vote bank

SAD Inks Pact With BSP in Punjab, Opens Possibility of New Jat-Dalit Coalition

Of the 117 assembly seats, SAD will contest 97 while the BSP will contest 20 seats, mostly from Punjab’s Doaba region, where the party still holds some influence due to its Dalit vote bank.

Chandigarh: Months after pulling out of alliance with Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) over the controversial farm laws, Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) on Saturday formed an alliance with the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) for upcoming Punjab assembly polls due early next year.

Under the new pact, Akali Dal will contest 97 seats while the BSP will field its candidate in 20 seats which are mostly in Punjab’s Doaba region, where the party still holds some influence due to the presence of its core Dalit vote bank.

The sudden political development in Punjab that was kept under wraps for some time is being seen as an electoral compulsion for Punjab’s grand old party that has been struggling hard to revive after its worst ever political defeat in 2017 assembly polls.

The last election was held under shadow of SAD’s alleged mishandling of sacrilege issue that is believed to have dented its core Sikh vote bank. Then polity of the state went for a change due to emergence of a third political front – Aam Aadmi Party.

If this was not enough, its alliance with the saffron party became a burden after the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government at the Centre enacted controversial farm laws, which triggered massive protest among Punjab’s peasantry class that for long has been associated with SAD.

SAD had to snap ties with the BJP, following the farmers’ protest against the new laws.

The alliance with the saffron party had stitched a perfect Hindu-Sikh coalition in Punjab, making it win three out of five state polls held following their pact in 1997.

Will Jat-Dalit combination work?

SAD has realised that ahead of the next assembly elections, an alliance of Jats and Dalits will be necessary for the party’s success. SAD insiders said that the party is working to launch Hindu faces so that it doesn’t lose support of the Hindu vote bank after breaking alliance with the BJP.

For the BSP – that had a considerable influence in state politics in the 1990s but later became a non-player due to lack of winnability factor – it is an opportunity to regain its lost ground in Punjab that has also been the home state of its founder Kansi Ram.

The electoral arithmetic too appears to be in the favour of the new coalition. As per the 2011 census, Punjab has approximately 25% of Jat Sikhs while it has highest percentage of Dalit population in the country at 32%, out of which 60% are aliened to Sikhism while the remaining are Hindus.

Also read: Rift in Punjab BJP as Senior Leaders Ask Central Leadership to Repeal Farm Laws

Hence, the SAD-BSP alliance has a potential to capture at least 57% of the state’s overall vote bank. In the 2017 polls, Congress with 38.5% vote share formed the government in Punjab with a two-third majority.

“It is a winning combination and poised to change the state politics,” SAD’s senior leader Daljit Singh Cheema told The Wire soon after the announcement of their alliance in Chandigarh.

“Last time, we entered into a pact with each other in the 1996 Lok Sabha polls that worked wonders for us. Out of 13 parliamentary seats, we won 11 seats, eight for SAD and three for BSP. It was during this election only that BSP founder Kansi Ram won Hoshiarpur parliamentary constituency,” said Cheema.

He said this new alliance would repeat history and bring a new social paradigm in a state where Dalits will be equal stakeholders in government formation.

Political analyst Pramod Kumar, who is director of Chandigarh-based Institute of Development and Communication, said that SAD’s alliance with the BJP in 1997 was more of a political compulsion than an electoral need. The state then had just come out militancy and alliance was stitched to give the state a long lasting peace. It had to end someday.

“But BSP is SAD’s natural alliance because in Punjab’s agrarian economy, Jats and Dalits are interdependent on each other. The class and caste conflict between Jats and Dalits may be real to some extent here but this alliance is an opportunity to bridge that conflict and empower the communities,” said Pramod.

Kumar believed this alliance may prove a booster for both the parties and change the course of the coming elections. When SAD had a pact with the BSP in the 1996 parliamentary polls, its vote share was just 29%, yet the alliance won all parliamentary seats except two.

He said one may argue for a moment that BSP does not have that much of sway over Dalit population in Punjab as it used to have earlier. From 16% vote share in 1992 state polls, it recorded below 2% vote share in previous 2017 state polls.

