New Delhi: A 79-year-old veteran Dalit leader, Awadesh Prasad, has dismantled the Bhartiya Janata Party’s Hindutva card in the symbolically-important Faizabad constituency, where Prime Minister Narendra Modi showcased the Ram Temple as the symbol of a new India.
More than four months after the January 22 pran pratishtha event, presided over by Modi, the BJP is set to taste dust in the constituency.
Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty
The BJP ‘s clarion call of “Jo Ram ko layenge, hum unko layenge (We will bring the ones who brought Ram)” seems to have been trumped by the PDA (Pichda, Dalit, Alpsankhyak) coalition of Akhilesh Yadav.
Till 6 pm, Prasad, the Samajwadi Party candidate, was leading against the sitting MP of the BJP Lallu Singh by over 55,600 votes, as per ECI figures.
Akhilesh Yadav’s experiment of fielding a Dalit candidate on a general seat, Faizabad, where Ayodhya is located, seems to have engineered a major upset, the reverberations of which will be felt across Uttar Pradesh as well as the country, given the investment the BJP had made on the temple project as one it’s major electoral achievements since the party’s inception.
Prasad, who is a sitting MLA from Milkipur, is packed with experience, as he has won assembly elections nine times since 1977. He also served as a minister in several governments, including those run by Mulayam Singh Yadav in 1989 and 1993-95.
A Pasi by caste, Prasad’s victory has not only deflated the BJP in the constituency, but also provided a symbolic defeat of the saffron party’s project of pitting marginalised Hindu castes, including Dalits, as foot soldiers against Muslims. Rather than ending up as a symbol for the BJP’s saffronisation project, Faizabad, or for that matter Ayodhya, has emerged as the most successful product of the Samajwadi Party’s social engineering project of lower castes Hindus.
Prasad’s victory becomes even more significant because the candidate he defeated, Lallu Singh, made headlines after he was caught on camera pitching for a change in the Constitution or its complete overhaul.
Lallu Singh, who was elected as an MP in 2014 and 2019, was closely associated with the Ram Temple movement and was an accused in the Babri Masjid demolition case, till he was acquitted in 2020.