NDA partner Nishad Party has threatened to declare the BJP an enemy of the Nishad caste if the government does not confer Scheduled Caste status on the OBC community before next year’s Uttar Pradesh elections.

“I have already declared the Bahujan Samaj Party, Samajwadi Party and the Congress as ‘anti-Nishad’. They never respected the communities that depend on riverine occupations,” Nishad party leader Sanjay Nishad, fisheries minister in the Yogi Adityanath government, told reporters on Saturday.

“While our condition is worse than that of the Scheduled Castes, we have been put in the Other Backward Classes category in Uttar Pradesh. This despite our being classified as SCs in over a dozen states in India.”

The Nishad (Nirbal Indian Soshit Hamara Aam Dal) Party claims to represent the Nishad community, most of whose members are boatmen or fishermen. Bengal, Assam and Tripura are among the states where communities engaged in these traditional occupations have SC status.

“We are with the NDA because they are in power at the Centre and in the state and can take this decision the way they changed the University Grants Commission regulations against discrimination,” the minister said.

“We appreciate the BJP for the way it takes decisions overnight. We hope a notification will be issued soon including the Nishad caste in the SC category and giving its members reservation at government colleges and jobs and electoral constituencies.”

The new UGC regulations say that OBCs too are entitled to complain of caste discrimination in higher education, a right previously held only by the SCs and the Scheduled Tribes. Following complaints that this amounted to discrimination against the upper castes, the Supreme Court has halted the UGC order.

Sanjay Nishad claims that Nishads are 9 per cent of the population in Uttar Pradesh but government sources say they account for just above 2 per cent.

“The Nishads were fighting for respect. We can see that Prime Minister Narendra Modi and chief minister Yogi Adityanath now talk about us with respect and call us ‘Nishadji’,” Sanjay Nishad said.

“Thereafter, we wanted security, which the government is trying to provide to the community by bringing them into the mainstream. The third thing we want is prosperity and that’s possible only when we get SC reservation. We shall get jobs and contest the panchayat and Vidhan Sabha elections from SC seats and prosper if we have SC reservation.”