In March 2018, Praveen Nishad of the Samajwadi Party won the bypoll held for the Gorakhpur Lok Sabha seat in Uttar Pradesh, overturning an almost three-decade-long hold of the Bharatiya Janata Party over the constituency. The SP had the support of the Bahujan Samaj Party, as well as smaller parties including the Nirbal Indian Soshit Hamara Aam Dal party, or the NISHAD, which is helmed by Sanjay Nishad, Praveen’s father. The alliance brought together the core voters of the SP, the BSP and the NISHAD—the Yadavs, the Dalits and the Nishads, a community that comprises several non-dominant caste-groups that feature in the Uttar Pradesh and central Other Backward Classes lists.
“Last year’s bypoll overturned 27 years of the BJP’s hold on Gorakhpur and one of the major reasons was the consolidation of the Nishad vote,” Manoj Singh, a journalist and political commentator based in Gorakhpur, told me. For the upcoming Lok Sabha elections, the SP and the BSP are set to repeat their tie up with the NISHAD party and other smaller parties in Uttar Pradesh, including an alliance with the Rashtriya Lok Dal. The coalition appears to be relying on its caste-based vote bank which has been strengthened by the support of the Nishads. Meanwhile, the BJP seems to be crafting its strategy around the claim of development under the Adityanath-led state government, Hindutva and its own caste-based electoral calculation.
There is little information on the demographic composition of the Nishad community as well as their history. According to multiple media reports, there are 3.5 lakh Nishad voters with around 15 percent votes in the Gorakhpur constituency. Singh told me that the Nishads are also known as “Gangaputras,” and their livelihoods are centred around rivers and water bodies—many of them are boatmen, fishermen and net makers. When I met Sanjay at his residence in Gorakhpur—which also serves as NISHAD’s office—in early March this year, he told me, “The Nishads fought against the Aryans, the Mughals and the British, and hence they were declared a criminal tribe.” He added, “This is the reason we have become deprived and backward.”
The community has demanded reservation under the Scheduled Caste category for decades now. According to Sanjay, groups under the Nishad community were categorised as SCs till the early 1990s, but after the implementation of the Mandal Commission report, “the most populous sub-castes”—among the Nishads— “Kewat, Mallah, Bind, Kashyap, were reclassified as pichdi”—OBCs. In December 2016, the SP-led state government passed an order for 17 OBC castes, including some Nishads, to be included in the SC list, but the Allahabad High Court stayed the order. “Our primary demand is reservation under the Scheduled Caste quota and we want a share in power in proportion to our numbers,” Sanjay said.
Sanjay has penned around a dozen books on the Nishads as well as social justice in India, including Nishadon ka Itihas—History of Nishads—and Bharat ka Asli Maalik Kaun hai—Who is the Real Owner of India? He asserts that the Gorakhnath temple belongs to his community because its founder was a disciple of Matsyendranath, who Sanjay says was a Nishad. Pictures of the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama and the Italian explorer Christopher Columbus adorn a wall in his office. Sanjay claimed that both of them were Nishads. Singh told me, that some of the historical aspects of Sanjay’s discourse have not been verified by historians. “It is not clear what is historical fact and what is fiction,” he said. “However, it doesn’t matter to them because the Nishads have accepted what he has to say.”
Sanjay began his political career in 1979, as a student activist under the guidance of Kanshi Ram at the Backward and Minority Communities’ Employees Federation—an organisation which worked on socio-political issues of the Dalit community. He unsuccessfully contested assembly elections in Uttar Pradesh twice—in 2012, on a Rashtriya Mahan Gantantra Party ticket from the Campierganj constituency, and five years later, on a NISHAD ticket from the Gorakhpur Rural seat. He told me that his community’s votes were scattered between different parties in previous elections. “In 2014, Nishads voted for Modi because he said he would address the backwardness of Gangaputras,” he said. He added that in the 2017 assembly elections, too, Nishads voted for the BJP because of the promise of reservation. “But those promises have not been fulfilled.”
