Dalit vote, seat share | UP Congress wants Kharge to contest from state

With the twin hopes of denting the Bahujan Samaj Party’s (BSP) Dalit vote bank and securing a “fair share” of seats from the Samajwadi Party (SP) in alliance negotiations, Congress leaders from Uttar Pradesh have revived their pleas to their party president Mallikarjun Kharge.

They want him to contest from a constituency in the state in the upcoming Lok Sabha polls.

Kharge, Gandhis urged to contest from UP

Multiple Congress leaders, including a former Union minister from the state that sends 80 MPs to the Lok Sabha, told The Federal that they have urged Kharge, along with former Congress president Rahul Gandhi and party general secretary Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, to contest the Lok Sabha polls from Uttar Pradesh.

The request was made to the Congress president and the Gandhi siblings on the sidelines of a meeting of senior state leaders that Kharge had convened last week to discuss the party’s Lok Sabha poll preparedness and to finalise details of Rahul’s 6,700-km Manipur-to-Maharashtra Bharat Jodo Nyay Yatra.

A senior Uttar Pradesh Congress leader said this was “possibly the fourth time” in as many months that an appeal had been made to Kharge to consent to contest from an Uttar Pradesh constituency. However, the Congress president has remained non-committal to the proposal and is learned to have told his colleagues from Uttar Pradesh that his “first priority” is to ensure that alliance talks with Akhilesh Yadav’s SP and Jayant Chaudhary’s Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD) yield “satisfactory results” for all parties concerned.

Eye on ‘Kharge’s Dalit votes’

The Congress president, as well as the Gandhi siblings, have also told their colleagues from Uttar Pradesh that a call on whether they choose to contest from a seat in the state will be “taken at the appropriate time and after a collective decision-making process” that would likely include consultations with the SP and RLD too, if the two regional parties agree on a seat-sharing pact with the Congress.

Sources said the request by the Uttar Pradesh Congress leaders is based on the assumption that Kharge’s candidature would help the party consolidate a chunk of the state’s over 20 per cent Dalit population for the Congress – and by extension, will also benefit the party’s INDIA allies in Uttar Pradesh – as he comes from the Dalit community.

Former Uttar Pradesh Congress chief Ajay Kumar ‘Lallu’, former MP and Dalit leader PL Punia and incumbent Uttar Pradesh Congress chief Ajay Rai, all told The Federal that the Congress president contesting from a constituency in the state will “send a positive message to all sections of voters and also boost the morale of our workers” but added that no final call on the issue has been taken so far.

Leadership void

Rai also said that it “is a fact that Mayawati (the BSP supremo and undoubtedly the most prominent Dalit leader in Uttar Pradesh) has been losing her grip on the Dalit community” and that “this is a leadership void which the BJP is trying to exploit”. Lallu added, “The Congress has always stood with the Dalit community and we have to make all efforts to win their confidence again; we have to give them an alternative leadership”.

Party leader Ajay Rai, shortly after he took over as the Uttar Pradesh Congress chief last year, had also gone on record asserting the desire of “all Congress members in the state” that Rahul and Priyanka should contest the Lok Sabha polls from the state. Rai’s statement that Rahul, who had lost the 2019 Lok Sabha polls from his traditional seat of Amethi to the BJP’s Smriti Irani, would contest from Amethi once again had created a flutter in party circles. Following this the Uttar Pradesh Congress chief had clarified that he was merely airing the views of party colleagues and that no decision to this effect had yet been taken.

Similar calls for Priyanka to contest the Lok Sabha polls, preferably from a seat in eastern Uttar Pradesh, or even against Prime Minister Narendra Modi from Varanasi, have been made from time to time by Congress leaders of the state.

The Congress’s official stand on the matter has been that it is for Priyanka, who had led a disastrous assembly poll campaign of her party in Uttar Pradesh in 2022 and was recently divested of her role as the party’s in-charge of the state, to decide whether she wishes to contest a Lok Sabha election and also the seat that she wants to contest from. With many within the Congress and outside it endlessly speculating whether former Congress chief Sonia Gandhi will seek re-election from Rae Bareli owing to her frail health, it has long been touted that Priyanka could finally take the electoral plunge in the upcoming Lok Sabha polls.

A former Union minister and Congress leader known for his proximity to the party high command also said that “the SP would find it impossible to deny a seat in constituency negotiations to the Congress president, if he agrees to contest from the state, and since his candidature will also bolster not just the Congress’s but also the INDIA alliance’s prospects, we can hope to get a better deal from the SP in the seat-sharing talks”.

