LUCKNOW (The Thursday Times) — A new political party built on Brahmin grievances has set up shop in Uttar Pradesh ahead of next year’s state election, a sign of growing anger at India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) among the upper-caste voters who have long formed its core base, according to a ground report by the Indian news site Scroll.
The Rashtriya Adhikar Morcha (RAM) was founded by Alankar Agnihotri, a former judicial officer who resigned in February in protest at new anti-discrimination rules for universities. He told Scroll the party would contest 150 of the state’s 403 assembly seats and give unconditional support to Mayawati’s Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) in the remaining 253.
“We are cutting BJP votes in at least 100 seats,” Agnihotri said. “Our message to the BJP is simple: open your mouths on injustices against Brahmins else your leaders will be beaten up in every gali,” he added, using the Hindi word for street. In interviews, he has implicitly referred to Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah as “Gujarati gangsters”.
The BJP was long seen as a party of upper-caste Hindus, and several of its earliest leaders, including Deendayal Upadhyaya, Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Murli Manohar Joshi, were Brahmins from Uttar Pradesh. Over the past decade, however, it has won two state elections in a row by drawing in voters from the Other Backward Classes (OBCs) and Scheduled Castes, and many Brahmins now feel they have lost a party they saw as their own.
“Brahmins were the pillars in the house of BJP,” Rajendra Nath Tripathi, national president of the Akhil Bharatiya Brahmin Mahasabha, told Scroll. “But today, we can’t even openly claim to be its tenants.”
The immediate trigger was a set of draft University Grants Commission (UGC) rules notified by the Modi government in January, which set out how colleges and universities should deal with discrimination against students and staff from OBC, Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe groups. The rules followed a rise in student suicides, particularly among Dalits, but upper-caste groups protested, citing fears of false cases. The Supreme Court stayed the rules weeks later, but the anger has not faded.
Scroll found that some of that anger is aimed at Modi rather than at Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath. “Our vote for the BJP in 2027 will be for Yogi,” a young Thakur voter at an Adityanath rally outside Lucknow said. “We will not vote for BJP in 2029. The people are frustrated with Modi.”
The BJP’s Lucknow city president dismissed the idea that Brahmins would desert the party, asking: “Jayenge toh jaye kahan?” — where will they go? His deputy, Vinayak Pandey, was blunter. “Brahmins want everything,” he told Scroll. “You can do a dozen things for the community, but you don’t meet just one demand and they are up in arms.” Pandey also warned that if the BJP lost, upper-caste voters would “see the light”, adding: “Muslims will enter their house and kill them.”
Tripathi, who says he has just toured 42 districts, insists this time is different. “There is so much anger that this jayenge-toh-jaye-kahan will not work this time,” he said. But he admitted the community had not settled on an opposition party to back. Its demands include rolling back the UGC rules, diluting the law against atrocities on Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, and changing caste-based reservations. “The decision will be made 10 days before the elections,” he said.
RAM itself has yet to break through. Scroll found that in September, ordinary voters across Uttar Pradesh had not heard of Agnihotri or his party. “One can’t run a political party with the temperament of a bureaucrat,” Tripathi said. “Many Agnihotris come and go without making a dent.”
The numbers explain why the BJP cannot ignore the mood. The 1931 census put Brahmins at 11% of the population of the then United Provinces, today’s Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand, which in absolute terms gives Uttar Pradesh the largest Brahmin population of any Indian state.
