Amid welfare push, the shifting sands of Dalit politics in Agra

Clumps of darkness are descending on a young man as he rappels down the remnants of a 60-foot stage, its skeleton stripped of its cloth finery but still held up by gaunt poles of bamboo throwing menacing shadows. As he swings around on a pole, undoing knots of coir that hold together the structure, debris of a joyous celebration are strewn all around the vast field – wrappers of myriad hues, half-eaten plates of fried delicacies, an errant chappal or two.
Walking up the field is an elderly gentleman in an expertly tailored white safari suit, his carefully trimmed handlebar moustache and gold-rimmed glasses sitting on a face furrowed with creases. His stride is now tempered with age, his footing unsure in the uneven, pockmarked surface. Yet, this 80-year-old’s memory is sharp – right from the day he met Dr BR Ambedkar in March 1956, when he was 12, to the cramped alleys this year’s Ambedkar Jayanti roadshow needs to avoid.
But he is most proud of the three-day revelry centred around the Constitution framer’s birthday that he has helped organise – Bhim Nagari, a 30-year-old affair where Ambedkarites take over a neighbourhood, decorate it in motifs of blue, and organise a fair that attracts tens of hundreds of people from across the heartland. “We organise community weddings, felicitate achievers from our localities, and call senior ministers and academics. It is both a celebration and a reclamation of our dignity,” said Kartar Singh Bhartiya, the chief organiser and a local advocate. “It is what makes Agra India’s Dalit capital.”
This year, the stage was designed in the likeness of the London School of Economics, where Dr Ambedkar received his first doctoral degree. A kilometres-long shobhayatra with a hired elephant walked around the city all night on April 14, Ambedkar’s birthday, before converging in the Bhim Nagari grounds, where prospective brides and grooms were given matching tokens before they wed with traditional buddhist vows.
But lurking behind the 90-odd floats depicting the lives of Ambedkar, Ravidas and Buddha are the shifting sands of Dalit politics in a region where the marginalised community not only makes up a third of the electorate but also is among the most strident, prosperous and politically conscious of its kind in the country.
Agra encapsulates the churn within the community and the battle of two ideas that are shaping the general elections this year; on one side is the Bharatiya Janata Party that has married personality driven welfarism with Hindu cultural iconism to build a robust populist model to cleave the Dalit communities. On the other is a ground-up emancipatory model once championed by the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) that privileged political power over handouts and built grassroots network of community leaders, but which has since atrophied . Other opposition parties – notably the Samajwadi Party and Congress alliance – are attempting to replicate this model but have only met with diffident success.
It is a moment of extraordinary stress for a community with upwards of 250 million people who continue to battle pervasive discrimination and structural barriers. “We always had political shelter in stalwarts such as Ambedkar and Jagjivan Ram. But now, our education and prosperity may be increasing, but our political power is stagnant,” Bhartiya lamented. “It will have dire consequences for our movement.” 
The Valmikis
In Lohamandi, a debris-choked sewage canal is the permanent courtyard for lumps of misshapen naked brick houses. It meanders its way through the colony and breaches its banks every monsoon. The neighbourhood is populated largely by municipal workers from the Valmiki community (a Dalit sub-caste) which forms the bedrock of the BJP’s social coalition in Uttar Pradesh.
The impoverished community languishes at the bottom rung of socioeconomic indicators. Most of the 200 families in Lohamandi are employed as sewer cleaners or municipal sanitation workers. Young men find private jobs hard to come by and staying in school even harder. A mixture of resentment at the better fortunes of the Jatavs (the Dalit sub-caste that is the BSP’s core base) and anger that no other party paid them the respect of direct outreach pushed them towards the BJP.
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Critical to this endeavour was the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. “When I was young, they came and recruited me. In Seva Bharti, they gave 10 machines per neighbourhood and training for free to all women. Our boys would work for as little as ₹3,000 a month. They gave us jobs in shakhas,” said Nandkishor Valmiki.
