Chandigarh: Punjab’s large Dalit population is once again in the limelight ever since the Shiromani Akali Dal, a Jat dominated party, stepped into an alliance with the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) – a party formed to represent Dalits and other marginalised caste groups – for the state’s assembly polls which are due early next year.
Rattled by the alliance, the Congress government in Punjab last Friday took two crucial decisions to woo members of the Scheduled Castes (SCs) in the state. It decided to regularise the services of nearly 4,000 safai karamcharis and other sanitation workers in various municipalities of the state.
Besides, it decided to clear some of the pending SC post-matric scholarship dues of private educational institutions for the 2017-20 period. Citing the delay in disbursal of the scholarship, private institutions had announced that they would hold back the roll numbers of nearly 2 lakh SC students enrolled under the scheme.
SAD president Sukhbir Singh Badal had already announced that a Dalit would be made the deputy chief minister if his party is elected, in an apparent bid to consolidate Dalit voters ahead of the election.
The BJP, which will be going solo for the first time in Punjab after the SAD broke away to oppose the farm laws, is also making moves to appeal to Dalits.
Police officers try to stop SAD and BSP workers during their protest demanding arrest of health minister Balbir Singh for alleged vaccine scams. Photo: @officeofssbadal/Twitter
Dalit voters are crucial for all mainstream parties. Of the state’s approximately 3 crore population, nearly one-third – 32% – are Dalits, as per the 2011 Census. This makes Punjab the state with the highest percentage of Dalits as a share of the population.
The strength in numbers of Dalits has not translated into proportional electoral representation. Of the 15 chief ministers who have ruled the state since independence, none are Dalits. Before its bifurcation in 1966, three of Punjabs CMs were of Hindu origin. Since then, almost all CMs – except Giani Jail Singh – are from the Jat Sikh community, which comprises not more than 21-25% of the state’s population.
Giani Jail Singh of the Congress, who headed the state between 1972 and 1977, was from the Ramgarhia community, which is listed as an other backward classes (OBC) community in Punjab.
Why have Dalits not climbed the political ladder despite their large numbers?
Manjit Singh, a retired sociology professor and former head of the Ambedkar Chair at Panjab University, told The Wire that politics is not a numbers game. He said the traditional ruling class continues to occupy powerful positions due to their money power, better education and higher status within the society.
Political reservation has also not worked. Of the 117 assembly seats in Punjab, 34 are reserved seats. But leaders from the Dalit community were not given charge of important ministries, in any government. Even if a few leaders managed to rise, the community per se was not empowered, Manjit Singh added.
He said, “The power structure in our country has been such that marginalised castes are used as a vote bank but are not socially and economically empowered. It is obvious that if they gain strength, they will emerge as political opponents to the ruling class and challenge their hegemony.”
Former IRS officer Lekh Raj Nayyar, who is currently working with a Jalandhar-based NGO to promote Ambedkar’s ideology, said that by and large, the Dalits of Punjab do not own agricultural land or businesses. A majority of them are farm labourers or daily wage workers.
He said that while the SAD-BSP leadership is now promising to bring the state’s disadvantaged groups into mainstream politics, the problem is that successive governments did not address basic issues such as land reforms and socio-economic empowerment.
Farmers in a field of wheat crop in Punjab. Photo: REUTERS/Ajay Verma
Political preferences of Dalits
Though the Dalits form the largest caste group in Punjab, they are not a monolithic group. Different castes and groups in different regions have their own political preferences and should not be seen as one single bloc, experts say.
The Punjab government has notified as many as 39 SC castes in the state. Some of them are numerically large, while many are smaller groups.
For instance, nearly one-third of the Dalit population in Punjab is comprised of Mazhabi Sikhs, who are linked to the agricultural economy in Punjab’s Malwa (South-East part of the state) and Majha area (Amritsar, Taran Taran, Gurdaspur and Pathankot).
Many of them live in extremely poor economic conditions and are landless farm labourers. They depend on the landed peasantry, who constitute the ruling class in the state, for work. The education levels among Mazhabi Sikhs are also believed to be poor.