“But I believe it is natural for any political party to face such a situation when it is not in position to win elections. But with this new alliance, there is every possibility that BSP will regain its lost ground,” said Pramod.

On how the new combine can win over Hindu vote bank that makes up 38% of total population, he said SAD is a moderate party. During the SAD-BJP alliance, Hindus continued to vote for SAD. “I presume SAD will cultivate new Hindu leadership with its party so that it does not lose them,” he added.

‘Alliance should not be a one-time political opportunity’

A retired professor of sociology from Panjab University, Chandigarh, Manjit Singh, who is former head of Ambedkar chair, said that this alliance should not be a mere political opportunity as it must address the existing concerns of class and caste conflict between Dalits and Jats in Punjab.

He said there is no denying the fact that Dalits in Punjab have extremely poor economic conditions. They are landless and face continuous exploitation in the rural economy. There are examples how panchayats even today are passing resolutions to limit their wages, a sign of economic exclusion.

Also read: After Political Hibernation, Will Navjot Singh Sidhu Emerge as a Key Player in Punjab Congress?

“Then they are in a continuous struggle to reclaim their right over panchayati land. At the social level too, all major Sikh institutions that are mainly under SAD did not work on the ground for social inclusion. That is why we have separate gurdwaras and cremation grounds for Dalits and Jats in villages,” he explained.

He further said if the SAD-BSP alliance is just a ploy to win votes, it may work one or two times but not permanently.

“For it to work longer, we need a serious effort to have a religious acceptability of Dalits among Sikhism. Dalits also must be economically empowered through land reforms. Their housing needs must be addressed like what happened in Kerala many years ago so that they can live dignified lives,” said Manjit Singh.

A change in Congress camp expected

Senior journalist Hamir Singh told The Wire that this SAD-BSP alliance will definitely have some serious political repercussions in the state politics.

He said the alliance may do well in Doaba region where BSP still has strong pockets, and that is why SAD has given 20 seats to the BSP around that area only.

Elsewhere too, the alliance may work since Punjab has a total of 34 reserved seats out of 117 total assembly segments. It may also help tilting the reserved votes in general seats too, given that Dalits have in the past voted for the Akalis when it announced free Atta Dal scheme for them in the 2007 elections, he added.

He said as far as Congress is concerned, it would have wanted the BSP to fight alone in order to divide the Dalit votes. But this alliance that may consolidate the Dalit votes, will definitely increase the worries in the Congress camp.

He said historically speaking, Dalit and Hindus were the main core vote bank for the Congress in Punjab. Jats attached with the party in a big way only after the arrival of Captain Amarinder Singh in the 1990s.

“As several Dalit leaders in the Congress like Shamsher Singh Dhullo are voicing concerns that Dalits are being ignored in the party, we may see some organisational changes in the Congress in a few days’ time. There may be a post of deputy chief minister or acting party chief for Dalit leaders, in order to keep the Dalit vote bank with them,” said Hamir Singh.

But he is of the view that Punjab politics is still in the middle of confusion. It is because the farmers’ protest is not over yet and we don’t know for sure how it will impact Punjab politics in the weeks to come.

What is the SAD-BSP arrangement?

Announcing the tie-up at a press conference, SAD president Sukhbir Singh Badal described it as a new day in the politics of Punjab.

“Today is a historic day, a big turn in Punjab’s politics,” he said in the presence of BSP general secretary Satish Chandra Mishra.

Among the seats which the BSP will contest are Kartarpur Sahib in Jalandhar, Jalandhar-West, Jalandhar-North, Phagwara, Hoshiarpur Urban, Dasuya, Tanda, Mehal Kalan, Nawashehr, Chamkaur Sahib in Rupnagar district, Bassi Pathana, Sujanpur, Pathankot, Ludhiana North Mohali, Amritsar North, Amritsar Central and Payal.

Fact Check: Is Modi’s Claim About Vande Mataram Bhavan Being in Shambles True?

