Congress leader Rahul Gandhi has written to Prime Minister Narendra Modi to seek India's highest civilian honour, the Bharat Ratna, for Kanshi Ram, the Dalit icon who founded the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP).
This comes with barely a year left for elections in Uttar Pradesh, the centre of the late Kanshi Ram's politics. With Dalits constituting about 20% of the voters in UP, almost all major parties are vying to associate themselves with Kanshi Ram’s political legacy.
Rahul Gandhi made a massive, retrospective claim about what his great-grandfather, India's first PM Jawaharlal Nehru, would have done for caste justice had he been alive at the time of Kanshi Ram's rise as a political pioneer from the Dalit community.
The BSP under Mayawati currently finds itself in steep electoral decline. Having last held power in UP in 2012, the party has lost ground to both the BJP and the Samajwadi Party-Congress combine.
Rahul Gandhi has been pitching for the “sanvidhan” or Constitution, and its guarantees of equality, as a bedrock of his Dalit outreach.