Valmiki calls himself a kattar hinduvadi (orthodox Hindu). He spends his days scouring social media and low-income neighbourhoods for signs that people are trying to convert out of Hinduism, and uses force, coercion, inducements, even violence to stop them. There are cases filed in local police stations against him, but no investigation gets too far, he brags. “All Valmikis are nationalists and Hindus. Look at the various programmes where RSS has linked the Ramayana to our community. Even an airport is now named after Maharshi Valmiki.”
This is not an uncommon sentiment in Lohamandi. Valmikis are the second-largest SC group in this region and their impoverishment means that the BJP’s targeted welfarism, especially free ration, is of particular electoral salience, as is the BSP’s peculiar weakness in reaching out to smaller Dalit groups. This mirrors the BJP’s strategy of co-opting smaller Dalit communities across the heartland using welfare, invoking cultural heroes (Ramayana for the Valmikis, Maharani Uda Devi for another large SC group in central UP, Pasis) and pointing out dissonances with larger Dalit groups. This strategy is central to the BJP’s extraordinary growth in UP on the back of a coalition that comprises the upper castes, and the non-dominant sections of backwards and Dalits.
Yet, this coalition is not without its strains, forcing the BJP to tend to them constantly. On the ground, many of the communities who back the BJP don’t get along with each other, and especially don’t get along with Dalits. The 2021 death of a local boy in police custody, and the brutal murder and rape of a 19-year-old woman in Hathras district are irritants. Similarly, complaints are common of other groups underpaying the sewer workers, and the local municipality never paying any attention to the sewage, the flooding and the lack of schools and hospitals. “Many of us are trying to come out of traditional occupations and the stigma associated. We grew up facing discrimination, and our children face the same thing,” said Sandeep Valmiki, a community activist. “We were not given the respect we were promised. But where else will we go?”
The Jatav’s Dilemma
Not far from Lohamandi is the neighbourhood of Ratanpura, a maze of small-scale shoe part manufacturers, lathe machines, artisans and leather workers, each functioning out of airless crevices lining cramped alleys. For decades, it was the beating heart of prosperity that propelled the Dalit movement in northern India as the Jatavs used the shoemaking business – a legacy of other communities finding this job caste-barred and polluting, allowing them to quickly gain skills – to finance the movement, fund schools and hostels, and help politicians from a community with historically few resources at its disposal. If you had a piece of leather and an hour to spare, it was said, a stroll through the neighbourhood was all it took for you to take home a finished shoe.
Today, Ratanpura is a shadow of itself. The 40-plus shops have shrunk to just a handful as the business has shifted to the infinitely more productive industries on either side of the expressway. Some of these are also owned by Jatavs but they employ far fewer people. On a scorching Saturday afternoon only a small shanty is open where two men are sitting on skiving machines, wielding sharp edged tools to tear through strips of leather being expertly folded into place. Shivam Jatav has worked here for 12 years, but his labour counts for less and less. “What would earn ₹50 earlier fetches ₹20 now. We do odd jobs repairing bikes but we don’t have any other skill,” he said. Shivam, his father and younger brother get out of the house at 9am and often get back by 1am, earning not more than ₹450 rupees a day doing odd jobs. “Whoever we go to for a job asks if we have a high school degree. If we don’t, are we human?”
The depressed economic outlook is also having an impact on the political mood. After winning over the smaller communities, the BJP is hoping to make inroads among the Jatavs, taking advantage of the weakening position of the BSP, which fell to just 12.88% voteshare in the 2022 assembly elections, its worst showing in two decades. “This time, we’ll get a sizeable chunk of Jatav votes for sure,” said Pramod Gupta, former deputy mayor from the BJP.
But its efforts are facing some headwinds on the ground. “I came to the BJP from the BSP. There was a time when the BJP wasn’t allowed to enter this area, known as Mayawati’s stronghold,” said Kamal Paras, a local BJP leader. “We changed that, but in this election, we are facing a tougher time because of the lack of jobs for our community boys. I don’t know how many Jatavs will vote for us.”