At a meeting in Hooghly, the prime minister launched a scathing attack on the TMC government for allegedly leaving a house where Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay lived “in a very bad shape” for the sake of “appeasement politics”.

Kolkata: On Monday, while addressing a political gathering in Hooghly district of West Bengal, Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched a scathing attack on the state’s Trinamool Congress (TMC) government for having left a house that has been associated with the song ‘Vande Mataram’ “in a very bad shape”. Modi said that the neglect was not incidental, but part of the TMC’s policy of trumping patriotism with the “politics of appeasement”.

The house concerned is situated in the town of Chinsurah, on a bank of the river Hooghly. Chinsurah is on the opposite bank of the town of Naihati where the novelist Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay, who penned ‘Vande Mataram’, was born and brought up. He lived in this house in Chinsurah for five years while working as a deputy collector in the district.

“I have been told that Vande Mataram Bhavan, where Bankim Chandra lived for five years, is in a very bad state. This is the building where he conceived the penning of ‘Vande Mataram’. It is that ‘Vande Mataram’ that injected new life to the freedom struggle, gave new power to our revolutionaries, inspired every people of the country to turn the motherland sujalam, sufalam,” Modi said.

“’Vande Mataram’, these two words, provided fresh awakening to the countrymen living hopelessly under foreign rule. Not maintaining the place of a person who penned such a song is a great injustice to the people of Bengal,” said the prime minister.

He then took digs at the state government at its ‘vote bank politics’ for the alleged neglect.

“And there is a grand politics behind this injustice. This is that politics that prioritises ‘vote bank’ over patriotism, and appeasement over development for all. This very politics today stops the people of Bengal from worshipping Maa Durga. These people will never be forgiven,” he said.

The song has caused controversy over the years, with some religious groups refusing to sing it.

However, a fact-check about the state of the buildings tells us a different story.

The building, in reality, is well-maintained. Painted in white, it has a bust of the author in front. Even the riverbank along the building has been beautified.

Bankim Chandra’s bust in front of the Vande Mataram Bhavan. Photo: Ananda Das

Talking about the present state of the building, Sankha Subhra Ganguly, a local resident who has been writing on the heritage of Hooghly, said that the building was in perfect shape.

“The building is not in shambles. It’s in regular use and regularly cleaned. There may be scope for improvement in the photo gallery that the building houses, but the building itself is not in bad shape at all,” Ganguly said.

He is part of the group which runs a Facebook page called ‘Hooghly Heritage‘ and lives barely a couple of kilometres from the building concerned.

The building is alternately called Bankim Bhavan and Vande Mataram Bhavan. It is located at Joraghat in Chinsurah town. It has two floors, a ground floor and an underground floor. Because of the underground floor, some locals also call it Patalbari.

The front gate of Vande Mataram Bhavan. Photo courtesy: Hooghly Heritage

Historical evidence says Bankim Chandra moved to this place in 1876. By that time, he had already penned the first two stanzas of ‘Vande Mataram’, which is treated as India’s national song. The first two stanzas appeared separately in Banga Darshan journal, which Bankim himself edited.

Some accounts say he penned the song on Kartik Shukla Navami (November 7) in 1875. At that time, he was residing at his Kanthalpara home in Naihati.

Bankim joined as a deputy magistrate and deputy collector in Hooghly district in March 1876 and relocated to this residence in Chinsurah after a few months.

This residence has found references in several memoirs of Bankim’s contemporary intellectuals, such as Haraprasad Shastri and Chandra Nath Basu. According to Bankim’s biography by Shrish Chandra Chattopadhyay, the former in a July 1880 letter to Nabin Chandra Sen had written that it was while residing at this Chinsurah home that he wrote the novel Ananda Math, of which the whole five-stanza song became part. Ananda Math was published as a book in 1882, a year after Bankim left the Chinsurah house.

The complete view of Vande Mataram Bhavan. Photo courtesy: Hooghly Heritage

Therefore, is it most likely that Bankim penned that last three stanzas of the song – the stanzas that actually created controversy as a probable national song because it was about hailing goddess Durga – which were not accepted as part of India’s national song.

