MUMBAI: Having forged a new alliance and played the kingmaker, Nationalist Congress Party chief Sharad Pawar is on a new mission: to cultivate the 1.5 crore-strong Dalits in Maharashtra, whose partial alienation cost the NCP-Congress combine 31 seats in the 288-seat Maharashtra Assembly in the recent elections.
The Dalits are the deciding factor in close to 50 seats. Realising their importance, Pawar has driven the Uddhav Thackeray-led Maharashtra Vikas Aghadi government to focus more on the poorest segment of the 12 crore population of Maharashtra.
A slew of decisions have already been taken to win over Dalits and NCP sources said more are on the way. The first was the declaration that the NCP would undertake a project to develop sites associated with Dalit icons and social leaders all across Maharashtra. Then came Deputy Chief Minister Ajit Pawar’s announcement of the budget for the proposed Ambedkar memorial at Indu Mills in Dadar being raised from Rs 700-crore to Rs 1100 crore and directing that work on it should begin.
The government also decided to raise height of Ambedkar’s statue to 350 feet on a 100 feet high pedestal. When completed, it will be the second-highest iconic site in India after the Sardar Vallabhai Patel Statue of Unity in Ahmedabad. Housing minister Jitendra Awhad has decided to develop a memorial of Ambedkerite social reformer and folk poet-activist Annabhau Sathe at Chirag Nagar in Mumbai. Sathe is the author of 35 novels, including his world-famous ‘Fakira,’ which was translated in multiples languages.
Other than statues and memorials, Sharad Pawar is also making all the right noises, demanding the release of all Dalit workers and leaders, besides activists and writers, who he said had been “implicated” and wrongly arrested in the Bhima Koregaon riot case. His nephew and Deputy CM Ajit Pawar and other party leaders even participated in a function to mark first anniversary of the Bhima Koregaon incident earlier this month.
The reason for the Pawars wooing the Dalits is not far to seek. In the Lok Sabha elections in April-May 2019, the Congress and the NCP lost eight seats by the narrowest of margins because of a massive shift in Dalit votes to the Vanchit Bahujan Aghadi led by Prakash Ambedkar, great-grandson of Dr BR Ambedkar. The VBA managed to get 41 lakh Dalit votes. With the Dalit votes getting split between the VBA and the Congress-NCP, most of the eight seats were won by the Bharatiya Janata Party. In the recent Assembly elections, the VBA’s Dalit vote share halved to about 24 lakh but it resulted in the defeat of the NCP-Congress in 31 seats by close margins.
NCP spokesman Sanjay Tatkare said his party does not treat any community as a vote bank but admitted they needed the support of the Dalits. “We try to reach out to every section of the society and Dalits are also part of the society. In politics, this is an ongoing process. We are committed to welfare of all communities. But in the last five years the BJP created a distance between communities. We are trying to bridge the gap by appropriating their idols and icons,” Tatkare said.
“The NCP wants to woo back voters of three major communities, the Marathas, Muslims and Dalits. In the Assembly and Parliament polls the Marathas and Muslims voted overwhelmingly for the NCP, but its Dalit base got fractured. Pawar has decided to work on this Dalit agenda to ensure that the benefits of social programmes reach them,” said Pratap Asabe, a political analyst.