The BJP's choice of Dinesh Arya as its Rajya Sabha candidate from Uttarakhand came as a surprise even to many within the state party unit.
A low-profile candidate, Arya has served as Nainital district BJP president and as media adviser to Chief Minister Pushkar Singh Dhami. His being a Dalit leader from Haldwani was behind the party's calculations.
His selection is being read in the context of what happened in his hometown a few weeks ago. Haldwani was at the centre of a controversy over an alleged purification ritual after Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge's rally there in August. Kharge, a Dalit, raised the matter in Parliament. The BJP denied any connection with the incident and said it did not support such practices.
Now, Arya's nomination gives the party a concrete step to argue that it stands for Dalit rights.
It is not just Uttarakhand, which goes to the polls in a few months: the BJP is actively wooing Dalits in other poll-bound states as well.
In Uttar Pradesh, Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath announced that Bhadohi would again be known as Sant Ravidas Nagar. The district was renamed Sant Ravidas Nagar by the Mayawati government in 1997, but that name was changed back to Bhadohi by the Akhilesh Yadav government in 2014.
The name change was followed by a much larger Sant Ravidas campaign. On July 29, the BJP launched a seven-month programme to mark the 650th birth anniversary of the saint. It includes the distribution of soil from his birthplace in Varanasi and a Samrasta Yatra from Jalandhar to Varanasi from October 5 to November 5.
The choice of Jalandhar as the starting point is important. Punjab has the country's highest proportion of Dalits, at about 32 per cent. The Ravidassia community is concentrated in the Doaba region, particularly in Jalandhar, Hoshiarpur, Kapurthala and Nawanshahr. The BJP won none of Punjab's 34 reserved Assembly seats in 2022. In the border state, the BJP has a smaller base among Dalits.
The Punjab BJP has been working on the community separately as well. Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited Dera Sachkhand Ballan in Jalandhar during Guru Ravidas Jayanti in February. The Centre has also conferred the Padma Shri on Sant Niranjan Das, the head of the dera. The Sant Ravidas Express between Amritsar and Varanasi and the Kalash yatras carrying soil from Ravidas's birthplace are other parts of the outreach. In Jalandhar, the soil is being taken to temples and other religious sites.
Even for the culmination of the BJP's anti-drugs yatras in the state, the party chose Jalandhar. Home Minister Amit Shah addressed the event last week.
The BJP's Ravidas campaign comes months before the 2027 elections in Uttar Pradesh and Punjab. In Uttar Pradesh, Dalits account for about 21 per cent of the population and 84 Assembly seats are reserved for them.
The BJP and its ally won 63 of these seats in 2022, but the 2024 Lok Sabha election showed that the party cannot take Dalit support for granted. The Samajwadi Party made gains among Dalit voters a part of its PDA campaign.
The BJP is trying to shift the Dalit conversation towards representation and recognition, even as the BSP is much weaker than it once was.