Samajwadi Party, a difficult ally for Cong to please

For the Congress, the SP has been a difficult alliance partner to please, particularly after the Grand Old Party rebuffed Akhilesh’s offer for an alliance in last November’s Madhya Pradesh assembly polls. Additionally, the SP chief has not just made it clear to the Congress high command that his party will be part of the INDIA coalition only if the BSP is kept out but has also been tight-fisted in sparing seats for the Congress during informal back-channel talks over seat-sharing.

Sources told The Federal that the Congress, reduced to a fringe party in the state following three decades of steady atrophy, wants the SP to offer it at least 22 of the state’s 80 Lok Sabha seats. This 2009 tally of 22 was the highest number of seats that the Congress had won from Uttar Pradesh since 1989. However, Akhilesh is unwilling to offer the Congress more than 10 seats, including the traditional Gandhi family seats of Amethi and Sonia Gandhi’s Rae Bareli, the sole seat that the party had won from Uttar Pradesh in 2019.

Congress sources said there is another aspect that is fuelling its Uttar Pradesh leaders to push Kharge into the electoral arena from the state.

Mayawati’s waning clout a boon for Cong

“Since the BSP’s influence has been steadily waning in the state and Mayawati’s voters are realising that she has been playing the BJP’s game, several of the party’s sitting Lok Sabha MPs are considering switching to other Opposition parties. If the Congress leadership puts its combined strength in contesting from the state, it will bolster the Congress’s overall winnability,” a former Congress MP from the state said.

The former MP explained further, “some of these BSP MPs may join us and not the SP, because irrespective of whether their constituency is SC-reserved or not, they have a sizeable Dalit vote, and the community still doesn’t trust the SP... but with Kharge, who is a Dalit, and the Gandhis in the fray, the Dalits might just consider us a better alternative while the Congress can hope to benefit additionally from the consolidation of Muslims votes behind the INDIA parties and also by getting a good chunk of OBC votes due to Rahul and our coalition’s push for caste census... to combat the BJP’s heightened Hindutva pitch following the Ram Mandir inauguration, this could be a good strategy for us.”

Kharge’s changing stance on Dalit identity

However, aside from Kharge refusing to give his ready consent to fight the polls from Uttar Pradesh, there is another minor hitch in these grand ambitions of the Congress. The Congress president has often been reluctant in overplaying his Dalit identity, even if in his five-decade long electoral career he has always contested from a SC reserved seat from his home state of Karnataka.

This, Congress sources say, is slowly changing as Kharge, aside from regularly invoking Dalit icon Dr BR Ambedkar and the plank of social justice. Last month, when Trinamool Congress MP Kalyan Banerjee triggered a row during Parliament’s winter session by mimicking Rajya Sabha chairman Jagdeep Dhankhar while Rahul videographed the act, Dhankhar and the BJP had likened the entire incident to an “insult of the Jat community” to which the Rajya Sabha chairman belongs.

Kharge, in a departure from his usual articulation over his caste identity, had slammed the BJP and even hit out at Dhankhar wondering if “I should say you are insulting Dalits by not allowing me to speak in the Rajya Sabha”.

No Dalit card

“Yes, our president, unlike BJP leaders, does not believe in using his caste identity for political gains. He never plays the Dalit card and, in fact, he has sometimes admonished Congress leaders for addressing him in public or even party events as a Dalit leader but then politics is about perception. The Dalits need good leadership and who better than Kharge, with his vast experience in politics. Everyone knows he is a Dalit by caste and if he contests the polls, he would most likely do so from a SC reserved seat. So there is actually no need for him to personally play the identity card,” the former Union minister quoted earlier said.

With the SP indicating to the Congress that it would initiate seat-sharing talks for Uttar Pradesh early next week, it remains to be seen whether the issue of Kharge contesting from a seat in the state gets some clarity and gains further momentum.

For now though, the octogenarian Congress president is keeping his cards close to his chest and has told his party colleagues to wait for an appropriate time to know his decision; an approach similar to his response when Trinamool chief Mamata Banerjee and AAP convenor Arvind Kejriwal sprung a surprise at the last INDIA conclave by suggesting that Kharge, being a Dalit face, should be declared the alliance’s prime ministerial face against Modi.