The 37-year-old is just the kind of leader the
Bharatiya Janata Party should have been taking around the country to speak at
rallies.
Jun 03,
2018 · 09:00 am
Sadhvi Savitri Bai Phule is just
the kind of MP the Bharatiya Janata Party should have been taking around the
country to speak at rallies. The 37-year-old has renounced the householder’s
life, is always dressed in saffron, boasts of terrific oratorical skills, and
the Bahraich reserved constituency, from where she was elected in 2014, is not
a family fiefdom. Phule’s Dalit identity is seemingly yet another advantage for
the BJP, keen as the party is to break the upper caste mould in which it is
fundamentally cast.
Yet, independent of her party,
Phule has been presiding over meetings and holding rallies to highlight the
oppression and suffering of the Bahujan Samaj (literally, people in the
majority), which includes the Dalits, the religious minorities and the Other
Backward Classes.
If the mission of the BJP’s other
sadhvis – Rithambara and Uma Bharti for instance – is to liberate temples that
were allegedly converted into mosques centuries ago, Phule’s focus is
different. In the drawing room of her 65, North Avenue flat in Delhi, where on
every sofa was seated a visitor with a petition, she spelt out her mission: “To
bring an end to the injustices and atrocities committed daily on the Bahujan
Samaj”.
The remarkable difference between
Phule’s world of saffron and the BJP’s can be gleaned from her response to
Prime Minister
Narendra Modi’s reiteration on May 27 to sub-categorise the
Other Backward Classes for reservation. “I am against dividing the Other
Backward Classes into backward and more backward, the Scheduled Castes into
Dalits and Ati-Dalits [lowest of the low],” she said. “They think by dividing
us they can get our votes. It is a divide and rule policy. They have been doing
this since Independence, of breaking the unity that Babasaheb [Dr BR] Ambedkar
forged among us.”
Charting her own path
It is rare to find a person in the
BJP who has the chutzpah to publicly criticise a policy endorsed by Modi, such
is the control he exercises over the party, so deep the fear of him among its
MPs. Phule refrains from taking Modi’s name, but she does not leave her
audience in any doubt that she is very upset, and angry, at the happenings that
fall under the rubric of the party’s programme.
Nor is she afraid of being outspoken.
“Afraid? Is it sin to speak out against the humiliation heaped on you?” she
asked. “There have been so many MPs who cared only about their families’
well-being. Does anyone remember them?”
For sure, Phule’s refusal to lace
her criticism of the BJP in diplomatese has been getting her headlines ever
since the
Supreme
Court diluted the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of
Atrocities) Act in March. She held a rally on April 1 in Lucknow to demand that
the Union government reverse the apex court’s judgement. She spoke out against
the incarceration of Dalits who participated in the Bharat bandh of April 2
against the Act’s dilution. She breathed fire as BJP MPs, on Modi’s
instruction, took to dining at Dalit homes.
“Those MP insulted us Dalits,” she
said, her voice rising. “They did not eat food cooked at Dalit homes, did not
use our utensils, did not drink water from our glasses. They ate food cooked by
non-Dalits at the threshold of our homes.”
She added: “It only establishes
that they think Dalits are untouchables.”
She drove home her point further.
“They had their photos taken eating at Dalits homes and made it go viral,” she
said. “How come when they dine with other castes, they don’t think the moment
is worth capturing on camera?”
Her logic is, indeed, irrefutable,
as is her parsing of the motive underlying the spurt in the disfigurement of Ambedkar
statues in Uttar Pradesh. One such incident took place in Matiala village in
Bahraich. Two months later, in April, even the broken statue of Ambedkar was
whisked away at night,
Phule held a rally and organised a dharna, but the culprits
are yet to be nabbed. “I even made a representation to the Chief Minister
[Adityanath], still no action has been taken,” she said.
She then quickly tossed a question
at her listeners: “Why do you think the Ambedkar statues are being desecrated
and Dalits thrown in jail for participating in the Bharat bandh?” Phule
launched her sally: “It is because they want to break our morale to fight for
our rights. It is being openly said that the Constitution needs to be revised,
as also the reservation policy.”
In case the connection between such
demands and the desecration of the Ambedkar statues was missed, Phule
emphasised, “It was Babasaheb who framed the Constitution. It is because of him
we have reservation, it is because of him I am an MP.”
Phule sniffs a conspiracy to
reverse the reservation policy, highlighting its inherent hypocrisy. “They want
to end reservations even though they cannot fill the job quota, even as they
are privatising jobs,” she said. “You have people appropriating quota jobs on
fake caste certificates. I demand that the government must investigate the
implementation of the reservation policy.”