Over the course of two decades, Sanjay attempted to unite the Nishads under a common platform. He succeeded in 2016 when he formed the NISHAD party and emerged as a leader of his community. According to him, there are 578 sub-castes of the Nishads in India, and 236 of them are based in Uttar Pradesh. “Nishads comprise fourteen to seventeen percent of the population of UP and are in a position to influence votes in at least 25 to 30 Lok Sabha seats,” Sanjay said. Singh told me that Sanjay’s estimates of the Nishads’ unified electoral influence are likely true. “The caste equation in favour of the grand alliance has become stronger,” he said, adding that the NISHAD party was the strongest in eastern Uttar Pradesh, which comprises Gorakhpur.
“The BJP was never worried about Gorakhpur,” Singh said. Adityanath was the member of parliament from the constituency for almost two decades, till he became the chief minister. “But Praveen Nishad’s win last year broke the myth of electoral invincibility about Yogi,” he said. The BJP is worried, he claimed, and “in addition to their development and Hindutva pitch, they are also trying to cultivate Nishad and Yadav leaders to blunt the caste arithmetic of the alliance.” In March this year, the BJP inducted Amrendra Nishad, the son of Jamuna Nishad, a popular figure in the community who has served as a member of the BSP and the SP. Amrendra is reportedly expected to fight the upcoming Lok Sabha election from Gorakhpur.
I spoke to Pradeep Rao, who served as Adityanath’s press officer from 1989 till 2014, about the BJP’s strategy for the upcoming elections. “This election will be different from all the others because it will be fought by the BJP on a development plank as against the caste arithmetic of the opposition,” he told me. Rao is the principal of Maharana Pratap PG College, an institution in Gorakhpur run by the Gorakhnath peeth. When I asked him how the BJP can counter the grand alliance, he said, “Hindutva has to be highlighted to make people vote along religious lines rather than on caste lines.” He added, “When Modi and Yogi come together, development and Hindutva become one.”
Rao claimed that since Adityanath became the chief minister in March 2017, Uttar Pradesh has witnessed development at an “unprecedented scale.” Earlier this month, Adityanath made the same assertion while addressing a crowd of around three hundred at the Deen Dayal Upadhyaya Gorakhpur University. For around two hours, he praised his government for improving law and order, infrastructure and healthcare in the state, while criticising the previous state government for its “misgovernance.” In August 2017, as many as 34 children and 18 adults had died at Gorakhpur’s Baba Raghav Das Medical College after the oxygen supply at the hospital finished. Some media reports suggested that the deaths occurred due to the negligence of the BJP-led state government. When I asked Rao about these reports, he termed them “100 percent fraud,” and said that the controversy had been blown out of proportion.
He pivoted the conversation back to politics. Rao also told me that while the Yadavs and the Dalits would vote for the grand alliance, “upper castes and OBCs will vote for the BJP.” Shravan Kumar Nirala, the zone coordinator of the BSP in Gorakhpur, echoed Rao’s thoughts about the alliance’s vote bank and added that the “Muslims and Nishads will vote for the alliance.” Kali Shankar Yadav, the incharge of SP’s youth wing in Gorakhpur, also claimed that they “have an unbeatable caste coalition.” Yadav said the city was a “prestige” issue for Adityanath, who “will use money and muscle power to win Gorakhpur,” but was confident that the coalition would win. Although the alliance’s candidate for Gorakhpur has not been declared, everyone I spoke to agreed that it would most likely be Praveen Nishad from the SP.
On 7 March, I attended a rally organised by the NISHAD party to demand reservations for the community in Gorakhpur. Around two thousand people participated in the rally, many of whom were wearing red caps and carrying flags with an inscription of the party’s name. Pappu Kumar Nishad, an unemployed 20-year-old resident of Gorakhpur, said, “I have just finished a BA, but there are no jobs available. This is why we need reservations.” He said that if a fellow Nishad had a government job they would be in a position to help him. Dilip Nishad, from Ghazipur in eastern Uttar Pradesh, told me, “Upper castes get reservation without asking for it, because the government implemented a 10-percent quota, but they haven’t met our long standing demand.”
Sanjay had told me that he was opposed to the BJP. “The BJP is a false party because they don’t want Nishads to prosper.” At the rally, the participants seemed to believe the same. Referring to the emerging political consciousness among the Nishads in recent years, Ravindra Nishad, a 24-year-old resident of Uttar Pradesh’s Maharajganj district, told me, “It has been a long time in the making, but earlier we didn’t have a political party of our own.” He added, “We will vote for anyone who our party asks us to vote for. Anyone but the BJP.”