Lucknow: With the Uttar Pradesh assembly election still a year away, the contest for the state’s Dalit vote has already begun in earnest, and the Congress has now formally entered the fray with a series of “Samajik Nyay Sammelans” (social justice conferences) beginning in the state capital on Friday.
The campaign, launched from the party’s state headquarters in Lucknow, will travel to Kanpur on August 22 and Jhansi on August 23, before being extended to every assembly constituency in the state. UP Congress in-charge Rajendra Pal Gautam is overseeing the exercise, with state president Ajay Rai and the national chairman of the party’s OBC department, Dr Anil Jaihind, among those addressing the outreach.
At the heart of the campaign is the slogan “jitni aabadi, utna haq” (rights in proportion to population), along with the themes of the Constitution, reservation and a caste census — issues the Congress has leaned on nationally since 2023. The party’s OBC department state president Manoj Yadav said the campaign would also press the demand that an OBC column be added to the caste census form, and that castes be counted as per the Central and state OBC lists.
The timing is not incidental. The space the Congress is attempting to occupy has opened up largely because of the steady erosion of the Bahujan Samaj Party, once the undisputed custodian of the Dalit vote in Uttar Pradesh. In the 2022 assembly election, the BSP was reduced to a single seat with a vote share of 12.88 per cent, and Mayawati has been unable to mobilise her core base in successive polls.
Dalits account for roughly a fifth of the state’s population, and with the BSP weakened, the claimants have multiplied. Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav has announced that his party will field 14 Dalit candidates on general seats to reinforce his PDA (Pichhda, Dalit, Alpsankhyak) formula. The BJP, for its part, has run a months-long outreach around 15th-century saint-poet Sant Ravidas, while Azad Samaj Party chief Chandrashekhar Azad is working to build a base of his own.
Mayawati has ruled out any pre-poll alliance and has asked her cadre to rebuild the organisation from the ground up, with a fresh push for OBC support alongside the party’s traditional Dalit base.
For the Congress, which lost these voters decades ago, the sammelans are as much about rebuilding an organisation as about winning votes. Party leaders have indicated that district and block-level committees will be constituted soon.