State Dalit leaders face wrath of uncrowned king

However, the State Dalit leadership became his prime target. "When the need was to grab political power, the so called followers of Dr Ambedkar in the State led the masses to fight for crumbs," he said.

Quoting Dr Ambedkar, Kanshi Ram said that political power was the master key with which most difficult locks could be opened. "We acquired the guru chabi and set up two universities in UP and named them after Dr Ambedkar and Sahu Maharaj… We also created a district called Phule Nagar during the short-lived BSP rule in UP," he said. Besides this, the BSP government in UP also implemented Ambedkar Village Development Scheme in over 11,000 hamlets and also ensured that Dalits who were promised ownership of land were given the physical possession.

Whereas in Maharashtra, a vast Dalit population had been fighting endlessly to get a university renamed after Dr Ambedkar. The Dalit population of Western Maharashtra has been demanding to rename Pune university after Shahu Maharaj who had made considerable contribution in the field of education. "But I told them to grab power in the State and everything would follow," the BSP leader said.

When Dalits in northern India have been making strong political assertions, the Dalits from the land of Phule Shahu and Ambedkar have been practically doing nothing concrete to politically overthrow the Brahminical order, he said. He claimed that BSP was making advances in Madhya Pradesh, Punjab, Haryana and Rajasthan. "Now it is for the Dalits of Maharashtra to decide in which direction they would like to go," he added. "It is my misfortune that I have to talk about the teachings of Dr Ambedkar on the land from where I learnt my first lessons of Dalit politics," the BSP leader said.

Kanshi Ram’s continuing face-off with the State Dalit leadership has ruled out the possibility of halting the division of Dalit votes in Maharashtra where the political contradiction between neo-Buddhist Dalits and Hindu Dalits has sharpened considerably during the rule of the saffron coalition.

Nevertheless, he appealed the people to contribute to the nation-wide drive to keep the forces of Hindutwa away from power. "There is enough time to think about which party should come to power and who should become the prime minister, but there is little time left to decide who should not become the prime minister," he asserted. "For the last 50 years, Brahmins, Banias and Thakurs have ruled, but the next 50 years would reverse this trend," he said.

The rally brought out the sharp difference between the approach of the State Dalit leadership and that of the BSP for which the Dalit political movement was the key to social and cultural uplift. However, the State Dalit leadership following the legacy of Phule and Shahu Maharaj had been giving equal weightage to cultural and political movement. The Dalit Panther, the militant movement in the State, in 1980s had laid stress on the movement for cultural and economical issues in order to prepare masses to grab political power.

According to political observers, Kanshi Ram hit the right chord when he referred to depoliticisation of Dalits in Maharashtra where the traditional Dalit party, Republican Party of India, continued to be riddled by factionalism.