Digvijay props up Dalit IAS officer to counter BSP

Yogesh Vajpeyi

Bhopal, April 30: Those responsible for such acts against the tribals and the Dalits should have their necks chopped off.’’

The outburst did not come from a proclaimed ‘‘terrorist’’ like IIT-educated Rahul Bannerjee who is now in the jail for inciting Dewas tribals toward violence against the state. It was a statement by Manmal Dahima, a 1976-batch IAS officer, currently serving as Commissioner (Archaeology and Archives) in Madhya Pradesh.

And when Dahima speaks, Chief Minister Digvijay Singh listens. Singh and Madhya Pradesh Congress president Radhakrishan Malaviya not only shared the dais with Dahima at the state convention of MP Anusuchit Jati Janajati Adhikari Evam Karmachari Sangathan (AJJAKS) in Bhopal on April 22, they joined hands with him in an apparent expression of solidarity for the police firing on tribals in Dewas on April 2 and the murderous attack on Dalits for daring to enter a temple in a Vidisha village later in the month.

The Chief Minister has already ordered a high-level official inquiry into the Dewas firing and arrest of all the 26 accused in the attack on Dalits in Vidisha. The gesture during the function did cause some raised eyebrows among fellow bureaucrats for whom Dahima’s involvement in Dalit politics amounted to a violation of the civil servants’ code of conduct. But Digvijay Singh isn’t unduly perturbed.

In fact, Singh has been using Dahima as a trump card against BSP chief Kanshi Ram, whose Dalit outfit posed a serious threat to the Congress hegemony in Madhya Pradesh at one stage. He almost made Dahima resign from the IAS in a bid to put him up as a Congress candidate from Ujjain, where he had served as the divisional commissioner only a few years back.

‘‘I was denied the ticket at the eleventh hour, otherwise I would have been an MP,’’ admits Dahima. The IAS officer, who hails from a ‘‘poorest of the poor’’ Dalit family of Rajasthan, considers it unfortunate that ‘‘those who have themselves come from the Dalit class and now occupy positions of power have forsaken their unfortunate brethren’’.

As president of AJJAKS, Dahima is now busy organising Madhya Pradesh government servants from Scheduled Castes and Tribes. On Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar’s birth anniversary on April 14, he publicly called for a social boycott of tribal and Scheduled Caste IAS and IPS officers who did nothing for their people. ‘‘Jo apna ateet bhool jaye voh nalayak hai (Those who forget their past are worthless,’’ he thundered.

Initially, Digvijay Singh lent his government’s support to AJJAKS with a view to expanding his party’s SC-ST vote bank. It was during the 1993 Assembly elections in UP, MP, Rajasthan and Himachal Pradesh when Singh realised the role that the Dalit bureaucracy played in the political arena. Kanshi Ram’s BSP had ridden piggyback on his Backward and Minorities Classes Employees Federation to become a major political player in the Hindi heartland in the preceding years. Singh took a leaf out of Kanshi Ram’s book and decided to use Dalit bureaucrats as a political weapon. On the eve of the crucial 1998 Assembly elections, Singh’s sources told him that 17 senior officers in the MP government, including some in his secretariat, were clandestine Kanshi Ram supporters.

Singh convinced most of them that since Kanshi Ram’s BSP had limited pockets of support in Madhya Pradesh and could never capture power, their best bet was to work for him and the Congress. The result was that he found an ardent support group in AJJAKS.

The strategy worked well. The BSP, whose vote share had been steadily increasing, then found it shrinking. In the last three by-elections, it has been on the downswing. And four of the 11 BSP MLAs deserted the party after Singh was returned to power for the second time.

What’s more, Dahima himself is now sharply critical of Kanshi Ram and his outfit. ‘‘The BSP rose to power on the shoulders of the Dalits but has now become a personal fiefdom of Kanshi Ram and Mayawati,’’ he says.

He’s full of praise for Digvijay Singh’s pro-Dalit policies. Not without reason, perhaps. For it is at the instance of AJJAKS leaders that the state government relaxed rules for admission to medical courses. In fact, the Singh government has gone to the extent of recommending the scrapping of the State Administrative Tribunal itself because some of the latter’s decisions did not find favour with AJJAKS.