Very startling revelations have emerged from the investigation, conducted so far by Tamil Nadu police, into the broad daylight murder of State BSP chief K Armstrong. According to the latest reports, a wider network is said to have been involved in hatching a conspiracy to wipe out the BSP leader. In this conspiracy, functionaries across the political spectrum joined hands to kill the BSP leader.
The suspected conspirators are reported to be functionaries of DMK,AIADMK,TMC and BJP. What brought all these criminals, belonging to different political ideologies, together, requires a serious pondering to understand the conspiracy.
I have drawn the following inference from this incident: in India’s political system, all political parties, irrespective of their pronounced ideologies, are unanimous on the point that no Dalit / Bahujan party(ies), which truly represent the downtrodden of this country, should be allowed to gain ground.This is a manifestation of a feudal and casteist mindset that has worked behind this jointly hatched conspiracy to weaken the independently emerging dalit/ bahujan assertion under BSP in the State.These mainstream political parties, both at the national and regional level, are completely antithetical to the idea of independent existence of dalit party(ies) in India.
It would not be out of context to mention here that for the last several decades the political power in the State of Tamil Nadu has been interchangeable only between the two Dravidian parties.They would hardly like the emergence of an independent dalit political party in the state to wean away their support base among underprivileged and marginalized communities from them.The two Dravidian parties represent mostly the powerful intermediary castes whose stories of dalit- oppression in various forms have appeared in media from time to time.The intermediary communities in the state, by and large, are economically, socially educationally and, above all, politically very advanced. All power in the State is concentrated in their hands. Given their feudal tendency and deep rooted prejudices against the other weaker communities in the state they are vehemently opposed to sharing political power with the marginalized communities.
Likewise, involvement of TMC and BJP functionaries in the conspiracy brings forth the intolerance of upper castes who are largely represented by these two parties. Here, it would be pertinent to mention that hitherto, dalit politics has only witnessed the so-called intermediary classes’ strong resistance against marginalized communities’ political assertion. The examples of UP & Bihar, where all efforts were made to swallow up a fast emerging Bahujan party, should be a warning call to the real bahujans of this country. When it comes to Dalit/ bahujans rights and interests almost all political parties are unanimous in taking them very casually. Forgetting their ideological differences they immediately come together to finish a likely threat to their political domination, which may flow from the rise of independent dalit political parties/ leaders.
Pratap Singh was in the Indian Foreign Service and has served as an Ambassador. He is now retired and practices law in the Supreme court of India
