If the stature of political leaders is measured by their popularity rating in the latest polls, several leaders will be ahead of Kanshi Ram. But if political leaders are judged by their capacity to create and sustain a mass following, Kanshi Ram was the tallest national leader of our time. Unlike other national leaders, he did not inherit a political legacy. He did what no political leader has done in post-Independence India: he created a national political party that did not have any roots in the parties that existed at beginning of electoral democracy in 1952. That he did it among the most marginalised sections of our society makes his achievement all the more enviable. Those of us who take pride in the inclusive character of our democracy must learn to see Kanshi Ram as one of its architects — now, rather than after the four decades it took us to recognise Dr Ambedkar as a national hero.

To label him a ‘Dalit leader’, as the media has, does injustice to him. No doubt, he never pretended to court the entire Indian society. After all, he coined the infamous “Tilak, Taraju aur Talwar” slogan. At the same time he never set out to be only the leader of the Dalits. None of the three organisations he founded was meant exclusively for the Scheduled Castes. Their names tell you the story: All India Backward (SC, ST, OBC) and Minorities Communities Employees Federation or BAMCEF as it came to known later, Dalit Shoshit Samaj Sangharsh Samiti or DS-4 and finally the Bahujan Samaj Party. For him bahujan never meant Dalit; his political project always included SC, ST, OBC and the ‘converted minorities’ that account for nearly 80 per cent of the Indian population. That his project had limited success outside of the Dalit community must not take away from the grand historic project of bringing all the victims of the caste system together as a unified political community.

Kanshi Ram was not your run-of-the-mill political leader who simply follows a given political line. Boldly, if subtly, he rejected the standard line available to Dalit politics. He was one of the few political thinkers of our time in that he created political possibilities by the power of ideas. He did not care much for erudition or for the abstract language of high political theory. But through a series of apparently strategic manoeuvres he worked out a new grammar of power for the dispossessed. He saw political power as the master key to social transformation and tried hard to decipher its logic. His understanding of the logic of macro politics allowed him to undertake unconventional experiments like putting up candidates for all the seats without waiting to build the party organisation. He had the courage to stand up to political correctness and declare that he wanted political instability, that he saw nothing wrong in political opportunism. His belief in this new understanding enabled him to defy Ambedkarite progressives and secular orthodoxies and go for many risky and controversial alliances. But all this was guided by a larger goal or mission as he called it. Let us not forget that here was a man who broke his engagement, decided not to get married and severed all family attachments for the sake of his mission.

His political theory was not codified; it depended excessively on his own political judgement. That is why the BSP and the Dalit movement have not appeared, in the last few years, sure-footed in handling some of the challenges that they face. Kanshi Ram never saw political power in UP as an end in itself; he saw it as the master key for gaining entry to the rest of India. But the BSP increasingly looks like a regional political party whose mass base and ambitions are confined to UP.

Political power did not quite open the doors to the socio-economic transformation that the BSP’s political success had promised. Kanshi Ram’s refusal to allow internal democracy within the party may have saved it from the fragmentation that destroyed much of Dalit politics, but in the hands of his successor this instrument appears more a lever to ensure personal dominance. That is why lakhs of Dalit activists and democrats will miss Kanshi Ram ‘saheb’. So will I.

The writer is senior fellow at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi