Gurugram: Amid an ongoing debate on whether the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) wants to change the Constitution if and when Prime Minister Narendra Modi comes to power for the third time, opposition parties, particularly the Congress, are making this an issue among Dalits in Haryana.
Dalit votes are crucial for the BJP, not just to reach its goal of securing over 400 seats for the NDA, but even to replicate its success from the 2014 and 2019 general elections.
However, partially due to the Opposition’s campaign and largely due to statements by BJP leaders including Arun Govil, Jyoti Mirdha, Anantkumar Hegde, and Lallu Singh, the fear of a possible change in the Constitution has grown stronger among Dalits.
While addressing a public meeting in his constituency of Uttara Kannada in March this year, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) MP Anantkumar Hegde claimed that his party needed over 400 seats to “undo the additions and distortions that the Congress introduced to downgrade Hinduism”.
While the BJP distanced itself from the speech and denied Hegde a ticket to contest the ongoing Lok Sabha polls, other party leaders like Govil, Mirdha and Lallu Singh went on to make similar claims.
Since then, the BJP — with Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Union Home Minister Amit Shah at the forefront — has been trying to counter this by accusing the Opposition Congress of trying to take reservations away Dalit and give them to Muslims. But the damage seems to have already been done: according to various Dalit leaders in Haryana, there are fears among the Scheduled Castes in the state that the BJP could be considering doing away with the current reservation offered to them.
According to Dalit leaders and activists ThePrint spoke to, various factors are driving this apprehension — including a perception that anti-reservation sentiments are growing in the country, together with the idea that the stringent Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989, is being misused.
“Amendments to the Constitution have been made on several occasions in the past. But this is the first time that the BJP’s MPs and Lok Sabha candidates have themselves gone on the record to say that the party needs 400-plus seats to change the Constitution,” Rajwant Dahinwal, an advocate from Rewari and a Dalit activist, told ThePrint. “This has spread fear across the SC and ST groups that the reservation given to them will not be [retained] if the BJP comes to power again with a big mandate.”
It’s a sentiment that several Dalit leaders echo. On its part, however, the BJP dismisses these fears as unfounded.
“The Constitution can’t be changed just like that. PM Narendra Modi and HM Amit Shah have repeatedly said that there is no cause for Dalits to worry,” said Suresh Danoda, general secretary of the BJP’s SC Morcha in Haryana.
But Dalit leaders are far from convinced. According to Shammi Ratti, a Balmiki community leader in Fatehabad, these concerns go beyond simply losing reservation and stem from a more fundamental problem of inequitable distribution of its benefits among Haryana’s Scheduled Castes.
“Several underprivileged castes among the Scheduled Castes like Balmikis, Dhanaks, Bazigars, Sansis, Dehas, and Saperas are not able to get the fruits of the present reservation because these benefits are largely cornered by the socially better-placed castes like Ravidassias,” Ratti said, advocating for a more layered reservation system such as the one that was implemented in the state under the Bhajan Lal government.
“In 1994, the Bhajan Lal government divided the Scheduled Caste population into two categories — A and B — offering 50 percent of reserved seats to Block A, the underprivileged castes, on a preferential basis. However, this was set aside after it was challenged in the Punjab and Haryana High Court,” he said, adding that he hoped that Congress leader Rahul Gandhi’s promise of ‘jitni jiski aabadi, utna uska haq (rights proportionate to population)’ could help the underprivileged SC castes.
Also Read: ‘Did God send these?’ — BJP ‘bulldozer rally’ ahead of Yogi’s Sirsa visit invites Congress barbs
What drives this fear
The Scheduled Castes form a substantial part of Haryana’s population — according to the 2011 census, they account for 20.2 percent of the state’s 2.53 crore people.
Fatehabad district has the highest SC population (30.2 percent), followed by Sirsa (29.9 percent, and Ambala (26.3 percent).
Dalit votes are crucial in the state. In the 2019 Haryana assembly elections, for instance, The BJP won five of the 17 seats reserved for the Scheduled Castes — two down from the nine it won in 2014. The Congress, on the other hand, won seven as compared to four it won in 2014.
According to activists, there are six reasons the state’s Dalit groups are apprehensive of the BJP despite concerted efforts to allay their fears.
The first is a perceived rise in anti-reservation sentiment in the country. For this, Rajat Kalsan, another advocate and Dalit activist, cites the 2018 anti-reservation protests at Jantar Mantar where a little-known fringe anti-reservation group called Aarakshan Virodhi Party burned copies of the Constitution. Dalits saw this as the BJP “testing the waters” before actually changing the Constitution, he said.
“The video of this abuse of the Constitution went viral on social media. All this took place in the presence of the Delhi Police. It was only after a lot of hue and cry that the police registered a case,” said Kalsan.
This fear was compounded by the prime minister’s promise during his budget speech that his government would make “bade faisle” (big decisions) during its third term, as well as the remarks made by other BJP leaders.
“When the PM linked bade faisle with 370 seats for the BJP and 400-plus for NDA (during his speech this year), he left no one in doubt that he meant what Hegde and others said later,” Kalsan said.
This came two years after the BJP-led government’s flagship government recruitment web portal — the Haryana Kaushal Rozgar Nigam (HKRN) — sparked a controversy in the state. Launched in 2021, the web portal is aimed at hiring contractual staff at the various government departments, boards, and universities.
Opposition leaders like veteran Congressman and former chief minister Bhupinder Hooda have alleged that the system was aimed at “eliminating reservation”, among other things.
Dalit activists, too, believe this is the case, as the selection criteria for recruitment under HKRN don’t have caste-based reservations.
“The state government has been skirting the Haryana Public Service Commission (HPSC) and the Haryana Staff Selection Commission (HSSC) since the portal was launched,” he said.
Then, there is the fear that the BJP government, through the state’s police, is creating a perception that the SC/ST Act — enacted to prevent hate crimes against Dalits and tribal people — is being misused.
According to the Haryana State Review (Police) by the National Commission for Scheduled Castes dated 3 March, 2018, the conviction rate in the cases under the law was 0 percent, 6.97 percent, and 7.74 percent, respectively, in 2014-15, 2015-16 and 2016-17. Additionally, the meeting minutes say that approximately 25 percent of cases were closed by the police.
According to activists, there’s an apprehension that a narrative is being created to ensure that the law, currently stringent, is either diluted or abolished entirely.
“There is also a fear that the Modi government’s push for simultaneous elections is aimed at ensuring that BJP has control of 80 percent of Indian states so that the Constitution can be easily changed,” Kalsan added.
Nilesh Bahani, chief of the research wing of the Indian Youth Congress’s Haryana unit, agreed with the activist’s assessment of the situation.
“Dalits are genuinely afraid that the BJP returning to power would put the Constitution in danger,” he said. “Even now, Dalits (in Haryana) are not getting enough jobs because there aren’t enough vacancies and most of the (government) hirings were through the HKRN.”
But like BJP SC Morcha president Danoda, the party’s former state chief and its current national secretary O.P. Dhankar dismisses these fears, saying they were being “created by the Opposition to defame the BJP”.
Asked about the remarks made by BJP leaders like Hegde and Mirdha, Dhankar said: “Only statements made by those who are authorised to speak on behalf of the BJP should be trusted”.
This is an updated version of this report
(Edited by Uttara Ramaswamy)
Also Read: ‘Jobs on merit, no bribery’ — in Karnal, Khattar makes a poll pitch based on 9-yr record as CM