There are no questions about this vote bank

But these are not empty words. The all-night street play Jaise ko taisa (tit for tat) enacted by Jatav youth in front of an Ambedkar statue on the village ground demonstrates this. It was the play which had infuriated Singh. It’s about a Dalit boy who forces an upper caste girl into matrimony and treats her like a servant. The play ends with the "Now you know what it’s like to be a Dalit" message.

If Singh does not read the writing on the wall, it is his funeral, taunts Dinanath, a 24-year Jatav school teacher from the village. Less than a year back, Singh and eight of his supporters were sent to jail because they wouldn’t let Jagpal Chamar till three bighas of surplus land allotted to him by the Government in 1991.

The scene keeps changingas one travels across countryside in the Indo-Gangetic plains of UP. But the mood is the same. Be it villages Maithana and Khanauda in Western UP’s Muzaffarnagar, Harpalpur and Barkheria in Central UP or Dighawat in the rocky Bundelkhand region. The Dalits have broken the shackles of slavery — now they want to call the shots.

The scheduled castes, making up 22 per cent of the State’s poorest population, were always looked down upon even by the most backwards. Their literacy rate is under 27 per cent compared to 42 per cent of the general population. The Dalit households cultivate less than 9 per cent of the cultivable land, a majority being landless labourers.

Their horizontal mobilisation across UP is difficult, but an educated and upwardly and politicised generation has emerged in some regions like Western UP, Agra and Rohailkhand.

In almost every UP district one meets a small, urban and entrepreneurial Dalit elite, mostly among the Jatavs who account for over 46 per cent of UP’s Dalitpopulation.

And Mayawati rather than Kanshi Ram is their role model. The BSP supremo may have kindled the flames, but it was India’s first Dalit woman Chief Minister who set the Dalit mind afire.

“There are no chinks in our armour,” claims Harbhajan Singh, in-charge of the BSP’s Western UP division. “The Manuwadis ruled over us by dividing us into 66 sub-castes. But now there is no Jatav, no Pasi, no Balmiki, no Dusadh or Musahar amongst us. We are all part of the Bahujan Samaj.”

That his party has maintained its vote share of slightly over 20 per cent in all electoral contests in UP since 1993 tends to corroborate the BSP leader. Even BSP opponents concede that Kanshi Ram’s Dalit vote bank is solid. And transferable to any one if the BSP chief says so.

Another significant change in the contemporary Dalit psyche is their willingness to fight it out.The BSP activists in most UP villages are young, in 25-40 age group. They organise prabhat pheris every day and chant slogans like “Vote hamara, rajthumhara, nahin chalegaa ( you can no more get our vote to rule us)”.

Compared to the older generation Dalits, some of whom had flirted with the Republican Party of India in 1960’s, today’s Dalit youth are more militant. “I know we will have to pay the price for rising against upper caste domination, but the cost of silent acquiescence is heavier,”says Daya Ram, 28, of Behzadka village.

The village youth have realised that political power does not necessarily flow from the barrel of the gun. It grows out of the mindSo they have opened schools and libraries have to educate the Dalits, especially their womenfolk and the youth. Iilliterate Dalits are exposed to Dalit literature and informed of great work done by the cult figures of Dalit pantheon like Ambedkar and Jyotiba Phule.

That the Jatavs, earlier disdainfully called Chamars, provide the hard core of the Dalit leadership in UP is not a coincidence. They account for 57 per cent of the State’s scheduled caste population and over 12 per cent of thetotal population.