Hoshiarpur

Hoshiarpur is a district and Lok Sabha seat in Punjab’s Doaba, listed by IndiaVotes as a Scheduled Caste seat in both 1996 and 2024. It is tied to Punjab’s Dalit Sikh politics by one name, Kanshi Ram. The Quint says he was born on 15 March 1934 into a Chamar Ramdasia family of Khawaspur village in Ropar district, and Outlook calls it a Scheduled Caste Sikh family. He founded the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP).

Key moments

• May 1996: Kanshi Ram won Hoshiarpur for the BSP with 2,30,011 votes, 39.5 percent, beating the Congress candidate by 10,944 (IndiaVotes).
• 2002 to 2006: he announced that he would take Buddhism on 14 October 2006. He died on 9 October 2006, and his funeral rites were Buddhist (The Quint). Both facts stand: he was born in a Sikh family and was cremated as a Buddhist.
• 4 June 2024: AAP’s Raj Kumar Chabbewal won Hoshiarpur with 3,03,859 votes, 32.22 percent. Jeevan Singh Tamil of the Bahujan Dravida Party (BDP) came seventh with 4,621 votes, 0.49 percent (IndiaVotes). Onmanorama reports that he stood there as a tribute to Kanshi Ram’s 1996 win. He was born in Thoothukudi, Tamil Nadu, and was initiated into Sikhism in 2023.

What it means today. Hoshiarpur is where a Dalit leader of Sikh birth won Parliament as the head of a party built on caste, and where a Tamil Dalit Sikh later chose to stand in his name. The result shows the limits of that name in 2024: the BDP candidate won under half of one percent of the vote. The sources opened do not say how much weight Doaba’s Ramdasia and Ravidassia communities give to Kanshi Ram’s memory today.