For INDIA bloc’s Dalit PM card, Mallikarjun Kharge needs to assert caste leader identity; nothing less will do

“I am emotional today that a labourer’s son, a common worker, has been elected as the president of the Congress,” Mallikarjun Kharge said in October last year when he took charge as the AICC president. The Congress had finally found its “labourer’s son” to take on Modi’s “chaiwallah”.

Engaging in personal attacks against a veteran leader from a Dalit community like Mallikarjun Kharge would be much more difficult for the BJP, or even Modi himself, as against going after a Rahul Gandhi or Nitish Kumar or Mamata Banerjee in election campaigns.

It is unlikely to deter the BJP’s plans for the 2024 Lok Sabha polls and narratives that it hopes to build around the INDIA bloc.

However, personal attacks against Kharge, if he were to be the prime-ministerial face, would mean risking the wrath of a section of voters the BJP hopes to woo.

But before concerning themselves with what the BJP would do if Kharge were made the Dalit prime-ministerial face of the INDIA bloc, the alliance parties have a different challenge to overcome, and that begins and ends with Mallikarjun Kharge.

Also read: Congress’ ‘son of a labourer’ to take on BJP’s ‘chaiwallah’

Dalit identity and politics of assertion

It is one thing to point to Kharge as a natural choice for the INDIA bloc’s prime-ministerial face.

However, if it chooses to go ahead with a Dalit Prime Minister candidate pitch, it is an entirely different challenge to convince Dalits to rally behind the idea of Kharge as a caste leader.

In his decades-long career in politics, Kharge has refrained from playing the caste card — for reasons ranging from the pushback Dalit leaders face from forward-caste and community leaders to not wanting to limit himself to just his caste identity.

Subtlety has been Kharge’s speciality when it comes to making caste-based pitches — even in election rallies.

However, subtlety simply has no space in a politically charged, polarised environment. Kharge is no Mayawati.

Even at the lowest performance of the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) in the Uttar Pradesh Assembly polls, which was in 2022, the Mayawati vote bank — made up almost entirely of Dalit electors — brought her 12 percent of the vote share even as the party won just one seat.

In the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, while it failed to transfer votes to alliance partners Samajwadi Party (SP) and Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD), the BSP polled 19.45 percent votes — again largely attributed to its Dalit vote bank.

Opinion: Mallikarjun Kharge proves he is the wartime general Cong needed

The task ahead

“Dalit politics in India cannot work without a clear Dalit assertion. Someone like a Mayawati starts an election with a fixed vote share of 12 percent in Uttar Pradesh — largely Dalit votes that won’t go anywhere no matter what. Her vote bank doesn’t flinch even in states like Rajasthan,” said a highly placed source in Congress’ strategy team.

“Kharge doesn’t command the same kind of support from the community,” noted the source.

The disconnect is owing largely to Kharge’s brand of politics, which has never revolved around caste identity and assertion.

“Even as a student-union leader, he never took caste, religion or identity into consideration. He has always been secular, open to people from all walks of life,” Prof Eshwar Ingan, a Dalit-rights activist and an associate of Kharge from Kalaburagi, had told South First in an interview for a profile of the AICC president we did in October last year. You can read it here.

And then there are the sub-caste divisions within Dalits. In Kharge’s home state of Karnataka, Dalits are divided into “right hand” and “left hand” categories — rivals in competition for the reservation pie.

The former are numerically smaller but bigger beneficiaries of reservations. The latter are much bigger in number but woefully underrepresented.

Kharge belongs to the “right” category of Dalits and falls short in wooing the numerically stronger “left-hand” groups.

“Unless he asserts himself as a Dalit leader, voters will not recognise him as one. Mallikarjun Kharge doesn’t do Dalit politics even as much as his son Priyank does in Karnataka,” said a senior member of Congress’ campaign team.

“The question is whether he will be able to shift any Dalit votes — especially in the Hindi heartland that we have lost to several parties, including the BJP, over the years. As of today, the answer is in the negative,” opined the member.

Optics aside, influencing voters to rally behind the INDIA bloc with him as their face is the real challenge. It would require Kharge — however late in the day it is now — to step out of his comfort zone of subtle identity politics and speak in the language of assertion.

As a senior member of the AICC’s strategy team put it, “Dalit politics in India needs unapologetic Dalit assertion.”

Until Kharge is able to pull that off, building on the narrative of social justice, the INDIA bloc’s Dalit PM face pitch is unlikely to create ripples on the ground. Modi plays the perfect “chaiwallah” but will Kharge play the “labourer’s son” is the question.