There are also references that the song was first put to tune by one Khetra Nath (or Kshetra Mohan) Mukhopadhyay in this Chinsurah home. However, the two most-known music composers for this song are Jadunath Bhattacharya and Rabindranath Tagore, who set the poem to the tune during the 1880s.

Coming back to the Chinsurah house, a video of an event at Vande Mataram Bhavan on Bankim Chandra’s birth anniversary on June 28, 2020 shows no sign of the house being in shambles. Another video story on this building taken in February 2020 reveals the same picture.

Another video report on July 19, 2020 shows senior TMC leaders, including minister Chandrima Bhattacharya and MLAs Tapan Dasgupta and Asit Majumdar, paying floral tribute to Bankim Chandra’s statue at an event held in front of the building.

This September 2019 video shows the building in no worse state.

Local residents say that the building used to be in shambles in the 1990s. The erstwhile Left Front government acquired it through the state heritage commission in 1992 but no work took place till 1998 and the building kept deteriorating. It was covered with weeds, with ceilings and walls broken, and anti-social elements often found it a good hub for gathering.

The renovation started in 2006 under the Left-led Hooghly-Chinsurah municipality’s initiatives. However, the building actually found its shine after the municipality was won by the Trinamool Congress in 2010.

Gouri Kanta Mukherjee, who has been Hooghly-Chinsurah’s civic chief since 2010 and is at present the municipal administrator of the town, said, “The prime minister lied with a straight face. I hope he has better people around to inform him, if not the distortion of truth was intentional. The municipality maintains the building regularly. We hold events every January 23, January 26, August 15, Bankim’s birthday and death anniversary. It also hosts other events, such as art exhibitions.”

The building, which is now painted every year, has two floors. The ground floor contains a photo gallery spreading over two rooms, containing oil paintings of Bankim Chandra and his wife, photos of his family members, photos of notable contemporaries of Bakim who visited this place, and a list of his published books, with the year of publication and persons they were dedicated to. An easy chair that Bankim used has also been kept.

Photos and paintings inside the Vande Mataram Bhavan. Photo: Ananda Das

The underground floor is used as a gallery for contemporary arts where exhibitions are held.

Trinamool Congress reacted sharply to Modi’s statements. “The prime minister is an expert in misleading the people without doing anything good in particular. There is no question of the TMC ever disrespecting ‘Vande Mataram’ or its creator, because ‘Vande Mataram’ has been our central slogan since the birth of the party,” said Dilip Yadav, the TMC’s Hooghly district unit president.

This, however, is not the first time that the BJP has tried to trigger controversy in Bengal over ‘Vande Mataram’. In 2018, Amit Shah, who was then the BJP’s president, had alleged in Kolkata that the move by the Congress to accept only a truncated version of the song in 1937 as the national song ‘led to the Partition of India’.

However, historical evidence reveals that the Jawaharlal Nehru-led Congress took this decision after Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose reached out to Rabindranath Tagore for his opinion and Tagore opined that those believing in monotheism, including people who follow the Brahmo Samaj – which included Tagore himself – could legitimately find the last three stanzas objectionable.

Snigdhendu Bhattacharya is a journalist and author based in Kolkata.

The Disabled as Vote Bank: Is it an Oxymoron?

It is high time disability is seen as a mainstream issue in politics. The media too has a responsibility to ensure that people with disabilities are not merely seen as ‘objects of charity’.

The political class looking at a section of the society as a ‘vote bank’ is not necessarily a bad thing. Credit: Reuters

The Economic Survey 2018 is out, the annual Budget has been presented and now all the issues are increasingly getting pointed towards the much-awaited general elections next year. Amidst all this, the opinion polls have started coming in and are being presented in lengthy panel discussions on TV news debates.

Not only do these polls predict who’s going to get how many seats in the elections, these also talk about caste considerations, about inclinations of female voters, about the mood of youngsters, about urban voters, rural voters, voters from different states, voters from different age-groups etc. But never in the history of Indian politics or in the data presented by an opinion poll has one seen the presence of disabled people, their inclinations, their issues, their choices as voters.

