would not be liable for bail from a chief judicial magistrate court and would have to spend some days in jail before applying in a sessions court – were added to the FIR later. The AJM has denied all charges as fabricated.
Among those arrested was 79-year-old retired India Police Services officer-turned-human rights defender S.R. Darapuri, a Parkinson’s disease patient who had attended the demonstration for just one hour as a special invitee owing to his record of speaking up for land rights.
A French scholar, Heinold Valentine Jean Roger, who was visiting India to research poverty was also arrested for allegedly visiting UP without a valid permit and violating the provisions of the Foreigners Act, 1946. He was at the demonstration filming the events for a project he was working on when the police apprehended him.
“He had got in touch with one of our office-bearers and travelled to Gorakhpur to record how women participate in mass movements on the ground. He thought the demonstration, which was attended mainly by rural women, would be a good place to see it,” said lawyer Vineet Kumar, the national vice president of the AJM.
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Movement for land rights
The AJM views the arrests in Gorakhpur as an attempt by the government to tarnish its image and nip in the bud their movement for land rights for Dalits. Land rights for the marginalised communities, especially Dalits, have been the mainstay of AJM’s politics since its inception. The AJM, which has grown to become an unregistered political party, often cites the example of the experiment by the Telangana government which had promised to provide Dalits with the minimum required agricultural land, in its case 3 acres, to make a living.
Several memorandums drafted by Nirala over the past four years show that he believes that distributing land to the landless Dalits, OBCs and Muslims would play a big role in tackling caste-based economic inequalities. If Dalits have land for subsistence, they would be able to earn a living with dignity and not face atrocities, Nirala argued in a recent letter addressed to President Droupadi Murmu. On October 10, the AJM handed the letter to the district magistrate of Gorakhpur at the end of the protest.
“Hume mazdoor nahi, hume malik banna hain (We don’t want to just live as labourers, we also want to own land),” Nirala thundered at the October 10 protest. Taking a dig at the BJP’s attempts to lure the Dalit voters with piecemeal welfare initiatives, Nirala invited Adityanath to attend the dharna.
“We don’t want five kilos of free ration. We want our one-acre land. We are not beggars. We are the mulnivasi (indigenous people) of the country, its poor and working-class people,” he said.
Prior to this event, the AJM held two other major demonstrations on the same issue over the past year. In December 2022, it convened a Dalit Adhikar Rally and in March this year, staged a demonstration near the Gorakhpur commissioner’s office. In addition to their demand that each landless Dalit, OBC and Muslim family be provided one acre of land, the AJM agenda also includes the demand that the government provide Rs 25 lakh to each Dalit family to start a new business. The party is also in favour of making education and health facilities free for all castes and classes, and funding Dalit students to study abroad.
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While Nirala is the national president, its state president Seema Gautam was also named in the FIR and faces serious charges. The AJM also runs the Ambedkar Pathshala Sewa Trust which purchases stationery items and donates them to poor children. Vineet Kumar says the AJM carries this out from donations collected from Dalits who are in government services and those who are slightly better off and able to contribute to the community.
The AJM chief has displayed political ambitions. In 2022, Nirala contested the assembly election from the Bansgaon constituency in Gorakhpur. He fared poorly, getting only 1,147 votes.
Adarsh, Nirala’s brother, says he formed an independent outfit AJM rather than joining any of the other parties, SP, BJP or Congress, as they lacked ideological conviction when it came to working for Dalits. “Joining a mainstream party that doesn’t give Dalits their independent voice would be akin to a pet dog with a collar around its neck,” he said.
Adarsh says the crackdown against AJM for holding a demonstration for land rights was an assault on not just the fledgling outfit but also on the Dalit and backward caste people who attended the meeting to voice their support for the cause. “Ultimately, their voice is being suppressed. Had we been an upper caste outfit, the administration would not have displayed such a mindset towards us. BJP leaders visit Dalit homes to eat khichdi and are holding Dalit sammelans (conferences) these days. But they don’t want to engage with the ground reality of the community,” said Adarsh.
Explaining the AJM’s rise
The rise of the AJM can be seen through the prism of the larger disintegration of the BSP-led Dalit politics in the state.
