Even as the BJP went overdrive to honour B.R. Ambedkar on his birth anniversary in an apparent effort to repair the perception that it was not sensitive to the issues of dalits, the Congress on Saturday attacked the ruling party for “doing politics” in the name of Ambedkar and accused the Narendra Modi government of taking anti-dalit steps.
“The prime minister spoke a lot about Babasaheb yesterday (on Friday). But dalits all over the country heard him with a lot of sadness. The Modi government and the BJP are doing politics on every issue, including dalits,” said Congress leader Kumari Selja.
Selja said the ideology of the BJP and the RSS was antithetical to the values espoused by Ambedkar and accused the ruling dispensation of making an attempt to appropriate the legacy of the dalit leader.
Reacting to Modi's charge that the Congress denigrated Ambedkar, the Rajya Sabha MP said, “The Congress party, in recognition of Babasaheb's pre-eminence as a scholar and a thinker, gave him the responsibility of drafting the Constitution. And the BJP is talking about meddling with the same Constitution.”
Selja said that the image of Ambedkar's statue being put in a cage so as to protect it from vandals is symbolic of the present state of affairs. “The image is symbolic. It is not just the statue of Babasaheb that is enclosed in a cage. His ideas too are sought to be confined within a cage,” she said.
The opposition Congress has attacked the Modi government for eliminating the budgetary sub-plan for scheduled castes and accused it of reducing the budget for the schemes meant for dalits and also doing away with schemes meant for dalits.
The Congress has been on the offensive against the Modi government on dalit issues, especially in the context of the Supreme Court's recent judgement on the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act.
The court order, which does away with 'automatic' arrests in cases registered under the act, has been largely seen as weakening a law that was put in place to protect the dalits and the tribals from caste-inspired atrocities. The Congress has accused the Modi government of not having forcefully defended the act in the Supreme Court.