\*\*Anant Rao Akela\*\* is a Bahujan author, poet and folk singer, and the compiler of all the (\~13-14) volume of writing and speeches of Saheb Kanshiram.

This is his first volume translated in English by Bhagwan Singh globally. If you want to support him, please visit this link:- [https://www.instagram.com/anand\_sahitya\_sadan](https://www.instagram.com/anand_sahitya_sadan)

He is a long-time BSP organiser from western Uttar Pradesh, he recalled first hearing Kanshi Ram at an agitation meeting in Bareilly and being immediately drawn in. Like Brijwasi, he would go on to devote decades to the party, rising through its ranks, managing constituencies, and internalising a politics that demanded both discipline and sacrifice. \*\*Akela’s\*\* turning point had come in his younger days when he was denied the right to recite from the Ramcharitmanas because of his caste. Encounters like these made Kanshi Ram’s message assume a certain urgency: politics was not abstract, but a direct response to lived humiliation.

Kanshi Ram’s politics rested on clear lines of antagonism, be­tween the “Bahujan” and entrenched upper-caste power; it also took roots in the belief that independent political assertion, rather than accommodation, was the route to dignity. Early associates like Brijwasi and \*\*Akela\*\* were part of this ideology that demanded personal sacrifice and organisational loyalty, where workers moved from rally to rally, often on meagre means, bound by this shared ideological purpose. The slogan was not inclusion, but consolidation for welfare, “*Bahujan hitay*”. Akela remembered an earlier meeting where a journalist had asked Kanshi Ram why BSP wouldn’t take upper castes into its fold. The Dalit leader replied that such an opening up would halt the process of social change. He said that Brahmins and other castes could join at some point, but they could not anchor the party.

The inflection came under Mayawati after Kanshi Ram’s death in 2006. Her shift to “*Sarvajan hitay*”, most dramatically embodied in BSP’s 2007 majority, built on Dalit–Brahmin social engineer­ing, was a strategic mastetroke, but also a structural departure. In seeking to expand the party’s social base, she normalised pre­cisely the kind of cross-caste accommodation that Kanshi Ram had treated with caution. Over time, this repositioning did more than reshape BSP’s electoral strategy; it subtly recast the terms on which Kanshi Ram himself could be remembered. Once the party moved away from an explicitly antagonistic “Bahujan” frame­work, it became easier for other political actors to appropriate its founder without engaging with the harder edges of his politics.

This is precisely the danger that Dalit scholar Anand Teltumbde had flagged years ago: that in blurring the lines between “friends and foes”, BSP risked diluting the very basis of a Dalit political project. In an article in the *Economic and Political Weekly*, Teltumbde wrote that there is an “intrinsic conceptual error” in as­suming BSP as a Dalit party. “How could there be a Dalit struggle without the definition of its friends and foes? By pushing such issues under the carpet, it actually negates the Dalit struggle itself,” he wrote. A movement that does not clearly identify structures of power, he argued, risks collapsing into a generic platform, thereby negating its own transformative potential. As BSP expanded its social coali­tion, the distinctiveness of Kanshi Ram’s politics began to erode.

For older cadres like \*\*Akela\*\*, this shift amounted to a dilution. The movement they had joined demanded ideological clarity and organisational discipline; what followed, in their view, was a transition towards electoral flexibility that blurred the dis­tinction between core support and strategic alliances. Yet, from Mayawati’s pepective, these were the compulsions of power in a state as socially fragmented as Uttar Pradesh. The problem, however, is that in broadening BSP’s appeal, she also loosened its monopoly over Kanshi Ram’s legacy.

Attempts to reclaim that sharper legacy from outside BSP have, so far, struggled to scale. Young Dalit leaders such as Chandra Shekhar Azad have sought to revive a more assertive, street-level politics of Dalit assertion, foregrounding dignity and resistance. But these efforts remain fragmented and personality-driven, lacking the organisational depth and nationwide cadre network that Kanshi Ram painstakingly built over decades. The result is a form of symbolic radicalism that generates visibility, but has yet to translate into durable electoral or institutional power.

It is in this context that the “Ambedkarisation” of Kanshi Ram can be seen as a common vocabulary adapted across parties. Where Kanshi Ram once insisted on organisational autonomy and ideological clarity, his contemporary invocations emphasise symbolism, representation and welfare delivery.



Manyawar Kanshiram speeches in English by AR Akela