Dalits form 21.5% of UP’s population. In absolute terms, the state has the largest Dalit population in the country. Over the last few decades, the BSP under Kanshiram claimed to best represent their political aspirations and achieve considerable success. In 2007, BSP under Mayawati shattered all perceptions and stormed to power in the state with a full majority. She was the first Dalit woman to do so in the country. However, the remarkable journey and movement of the BSP have withered over the last decade.
Mayawati’s first appearance after the defeat in the elections at the BSP office in Lucknow. Photo: BSP Office
Today, the BSP has been reduced to one MLA in the 403-member assembly in UP. But this is not just about its electoral performance. There is an overall sense of lethargy and decay, with the BSP today reduced to a nepotistic electoral agency bereft of direction and second-rung leadership. Mayawati’s ill-conceived strategy of appeasing upper caste voters, especially Brahmins, has also alienated her from the BSP’s ideological support base.
Mayawati hardly steps out, other than attending a handful of election rallies every other year, where she reads out long, dreary statements. She even discourages her party workers from participating in mass movements or ground demonstrations arguing that Dalit youth risk damaging their careers due to the criminal cases they might be slapped with. On December 6, 2021, on the death anniversary of Ambedkar, she reiterated her aversion to agitational politics, by saying, “The constitution can be safeguarded only through attaining power and not by agitating on the streets.”
Forces like the AJM have emerged from the vacuum created by the inaction and ideological bankruptcy of the BSP. They are filling gaps left by the BSP by appealing to the bottled-up frustration of Dalit youth.
In 2017, the Bhim Army led by Ambedkarite lawyer Chandra Shekhar Aazad rose to prominence in Saharanpur in western UP under similar circumstances. The prime attraction of the Bhim Army – now metamorphosed into a political party named Aazad Samaj Party Kanshi Ram – was its focus on direct action to protect and restore the dignity of Dalits. This was on display in the clashes between Dalits and Thakurs in Saharanpur’s Shabbirpur village in May 2017, after Dalits refused to allow a procession by the dominant community to mark the birth anniversary of Maharana Pratap following which their houses were set on fire. The Adityanath government had blamed the Bhim Army for inciting the violence, even sending Azad to jail under the National Security Act, while the outfit claimed that the government was targeting it to malign their movement.
Bhim Army chief Chandra Shekhar Aazad campaigned for his party candidate in the upcoming by-polls in Bulandshahr, Uttar Pradesh. Photo: twitter/@BhimArmyChief
YouTubers also arrested
Among those arrested in Gorakhpur after the October 10 protest were the YouTubers from the Dalit community who were there to cover the event. The AJM views mainstream media suspiciously. “The media is under the control of the Manuvadis. But they have no control over social media. This is why they have also targeted these three YouTubers who had come to Gorakhpur, one from Sant Kabir Nagar and two from Delhi, to report on the demonstration,” said Brijeshwar Nishad, a lawyer and AJM spokesperson.
After the police crackdown started on October 11, a day after the demonstration, local print media started publishing unverified reports without proper attribution, linking the protestors to a Leftist conspiracy and foreign funding.
Nishad points out that the October 10 demonstration ended peacefully with the district magistrate receiving their memorandum and assuring action. “The FIR and the arrests were a message that those who stand against this government will go to jail. They want to break the movement and malign the image of our organisation through baseless allegations of foreign funding,” said Nishad.
The FIR lodged in the case names 13 persons and includes 10-15 unknown persons. Among those identified are writer Siddharth Ramu, lawyer Jai Bhim Prakash, AJM office-bearer Rishi Kapoor Anand, independent journalist Neelam Baudh, and former Peace Party MLA Ayub Ansari.
According to the FIR, lodged on the complaint of a lower-rank staff at the commissioner’s office, the protestors indulged in dhakka mukki (pushing and shoving) with the staff after they asked them to clear the premises, citing the imposition of Section 144. The FIR accuses the protestors of abusing the officials, obstructing them, tearing government documents inside the office and damaging flower pots on the premises by kicking them. They were also accused of threatening to kill the staff.
A local court on October 26 heard the bail pleas of those arrested and reserved its order for October 28. Most of them have been in jail since October 12.