‘The caste order has not changed’: Anger among BJP’s Bahujan cadre in UP
Under the Adityanath government, party workers and voters complain of an upper-caste bias in the distribution of state resources.
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Amit Prajapati stood at the entrance of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s district headquarters in Akbarpur, Uttar Pradesh, working with electricians to get some bulbs fixed.
In the air conditioned rooms inside, sat the president, vice-president and the media in-charge of the party’s Ambedkar Nagar district unit – all Brahmins.
The BJP has tried to shed its image as the party of upper-caste Hindus by wooing marginalised groups like the Prajapatis, a community of traditional potters, officially categorised as Other Backward Classes, but seen as ati pichada, or extremely backward. In recent years, there has been a growing assertion among the extremely backward castes, who feel left behind by dominant OBCs like the Yadavs and Kurmis. EBCs constitute about 30% of all voters in Ambedkar Nagar, said a senior party leader.
Prajapati joined the Bharatiya Janata Party six years ago. The 24-year-old likes to point out that a worker from his caste is now mandal president of the BJP in one of the blocks in the district.
But despite such accommodation, Prajapati told me that several voters from his community did not vote for the BJP in the 2024 general elections.
The reason, he added, was unemployment and price rise. “In my village, no one from my...
