Eroded Support

On 11 July 2022, Rajendra Pal Gautam, Delhi’s minister of social welfare, Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, shot a letter to the secretaries of health and services, warning against irregularities in the hiring of pharmacists and assistants at mohalla—neighbourhood—clinics. A couple of months earlier, the health department had publicly solicited applications for vacancies in its thousand mohalla clinics. The public notification specifically mentioned that no reservation policy would be followed. In his letter, Gautam referred to the union government’s orders from 1968, reiterated in 2018, which mandated that all government hirings must follow constitutional reservation policies when hiring any manpower for more than 45 days. Gautam’s letter proved to be the beginning of a series of political events that would expose Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal’s pro-Dalit image and his Aam Aadmi Party’s performative social-justice politics.

The letter came amid a crowning year for the AAP. Only three months before, the party had formed a government in Punjab, a state where more than thirty percent of the population belongs to the Scheduled Castes. The AAP won the Punjab election on the promise of honouring BR Ambedkar and putting his pictures in all government offices. It was a move the party had adopted in its birth realm, Delhi, the previous month. Around the same time, the AAP won two seats in the Goa assembly on promises of providing free electricity and healthcare, which always drew support from marginalised communities. It garnered 6.77 percent of the vote share in Goa, becoming recognised as a state party there. The AAP was set to become a national party, a rare feat within a decade of its birth. It only needed to cross the six-percent threshold in one more assembly election. Gujarat was scheduled to go to the polls that December. However, Gautam’s official objection to the recruitment method revealed the party’s disregard for reservations.

“It blew up,” Gautam recalled, when we met at his residence a fortnight before this year’s Delhi election. “The chief secretary thought they would be prosecuted if they went ahead.” On 3 October 2022, Gautam received a call from Kejriwal’s office, asking for a meeting at 10 am the following day. He told me that Kejriwal asked him why he wrote the letter without first taking the chief minister’s permission. Gautam pointed to the previous government orders regarding temporary recruitment, telling Kejriwal that the matter needed his attention. Kejriwal, Gautam said, replied with a dismissive, flippant statement. “Tumhe toh bus reservation laga rehta hai”—All that matters to you is reservation.

Gautam left for Ambedkar Bhawan, on Rani Jhansi Road, to check on preparations for the next day. Every year, around 14 October—the anniversary of the 1956 event in which Ambedkar and four hundred and fifty thousand of his followers adopted Buddhism—large numbers of Dalits across the country renounce Hinduism. The 22 vows administered in these conversions specify a distance from Hinduism, including, “I shall have no faith in Brahma, Vishnu and Mahesh, nor shall I worship them.” Gautam, too, was going to formally convert to Buddhism with ten thousand Dalits, on 5 October 2022, at the historic Ambedkar Bhavan.