In a move that is perfectly designed to rattle the Mayawati government in Uttar Pradesh, the National Commission for Scheduled Castes (NCSC) has decided to organise dalit camps across the state.
The camps, first of which will be held in Gorakhpur on Thursday, will be held at all divisional headquarters for the next two months.
“The purpose of these camps is to educate the dalits about their rights and create awareness among them. There is no politics in this initiative except that we wish to interact with the deprived sections of society and learn about their problems,” said NCSC chairman P.L. Punia. This, incidentally, is the first time that the NCSC has decided to hold camps to interact with dalits.
According to sources in the NCSC, Mr Punia will be attending most of the camps and will be interacting with dalits across UP. The idea is obviously to document the plight of dalits in a government that claims to be dalit-friendly.
“We have found that maximum number of complaints regarding atrocities on dalits come from Uttar Pradesh. Benefits of various central schemes have also not percolated down to the dalits in UP. The NCSC wants to prepare a document and send it to the Centre so that dalits can reap the benefits of scheme that have been formulated for them,” said a NCSC official while talking to this correspondent on phone. The NCSC initiative has already put the Mayawati government on tenterhooks.
The BSP government is all the more wary of the NCSC initiative because of its chairman P.L. Punia.