Demolition of Ambedkar Bhavan will alienate Dalits from BJP in Maharashtra

Since the past two years, the BJP has been trying hard to woo the Dalits in Maharashtra.

The BJP organised the Samvidhan Yatra on BR Ambedkar’s 125th birth anniversary and tried to project Dalit faces in the party in order to connect with them in Mumbai.

The BJP government tried to expedite the establishment of Ambedkar’s memorial at Indu Mill in Mumbai and Prime Minister Narendra Modi came down to the city to lay the foundation stone of the much-demanded memorial.

Not only had the BJP given a Rajya Sabha seat to the popular Dalit leader from Maharashtra, Ramdas Athawale, it inducted him as the minister of state in the recent Cabinet reshuffle earlier this month.

But not always have the Dalits trusted the BJP's efforts to woo them. A huge protest march on the streets of Mumbai paralysed the city just a few days before the Maharashtra Assembly session begun.

The background for this march is interesting. It all started with the demolition of the Ambedkar Bhavan and the Buddha Bhushan printing press, in Mumbai's Dadar last month. The printing press was started by Ambedkar.

The Ambedkar Bhavan has become a centre for arranging meetings of Dalit activists. It has become a rallying point for those who have been dejected with the BJP government after the episode involving Rohith Vemula, the Hyderabad Central University Dalit scholar who committed suicide in January this year.

The place not only had the printing press started by Ambedkar, but also the offices of Bharipa Bahujan Mahasangh, a political outfit run by Ambedkar’s grandson Prakash Ambedkar.

This is the place where just a few months ago, Vemula’s mother and brother embraced Buddhism as symbol of protest.

The demolition of the Ambedkar Bhavan thus became an issue of destroying Ambedkar’s heritage and efforts to crush the Dalit movement.

The People’s Improvement Trust which owns the Ambedkar Bhavan had redevelopment plan for the institution.

“It is a public property which is being redeveloped into a 17-storey structure as Ambedkar Bhavan. The trust’s work will be continued from the new building. And even Prakash Ambedkar’s office will be retained in the new structure along with others which were working on the premises,” the trust had clarified after the demolition.

But Prakash Ambedkar's campaign against the trust’s act of demolition using force received more response, and it brought not only the Dalit factions in Maharashtra together, but all other parties other than the BJP came together to support the protest.

Even though Mumbai BJP president Ashish Shelar defended the state government saying that though the demolition was condemnable, the state had no role to play, it hasn’t helped to defuse the sentiments against the state government and the BJP as many of the supporters of the movement felt that the trust had the backing of the BJP and the government.

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Finally, the chief minister of Maharashtra Devendra Fadnavis on Wednesday (July 20) had to admit on the floor of the Maharashtra Assembly that the demolition of the Ambedkar Bhavan was wrong and announced that his government was ready to pay the bills for the restoration of the structure if the grandsons of Ambedkar come up with a plan.

But despite this, it looks like that situation is not going to get defused easily.

The 2014 Lok Sabha and Maharashtra Assembly results show that the BJP managed to get Dalit votes for the first time in Maharashtra despite strong opposition from Dalit fractions and the Congress.

It was seen as a vote for development moving away from caste politics as the BJP has always been at loggerheads with the Dalit leadership. The BJP stalwart Pramod Mahajan had to lose the Lok Sabha election in 1998 because of the Ramabai Ambedkar Nagar firing incidence during the Shiv Sena-BJP government in Maharashtra in which ten Dalits lost their lives.

Since then the BJP has been trying to win back the Dalits' confidence.

The Dalits, on the other hand, had got divided into different factions after Ambedkar's death and become puppets in the hands of the Congress. Ambedkar's followers in Maharashtra converted his party into a one-caste party of the Mahars or neo-Buddhists and failed to form social coalitions with other backward castes, and even repulsed other Dalit castes such as the Matangs and Charmakars.

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One advantage, however, that Mayawati and Kanshi Ram had when they were building the Baujan Samaj Party (BSP) was that Dalits constituted at least 21 per cent of the total population of Uttar Pradesh, compared with just about ten per cent in Maharashtra.

Driven by personal ambition, RPI leaders could not capitalise on what they had, and the party splintered into more than 50 factions since Ambedkar’s death in 1956. Among them, only four factions are politically relevant — the Athawale faction, the Ambedkar faction led by Babasheb’s grandson Prakash Ambedkar, the Jogendra Kawade faction and the RS Gavai faction.

All these factions were forced to come together after the Ramabai Ambedkar Nagar firing incidence.

These factions allied with the Congress to oppose the Shiv Sena and BJP and in the 1998 Lok Sabha elections, the BJP and Shiv Sena had to face a major embarrassment in Maharashtra as they could only manage to get 13 out of the 48 seats in Maharashtra.

The march by Dalit activists was not only in protest of the demolition of the Ambedkar Bhavan, but also of the treatment meted out to Rohith Vemula.

This has come up as a wake up call for the state BJP, and chief minister Fadnavis’ acceptance of mistake in the Ambedkar Bhavan demolition case is being seen as an effort to pacify the situation. Surely, the BJP is trying to learn lessons from previous mistakes.