Dalit Question and Political Response

In the existing literature the concept of mobilisation is used to analyse electoral strategies employed by political parties to obtain votes from a section of the population - in this case dalits. This aspect has been extensively covered for both Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh during the 1990s. The attempt here is to understand the response of political parties to fundamental shifts in the democratic arena in the 1990s in these two states: the decline of the single-dominant party system and the emergence of narrower political formations based on identity which has created a more competitive environment. The differential patterns of mobilisation employed by the BSP and the Congress in the two states using state power from above to put into effect programmes for dalits in order to enlarge their support base among them are examined.