While addressing a “Samvidhan Sammelan” (Constitution conference) in Lucknow last week, Leader of the Opposition (LoP) in the Lok Sabha, Rahul Gandhi, said had India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru been alive he would have made Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) founder Kanshi Ram the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh.

In the course of Nehru’s nearly 17-year-long tenure as the PM over multiple terms, during which he also called the shots in the Congress’s affairs, UP saw four CMs from the party, all of whom belonged to upper castes. The Congress continued to be a dominant force in UP up to 1989.

During Nehru’s premiership (1947–64), the Congress appointed four CMs in UP: Govind Ballabh Pant (Brahmin, 1950-54), Sampurnanand (Kayastha, 1954-60), Chandra Bhanu Gupta (Vaishya, 1960–63, 1967 and 1969), and Sucheta Kripalani (Kayastha married to a Sindhi; 1963–67).

Other CM aspirants in the UP Congress then included leaders like Purushottam Das Tandon, Sri Prakasa, Vijaylakshmi Pandit and Kamalapati Tripathi (became the CM in 1971), who were all from upper castes too.

The Congress leadership frequently changed the CMs in UP, but their selection seemed to ignore considerations of social justice or equitable representation. While party factionalism was a concern for Nehru, he was also not seen to have prioritised the representation of deprived sections in top government roles.

On his part, Kanshi Ram castigated Nehru-era politics as he made a scathing critique of national politics as part of his movement for the uplift and empowerment of Bahujans in the country.

Kanshi Ram (1934 – 2006), who was born in Punjab’s Ropar district, joined the Pune-based Explosives Research and Development Laboratory as a research assistant in........

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