Sought alliance with Mayawati in UP, she refused to even talk: Rahul Gandhi

Congress leader Rahul Gandhi on Saturday said that the Congress wanted to have an alliance with Mayawati’s Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) during the recent Uttar Pradesh assembly elections. “We wanted an alliance, we were willing to make her CM… But she refused to even talk about it,” he said.

“Kanshiram ji awakened the Dalits of UP. The Congress lost ground because of that. Today Mayawati is trying to put those Dalits and the movement back to sleep. Why?” Gandhi asked. “(Is it the fear of) CBI, ED” he added.

He was speaking at the launch of the book, The Dalit Truth: The Battles for Realizing Ambedkar’s Vision, a collection of essays edited by former IAS officer K Raju. Touted to be a symphony of Dalit voices, The Dalit Truth is the eighth in the Penguin Random House India’s ‘Rethinking India’ series.

Untouchability not acceptable

Gandhi, while launching the book at Jawahar Bhawan in Delhi, said: “I cannot accept that there are people in my country whom others refuse to touch. I can understand that human beings may not like other humans being, but I simply couldn’t accept that a human would be willing to touch a dog, kill an insect with his hand, pet a horse, but will refuse to touch another human being.”

“Since then, I have tried to understand (this). There is only one country in the world where we have this practice,” Gandhi added. “I had read my great-grandfather’s (Jawaharlal Nehru’s) book, Discovery of India, and I wanted to understand why this happens,” he said, adding: “I still can’t answer the question…why this happens even now. But I do have a sense of things, better than some years ago.”

Hunger for power

The Congress leader also took the opportunity to speak on the prevailing political climate in the country. There are politicians “who only think how they will get power,” he said. “These politicians sleep at night thinking how they will get power, wake up and think how they will get power. I was born in power and it’s strange that I have no interest in power. I sleep at night thinking about the country,” Gandhi said.

Calling himself a “beggar” Gandhi said, “This country has given me so much love and it has violently hurled shoes at me too. I asked myself why this happened and I understood that the country wants to teach me; it wants me to learn from my mistakes.”

To make his point, Gandhi quoted Savarkar. “Savarkar ji has said in his book: ‘I was happiest the day when I and my friends went and beat up a Muslim.’ I didn’t want to add ‘ji’ after Savarkar, but these are my sanskaar, I can’t help it,” he said.

LIVE: The Dalit Truth – Book launch at Jawahar Bhawan, New Delhi https://t.co/GxhF5z976b

— Rahul Gandhi (@RahulGandhi) April 9, 2022

Una incident

Gandhi also reminded the audience of the lynching of a group of Dalit men in Gujarat’s Una a few years ago. “I went to visit the victims. I was sitting with the father of one of those who was beaten up. His hands were shaking…He told me he was scared but he also said there was something for him to be happy about. I asked what was there to be happy about. He said, for the first time Dalits responded to violence,” he said. Gandhi said he was shocked when he realised the response the victim’s father was speaking about. “When my son was beaten up, 10-11 young Dalits drank insecticide and attempted suicide,” Gandhi quoted the victim’s father.

Gandhi recalled that when he went to the hospital to meet “those 10-11 Dalit youth,” he spoke to one who was conscious. “He told me that he could not tolerate how his brother was beaten up and in response had attempted suicide,” Gandhi said, adding that another boy told him that he saw “a WhatsApp forward” about the incident and attempted suicide because “he couldn’t do anything to help”.

“Until I had spoken to these two, I thought this was a case of mass suicide. But then I figured…the boys had all attempted suicide separately. Another boy told me that he drank insecticide because he sees these atrocities or faces them every other day,” Gandhi said.

Another shock was in the waiting for Gandhi, when he asked one of the Dalit boys why he didn’t hit back. “He was shocked and asked me whether I haven’t understood anything he was trying to say. I was puzzled and asked what he was saying and he said, if he had killed the perpetrators, then he would have been born a Dalit again in his next birth,” Gandhi said.

Talking about the state of institutions in the country, Gandhi said, “Without institutions, there is no point of a constitution…The institutions today are under the RSS’ control. This attempt to capture institutions had begun the day Gandhiji was assassinated. Everything is being controlled. Media, top industrialists, politicians.”

He concluded by saying that “This is the time for Dalits to fight for their rights. Ambedkar, Gandhi have shown us the way. All we need to do is to walk on that path. It’s difficult, but needs to be done.”