The Constitution concern
The chaos of Ratanpura is a world away from the tranquil calm that envelops the Buddha Vihar in Chakki Pat. It is here on March 18, 1956 that BR Ambedkar addressed a huge public meeting in what is considered a turning point for anti-caste movements. “I went to see him with my father. Dr Ambedkar walked with a stick. We contributed ₹2,000 for the movement, Bhartiya said. The receipt, signed by India’s first law minister, is now proudly displayed in their drawing room.
On still summer afternoons, attendance in the Vihar is sparse. Inside, the whitewashed ceiling and walls are adorned by frescoes of Ambedkar and Buddha, and a couple of people mill about. An undercurrent of tension is coursing through the neighbourhood. Rumour upon rumour is being fuelled, sometimes by dubious videos and sometimes by opposition leaders, that the Constitution will be under danger if the BJP returns with more than 400 seats – a claim that Prime Minister Narendra Modi has repeatedly and publicly denied.
But the rumours haven’t been quelled. “A part of this is also the mentality of the local leaders. Modi might say something else but local leaders keep bragging that the Constitution should be changed. That shadow will always be there,” said Devki Nandan Som, a business leader from the community. “The mentality of the senapati might be good, but what is happening on the ground? Obviously the worry is there.”
That this is a matter of concern for the BJP has been underlined by the urgent response to tamp down this rumour by Modi and Union home minister Amit Shah. But on the ground, local BJP leaders are having to contend with the emotive relationship of Dalits with the Constitution, implicit in which is the question of reservation. “If the question is about the Constitution or reservation, no matter what the party, all Dalits will come on the streets,” said Bhartiya.
The churn and its fallout
The parliamentary constituency of Agra is reserved for scheduled castes and one that the BJP has had a vice-like grip on since 2009. In the last Lok Sabha elections, Union minister SP Singh Baghel – who switched from the BSP in 2014 – won by 200,000 votes against a combined SP-BSP candidate. This time, he is facing off against a SP candidate who is from the Jatav community and a BSP pick Puja Amrohi, the daughter of a former lawmaker.
“The Jatav vote is breaking, the question is where do they go. Those who want jobs and those who want rations, both are with us,” said Rambabu Harit, a former BJP minister. He is confident that the BSP’s core Jatav voter is wayward. “They know that voting for BSP is a vote wasted.”
Favouring the BJP is not just caste dynamics but also the party’s work ethos of being present on the ground between elections – a factor crucial for a community that routinely battles violence and bias, and needs access to the police station and the local lawmaker. “The BJP works nonstop, and its workers are always accessible. The Opposition only wakes up before the elections,” said Suresh Soni, an advocate.
The Opposition believes that it can use the emotive hold of the Constitution and economic hardships into a potent narrative. “Our candidate is also a Jatav who has a presence on the ground. Both Dalits and Muslims will unite to save the Constitution,” said Wajid Nisar, the local SP chief.
The balance in this fight could be held by the BSP, which continues to command some loyal voters in traditional strongholds such as Chakki Pat, though that number is dwindling among the young. “Yes, we get rations but we only like the elephant (the BSP’s election symbol). You cannot underestimate a woman who was CM four times,” said Ranjit Kumar Singh, a clerk, referring to Mayawati.
But there is a loss of trust with the BSP – Soni said he was disenchanted because the party had not taken a strong stand on major cases, atrocities or helped local people – which has also cast a depressing shadow on anti-caste movements, whose node is Agra. The BSP was once more than just a political party, its volunteers worked as a bulwark against grassroots caste violence, ran hostels and camps where the teachings of stalwarts such as Ambedkar and party founder Kanshi Ram were taught, and stitched together a network of support that boosted the confidence of the community and helped them excel.
“Our community has now become rudderless, and we are lurching from one party to the other,” said Som. “Where are our leaders?”
This is the 15th in a series of election reports from the field that look at national and local issues through an electoral lens.