Learning from its mistakes in Lok Sabha polls and elated after the Haryana Assembly elections win, the Bharatiya Janata Party has implemented its plans to expand the party’s voter base, targeting the significant Buddhist Dalit community in Maharashtra.
Apart from micro-managing its traditional voters, the party has been making significant outreach towards the Buddhists and Dalits in the state. And for that the party has deployed senior Union Minister Kiren Rijiju to work on the false narratives forged against the saffron party for years.
A tribal Buddhist himself, Rijiju has been on the ground for almost three months in the state meeting the leaders, voters and influential people of the community.
“There was a time when the Opposition had created a narrative against BJP for being anti-Dalit and anti-Ambedkar. The minister has worked with the people to show them what Jawahar Lal Nehru’s Congress did to Baba Saheb Ambedkar despite Mahatma Gandhi saying that the Central Cabinet can’t be complete without Ambedkar,” said a source.
There had been instances ahead of the Lok Sabha polls wherein a narrative was spread by the opposition parties regarding BJP’s alleged plan to remove reservation from the Constitution. This had reportedly led to a backlash by the community against the BJP, causing it to lose Dalit community votes across the nation, leading to the saffron front’s worst ever performance in the past three general elections.
The most significant aspect of the outreach by the party is to dispel the disinformation campaign being propagated by the opposition that BJP is planning to do away with reservation. In fact, it has been shown, with evidence from the historical archives, that Congress top brass never supported reservation, sources said.
“Coming from someone of their own community, the outreach is expected to have more impact when Rijiju talks about the party and Narendra Modi government’s plans for the community. The message being sent across is that Lord Buddha wasn’t a non-Hindu. He got Nirvana and thus Buddhism came into being,” a senior leader said.
“Buddhism is not against Hindu tenets of life. Why should they hate Hinduism? There is intent to explain to the community that if they didn’t get respect and were alienated, it was because of social ills propagated by certain parties to divide the country,” the leader added.
The outreach for wooing the Buddhist Dalits in Maharashtra is significant as there are over 1.5 crore Scheduled Caste voters in the state and out of these Buddhist Dalits number about one crore.
The total population of the community is 10 percent and it impacts 200 seats out of 288 Assembly seats in the state and are spread across various regions including Marathwada, Latur, Vidharbha and Mumbai, said the source.
All 288 constituencies in Maharashtra Assembly are scheduled to go for polls in a single phase on November 20, and the counting of votes will be done on November 23.