Now, there are many terms used for the disabled, some use the term ‘persons with disability’, ‘physically challenged’, ‘physically handicapped’, ‘differently-abled’ and lastly ‘Divyang’. None of these terms does one see or even expect to see in an opinion poll debate, primarily because people with disabilities have never been seen as a ‘vote bank’.

The political class looking at a section of the society as a ‘vote bank’ is not necessarily a bad thing. When the noted Indian sociologist M.N. Srinivas coined this term for the first time in his 1951 paper entitled ‘The Social System of a Mysore Village’, he used it in the context of political influence exerted by a patron over a client. Though over the years, the meaning of vote bank politics has evolved and many political commentators see it in a negative light.

One can often hear people say we are not just a ‘vote bank’ of the political class. But, being a vote bank has a bigger meaning attached to it. This means the political class or political parties know which section of voters to appeal to and, therefore, many government policies have come out in the past to satisfy the demand of various vote banks. If being seen as a vote bank is a problem, then not being seen as one is a much bigger problem.

Persons with disabilities have never been seen as a vote bank by the political class because first, they have been treated as ‘third class citizens’, who are often dependent on someone else for their day-to-day activities.

Second, politicians across the spectrum don’t deem it useful enough to talk about disability issues in mainstream politics, because most of them are either unaware of issues or they simply don’t care about it. This was witnessed by the country when there was little discussion, questions raised, any objections between parliamentarians when the Disability Bill was tabled in both the Houses of parliament for discussion in December 2016.

At best, people with disabilities are seen as ‘objects of charity’.

Third, it is believed that the votes of people with disabilities don’t matter that much because they are relatively few in number and that they as a section of society can’t do much in return for the political class, which the other sections of voters – divided on the basis of caste, class, region, gender or age group – can.

Fourth, the ‘able-bodied’ political class and the society, in general, have never treated the ‘differently abled’ as equal citizens. The next to the non-existent representation of people with disabilities in areas like politics, judiciary, media, higher lever bureaucracy etc shows the level of life they live in general.

This has been the case ever since. Making election booths disabled-friendly is not exactly mainstreaming disability in the discourse of politics. Sadly, people with disabilities as a ‘section’ are not seen as one which can stand and fight against the political class. Also, since every other section has a representative face in politics or even political parties who claim to represent a particular section, who represents the ‘differently abled’ in politics?

Also read: India Has a Long Road Ahead to Combat Challenges Faced by Persons With Disabilities

Has there been any political party which, apart from showing their support to pass new disability legislation, has ever placed the issue of people with disabilities in their mainstream agenda?

Today, as per a World Bank report, there are around than 40-80 million people with disabilities in the country, though the official data as per the 2011 population Census puts the figure at 26.8 million.

These numbers are just too large by any standards and even then political parties haven’t started to see them as potential vote banks. Not only the political class, even the media has done a big disservice to disability as a sector. How many news channels or newspapers have assigned even a single reporter who covers just this huge area?

The reason why the media is being questioned here is that they are the voice of the citizens, of the oppressed and the neglected, and if they are not, they should be. By not talking about disability issues or even while covering disability, putting it under a single column story in some mid-section page of a newspaper, or showing a single clip on disability-related story is doing a great disservice to this section of people, as the media owes the responsibility of giving proper feedback to the political class.

The truth is that the political class is blissfully ignorant about disability issues and people with disabilities. Those who are in a position of power (not necessarily limited to the political class), feel proud of their contribution to any person with a disability even if they have provided a ‘bare-minimum’ facility. Most of the disability-related news is either about an inspirational story of a person with a disability who has achieved something in life, or it is about some NGO or a politician or some philanthropist distributing prosthetics to them.

It is high time that disability is seen as a mainstream issue in politics. In the journey of 70 years as an independent nation, if there is one class which has seen and continues to see neglect and is ignored, it is the disabled class. This being the pre-election year, the least the political class can do is start raising issues related to disability.