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Rahul Gandhi demands Bharat Ratna for Kanshi Ram, writes to PM Modi as Dalit outreach peaks ahead of UP polls
Move comes as part of Congress outreach to Dalits and other socially backward sections ahead of Uttar Pradesh elections due within a year
Congress leader Rahul Gandhi on Sunday wrote to Prime Minister Narendra Modi to seek India's highest civilian honour, the Bharat Ratna, for Kanshi Ram, the Dalit icon who founded the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP)
Rahul Gandhi wrote on X: “I demand that the Government of India honour the great warrior of social justice and the guiding light of Bahujan consciousness, the esteemed Shri Kanshi Ram ji, with the Bharat Ratna. This highest national honour will be a tribute to Shri Kanshi Ram ji and the entire movement that showed millions of Bahujans the path to rights, participation, and self-respect.”
This comes with barely a year left for elections in Uttar Pradesh, the centre of the late Kanshi Ram's politics. With Dalits constituting about 20% of the voters in UP, almost all major parties are vying to associate themselves with Kanshi Ram’s political legacy. Across districts, posters bearing Kanshi Ram’s image appeared beside the flags of rival parties, each claiming to be the true inheritor of his vision and dream of Bahujan empowerment, ahead of his birth anniversary on March 15.
In the latest such outreach, Rahul Gandhi was at an event in Lucknow on March 13. Party leaders said the event signaled the start of the Congress’s campaign pitch for the 2027 polls.
Mayawati-led BSP keeps reminding voters that Kanshi Ram built the party as a vehicle for social justice, and that Mayawati was his chosen succesor.
Rahul Gandhi, Leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha, wrote his award-demand letter on Sunday marking the birth anniversary of Punjab-born leader who died in 2006 at 72.
"Kanshi Ram ji transformed the nature of Indian politics. Through his movements, he raised political awareness among Bahujans and the poor. He reminded them that their vote, voice, and representation are important, and that this country belongs to everyone equally," he wrote.
Latest in Rahul on Kanshi Ram after Nehru-linked claim
Rahul Gandhi stressed that it was because of Kanshi Ram's efforts that “many people who had never considered entering public life began to see politics as a means to achieve justice and equality”.
“For many years, Dalit intellectuals, leaders, and activists have called for Kanshi Ram ji to be honoured with the Bharat Ratna. Their demand has been consistent and deeply felt. Recently, I attended a programme in Lucknow where this demand was reiterated strongly by the leaders and participants present, reflecting a widespread sentiment,” he further wrote.
At the Lucknow event earlier in the week, Rahul Gandhi had made a massive, retrospective claim about what his great-grandfather, India's first PM Jawaharlal Nehru, would have done for caste justice had he been alive at the time of Kanshi Ram's rise as a political pioneer from the Dalit community.
"If Jawaharlal Nehru were alive, then Kanshi Ram would have been a chief minister from the Congress," Rahul Gandhi said on Friday, speaking at the Samvidhan Sammelan held in Lucknow ahead of the birth anniversary of Kanshi Ram.
Nehru died in 1964, while Kanshi Ram broke out onto the scene with his founding of backwards-championing BAMCEF in 1978, and later, the formation of the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) in 1984.
The BSP, under Kanshi Ram's protege and multi-term former CM Mayawati, currently has a fractious relationship with the Congress and, in turn, faces political allegations of having “compromised” with PM Narendra Modi's BJP.
Kanshi Ram never took up executive power directly, preferring to hand that to Mayawati instead as he focused on cadre-building.
In his tribute to the social justice icon, Rahul Gandhi had said Kanshi Ram never compromised on principles. He named Mahatma Gandhi and Bhimrao Ambedkar as others of the ilk.
Where does BSP stand?
The BSP under Mayawati currently finds itself in steep electoral decline. Having last held power in UP in 2012, the party has lost ground to both the BJP and the Samajwadi Party-Congress combine.
On her nephew and sometimes-designated heir Akash Anand, whose speeches on PM Modi went viral two years ago, she has had an angry series of u-turns, ousting and reinstating him multiple times.
The BSP's vote share was just over 27% in 2009, but fell below 10% by 2024. In the 2022 UP assembly elections, it finished a distant fourth with less than 13% of the vote.
The BSP maintained distance from both the Opposition's INDIA bloc and the ruling BJP-led NDA ahead in the 2024 Lok Sabha, results of which were the worst in the party's history with zero seats. A key reason, observers noted, was the collapse of the BSP's non-Jatav Dalit base that migrated to the SP-Congress alliance.
UP poll pitch
Rahul Gandhi has been pitching for the “sanvidhan” or Constitution, and its guarantees of equality, as a bedrock of his Dalit outreach.
Mayawati has been scathing about that, asking if it would “be in the interest of the SCs, STs and OBCs to ally with these anti-reservation parties, like the SP and Congress”. She has also attacked the Congress over its failure to conduct a caste census during its years in power. The Modi government is conducting a caste census as part of the overall, much-delayed census after repeated demands by Rahul Gandhi among others.
The next UP assembly elections are due by early next year. While the BJP's core base is upper-caste Hindus plus non-Yadav OBCs, the SP's counter-strategy is its PDA formula — pichhda (backward), Dalit, and alpsankhyak (minorities) — that powered its 2024 Lok Sabha resurgence.
As for Kanshi Ram's legacy, another recent claimant is Nagina Lok Sabha MP Chandrashekhar Azad, whose party is called Azad Samaj Party (Kanshi Ram), founded in 2020.
