The standoff between the supporters of Tikait and Mayawati has opened a new chapter in the long history of confrontation between the two sides based on land, caste and political power in UP, writes Sudha Pai The casteist remarks by Mahendra Singh Tikait against Mayawati at a rally in Bijnor and the tension that followed, reflect the high levels of hostility that have always existed between the jats and dalits, particularly jatavs, in western Uttar Pradesh. Historically, the former have constituted the landowning class and the latter the dependent and exploited landless labour in the countryside. In this relationship, caste hierarchy has provided the jats with an instrument to suppress the dalits as this secures their own socio-economic power in the countryside. This rivalry has taken a particularly virulent form in western UP. Here, since the colonial period, the jatavs have been better off and more aggressive than dalits of other regions. This was the region where the Republican Party of India was active in the early post-Independence period and that has left a legacy of political consciousness. While the hostility has continued, due to rapid social change in UP it has taken on new forms over the last few decades. In the 1970s, agrarian issues underlay the confrontation between the dalits and jats. Tikait, an obscure village pradhan, shot into prominence in the early 1980s when, following the Green Revolution and the rise of a rich farmer class, mobilisation by farmers' organisations such as the Bharatiya Kisan Union (BKU) formed by him, demanding lower taxes, higher prices for foodgrains and subsidies, gained importance. Describing themselves as