In the 1970s, agrarian issues underlay the confrontation between the dalits and jats. Tikait, an obscure village pradhan, shot into prominence in the early 1980s when, following the Green Revolution and the rise of a rich farmer class, mobilisation by farmers’ organisations such as the Bharatiya Kisan Union (BKU) formed by him, demanding lower taxes, higher prices for foodgrains and subsidies, gained importance.
Describing themselves as ‘kisan’, these organisations certainly did not reflect the interests of the smallholding or landless dalits. Rather, the period from the mid-1960s onwards was marked by increasing atrocities on the dalits by the middle castes, including the jats, who, benefiting from the new technology, backward caste movements, and formation of parties such as the BKD, emerged as their direct oppressors in the countryside in place of the upper castes who had been traditionally marked out as the exploiters.
Although Tikait did not stand for election, political parties wooed his organisation. The BKU’s influence spread over at least 17 districts, travelling from Baghpat to Agra, containing 17 parliamentary and 36 assembly constituencies. It was able to mobilise the rich/middle farmer to vote for the Janata Dal, which won every seat in the 19 districts of western UP in the 1989 elections.
With the rise of identities based on caste and religion in the 1990s, agrarian issues and parties/organisations representing them lost importance. Initially, the jats in western UP, including the BKU in the early 1990s supported the BJP. They were attracted to the Hindutva ideology, as a result of their own unhappiness with the strong upsurge from below, which questioned their domination. But the rise of the BSP and SP, broadly representing the dalits and backwards including the jats, initiated a new phase of confrontation between the two groups.
... contd.
Sudha Pai