In urban areas, Valmikis (10-12% of the total Dalit population) form the majority of Dalits. Many from the community still perform traditional caste-based occupations like sanitation work, through contractual jobs in municipal bodies. They too live in poor economic and social conditions.
A collection of Dalit groups lives in Punjab’s Doaba region (Jalandhar, Kapurthala, Hoshiarpur and Nawanshahr districts), who traditionally are artisans and form the largest chunk among Punjabi Dalits (40% of the total Dalit population). There are several castes which make up this number, including Chamars, Ad Dharmis, Ramdasias, Ravidasias, Ramdasia Sikhs and Ravidasia Sikhs.
Over the years, members of these communities have seen relative upliftment compared to their counterparts in Malwa and Majha areas, mainly due to overseas migration and access to education.
Ad Dharmi Dalits, who traditionally were leather tanners and later became part of the Ad-Dharm movement in the 1920s and espoused a distinct religious identity, have better education levels. Many of them are in the civil services or are engineers and doctors.
Former Punjab cadre IAS officer S.R. Ladhar, who hails from the Dalit community, told The Wire that SCs in Punjab may constitute one-third of the total population, but there has not been political consolidation.
He said that the Manuvad ideology of social hierarchy, which has long divided upper and lower castes in India, even manifests within different caste groups. One group may consider itself better placed than another and marriages between these groups are also not a common practice, Ladhar said. He also said that Punjab’s political parties have exploited these social tensions to their benefit.
For instance, the SAD often wooed Mazhabi Sikhs. On the other hand, Dalits in Doaba traditionally supported the Congress, before shifting towards the BSP and then again gearing back to support the Congress. This could be seen among other castes too, he said.
Punjab chief minister Captain Amarinder Singh. Photo: Twitter/Amarinder Singh
He said some political parties offered reservation within reservation for Mazhabis in government employment, upsetting other Dalit communities.
“But in that process, only a few Dalit leaders gained prominence. There are Dalit families with second or third generation MLAs and MPs. But the community as a whole did not prosper,” said Ladhar.
He added that in the past, governments offered free ration or scholarships for Dalits. But there has not been tangible social and economic development.
“Physical discrimination against Dalits in Punjab is minimal, primarily because of the impact of Sikhism. But the presence of the feudal system still continues to create a social and economic divide,” the former IAS officer said.
He pointed out that across India, Dalits comprise 15% of the population and their landholdings amount to 8.5% of the total. In Punjab, though nearly one-third of the state’s population is Dalit, the landholding among them is not more than 3.5%.
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Can Dalits rise to the top of the political ladder?
BSP founder Kanshi Ram was born in a Ramdasia Sikh family in Punjab’s Ropar district. He tried to mobilise different Dalit and other marginalised communities after he founded the party in 1984.
The party achieved some success initially, like in the 1992 assembly polls when it won nine seats. In the 1996 parliamentary polls, which it fought in alliance with the SAD, it won three seats. Kanshi Ram himself was among those elected to parliament.
Ronki Ram, a professor of political science at Panjab University in Chandigarh, said Kanshi Ram tried to build a coalition of Dalit communities in Punjab. His successor Mayawati tried to achieve a similar goal in Uttar Pradesh, but Punjab moved to the backburner.
As a result, many BSP leaders shifted to other parties, limiting its presence to a few pockets in the Doaba region. Its vote share too fell drastically from 16% in the 1992 polls to 1.5% in the 2017 polls, said Ronki Ram.
He added that even the present alliance between the SAD and BSP has not gone well among the latter’s local workers as they are unhappy over the seat sharing arrangement. This indicates that the local leadership was not consulted before the alliance was announced, Ram said.
“BSP still has the potential to unite Dalit and other marginalised communities, but it has to work hard and address the issues that prevent this consolidation,” he added.
Ladhar said, “The first step to political representation for the Dalits of Punjab is to follow Dr B.R. Ambedkar’s formula: educate, agitate and organise.”