‘Hold
caste census’
It is her other demand that would
horrify the BJP. She wants a caste census to be undertaken to determine the
percentage of different social groups in India’s population and their
socio-economic profile. Phule is opposed to the Supreme Court’s mandated 50%
cap on reservation. “It is because of the 50% cap that the Other Backward
Classes, though 52% of the population, were assigned just 27% reservation. Why?
A group’s share in power should be according to its share in the population.”
All her formulations pale in
comparison to her
hailing
Muhammad Ali Jinnah as a mahapurush or great man during the recent
controversy
over the presence of his portrait in Aligarh Muslim University. None in the BJP
can praise Jinnah and still hope to flourish. Ask BJP stalwart LK Advani, whose
career nosedived when he described Jinnah as a secularist in 2005. Yet Phule
declared,
“Jinnah, like so many others, fought for the country’s independence. Why should
anyone have problems hanging his portrait?”
This brings us back to the
question: What makes Phule so fearless, so unmindful of the consequences of
being so forthright? Perhaps she unlearnt fear during her childhood. Or perhaps
it is because of the oath she took many years ago.
In her home village of Husenpur
Mridangi, Bahraich, nobody, whether of high or low caste, would send girls to
school. Her father, an agricultural labourer, decided otherwise. Phule, who was
earlier named Savitri, would walk one-and-a-half km to school every morning to
attend Junior High School in the adjoining Gokulpur village. She was the
school’s only female student, perhaps a compelling reason for her to overcome the
fear of standing apart.
In Class 8, she had the temerity to
ask her principal why he was not handing to her the scholarship money for
Scheduled Caste students. “The principal said, ‘It is because of me you have
got a first division,’” Phule recollects. “I retorted, I got a first because I
studied.” In pique, the principal refused to hand over her transfer certificate
and marksheet. Phule sat at home for three years during which she tried to
persuade the principal to hand over her documents, to no avail. “Then my guru,
Akshyavar Nath Kannojia, who is also my uncle, decided to take me to [Bahujan
Samaj Party leader] Mayawati,” she said.
First glimpse of politics
It was 1995, and Mayawati had
become the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh – a stint that eventually lasted
just five months. Phule narrated her woes in Mayawati’s public durbar. Mayawati
asked her to meet the district magistrate, who got the principal to hand over
her certificates. “Behenji [Mayawati] became an inspiration,” recollected
Phule. “I thought if she could become chief minister, why couldn’t I?”
Phule enrolled at the local
inter-collegiate and then went on to do her BA. But politics was her new
mission now. Months after President’s Rule was imposed in Uttar Pradesh in
October 1995, Phule joined a protest Dalits had organised in Lucknow. The
Provincial Armed Constabulary opened fire, a bullet was lodged in Phule’s calf
and she fainted. “I revived only in hospital and, subsequently, I was jailed,”
she reminisced. “It was then that I decided I would not be a bride, bound to a
husband and his home, but work for the Bahujan Samaj.”
Bride? Phule had been married when
she was six years old, an event of which she has no recollection. As is the
custom, the marriage ceremony is considered complete only when the child, on
growing up, goes to her husband’s home. “After the spell in jail, I told my
parents that I do not want to marry but wanted to work for my samaj,” Phule
said. Her parents and the husband’s parents met and agreed he would marry her
younger sister instead.
When the marriage procession came
to their door, Phule told the gathering that she was divorcing her childhood
husband, and took an oath that she would never marry but would work for the uplift
of Dalits. “I took the oath that my samaj was my family, that I would not own a
house or an inch of land,” she said. “I don’t have any possessions. Whatever I
have, even the money for elections, comes from the Bahujan Samaj.”
In 2000, Phule was suspended from
the Bahujan Samaj Party. She claimed she did not have any clue why this
happened. She joined the BJP, and after two failed attempts, became an MLA in
2012, and then Bahraich’s MP in 2014. Given her penchant to voice views that
are anathema to the BJP, Phule is perhaps preparing to take the high road, once
again, alone.
On such a road, fear is perhaps a
luxury. There is only the pain of others to experience, to live in the torment
of it. “Look at the atrocities committed on my people, how their villages are
burnt, how they are
killed for riding a horse or growing a
moustache, how our women are raped and killed,” she said.
It is the torment of her people that makes Phule stand up for the rights of the
Bahujan Samaj, regardless of whether it displeases Modi and his party.
