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Strategies & Market Trends : India Coffee House -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JPR who wrote (7107)	9/23/1999 8:34:00 AM
From: JPR	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 12475

As reported in NYTimes Dalits shake up the system Dalits get what is due to them but denied before The growing political power and independence of the lowest castes, generally referred to as "scheduled castes" because of their enumeration in the Constitution for special benefits, is being felt not just in northern India, but across the country. They are voting in greater proportions than ever before, greater even than the upper castes, according to voter surveys conducted in 1996 and 1998 by the Center for the Study of Developing Societies in New Delhi. "Democracy is leading to greater social equality for people who had been excluded from political power for the first three or four decades of Indian independence," said Yogendra Yadav, a political scientist who supervised the surveys. The founders of independent India dreamed half a century ago of a casteless society, but caste has proved a resilient and dynamic force. Paradoxically, this hierarchical, hereditary system that has oppressed the lower orders of society has also become an organizing principal that the downtrodden themselves have seized on to forge their own political identity and to seek electoral power. The Elephant spurns the raised hand Now, instead of stamping the Congress Party symbol of a raised hand, most chose the elephant, symbol of the Bahujan Samaj Party, Hindi for Majority Society Party. Dalits in Universities & in Govt jobs. Affirmative action works The Majority Society Party was founded in 1984 and its leaders have emerged from the still small section of Dalits who have gone to universities or held Government jobs because of constitutionally mandated affirmative action requirements. Mayawati: Tit for Tat; Taste your own medicine Mayawati, a sharp-tongued, aggressive leader of the party, has relished talking back to upper castes, a heady reversal of roles for people who long kept silent out of fear. On a recent television talk show, a member of the audience asked how she could justify her lavish way of life in the name of the scheduled castes. Dalit woman as chief Minister In Uttar Pradesh, the party has parlayed alliances with other parties into brief spells when it ran the state. In 1995 and again in 1997, Ms. Mayawati -- a former schoolteacher who like many Dalit women has only one name -- became the first, and as yet, only Dalit woman ever to serve as Chief Minister of an Indian state. Promised land requiring that state jobs be set aside for them, insisting that land promised to the landless be handed over, and brusquely and summarily suspending bureaucrats who were laggards in carrying out her orders. BSP topples BJP This April, the party's five members of Parliament toppled the national coalition Government led by the Hindu nationalist Bhartiya Janata Party, which lost by a single vote. Mayawati: Dalit-Muslim-Brahmin coalition strategy She also laid out the party's unashamedly caste-based strategy for winning power. While keeping the party leadership firmly in Dalit hands, it has recruited candidates who are Muslims or from the middle and upper castes to run under the party's banner in most of the 85 parliamentary seats in the state. Most had first become involved in party work during their student days. "The party stands for equality, brotherhood and social change," said Harish Kumar, 32, who is himself a Dalit and secretary of the party's local division. Full stomach achieved ,and now get some respect We can always work to fill our stomachs," he said. "But the humiliations hurt the most."