Kanshi Ram wins Hoshiarpur in the 1996 Lok Sabha election

Who: Kanshi Ram (1934 to 2006), founder of the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP). He was born near Ropar in Punjab, in a Ramdasia Sikh family of the Chamar caste; ThePrint notes that the Chamar caste was brought into Sikhism in the time of Guru Ram Das.

What: In the Lok Sabha election of 1996 Kanshi Ram was elected from Hoshiarpur, in Punjab, and sat in the 11th Lok Sabha from May 1996. He had already won a seat from Etawah in Uttar Pradesh in 1991. In 1996 Punjab's 13 seats went eight to the Akali Dal, three to the BSP and two to Congress.

His road to the seat was long. Outlook and The Quint say he joined the Defence Research and Development Organisation at Pune in 1957, while ThePrint says he joined the Pune-based Explosives Research and Development Laboratory in 1960. Outlook says he left government service in 1965 and ThePrint says 1964. ThePrint says he left after backing a colleague who had been dismissed for refusing to work on Ambedkar Jayanti. He built an association of Dalit, backward and minority employees that became BAMCEF, formed the Dalit Shoshit Samaj Sangharsh Samiti (DS4) in 1981 and launched the BSP in 1984.

Where: Hoshiarpur, a Lok Sabha seat reserved for Scheduled Castes.

Why it mattered: The BSP's strength in Punjab was already visible in the Assembly election of February 1992, which the Akali Dal's mainstream leaders and the Kharku groups stayed out of and in which the BSP won nine seats and became the main opposition. Kanshi Ram's win in 1996 put the party's founder in Parliament from the state of his birth, from a seat reserved for Scheduled Castes. He died in New Delhi on 9 October 2006. His name is still invoked in Punjab politics: in October 2026 the Akali Dal (Waris Punjab De) held a seminar on his death anniversary at Kisan Bhawan in Chandigarh.