The Hindu : National : Charge against Mahatma

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Sunday, Oct 28, 2007
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Charge against Mahatma

Sarabjit Pandher

CHANDIGARH: Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister and president of the Bahujan Samaj Party Mayawati has said that though her party respected Mahatma Gandhi for leading the country’s freedom struggle, he actually divided society along caste lines.

Ms. Mayawati was responding to a query at a “Meet the Press” programme organised by the Chandigarh Press Club on Saturday. She refused to accept that her social engineering experiment reflected a shift in her stance from being a pungent critic of “Manuvad” to following “Gandhivad.”

She asserted that her social engineering formula, which catapulted her to power for the fourth time in her State, was based on the ideology formulated by Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, who had sought a casteless society free of all inequalities.

The BSP chief said that Gandhi had used an “unconstitutional term” to describe Dalits or the Scheduled Castes, which actually contributed to dividing society into upper and lower castes.

This further fuelled various manifestations of social tension, she claimed.

Elaborating on her endeavour to further the cause of Dr. Ambedkar and the founder of the BSP, Kanshi Ram, she said that the party had rallied the Dalits and the religious minorities, who were motivated to carry on the process of social reforms as enshrined in the Constitution.

The second phase of the process included changing the mindset of the upper castes.

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