NEW DELHI: Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi ’s experiment to cultivate Dalit leaders at grass-roots level in UP is facing a tough challenge. Most of Gandhi’s army of nearly 400 Dalit leaders refused to submit to their first political test – contest local body elections – because of the steadfast resistance among the old guard against his ambitious ‘leadership development mission’.Of the Dalit leaders identified in 84 reserved assembly segments in Uttar Pradesh, only about 10% agreed to contest the local body elections. Though the polls are not fought on election symbols, Congress wanted to gauge the success of these candidates in the local body elections. But the result was far from encouraging. Only 20% of the candidates won in elections which saw 400,000 candidates contested in over 3,000 kshetra and zila panchayats elections. Bahujan Samaj Party claimed 600 of its party members won, of whom 20% are Dalits.“We garnered major lessons for us from the local body elections,” said Shashank Shukla, who heads Gandhi’s mission in Uttar Pradesh. “The biggest takeaway has been the need to find a balance between developing new leadership and ensure that he/she is acceptable to the organisation as well as other castes, especially the upper castes in reserved constituencies,” he said. The second learning, Shukla said, has been that the new leaders in the programme need to find acceptance among the old guard. “It is a more deliberate process than we had imagined,” he said.While the state unit chief Nirmal Khatri and his team have been actively supporting the programme, the Dalit leaders are finding resistance within the assembly constituencies from the old guard. A senior Congress leader, who did not want to be identified, said, “Why do you think more candidates did not come forward? The older leadership has been seeing these youth leaders as a direct threat to their political careers.Why would they get any support?” The results have been disappointing for Congress especially because like all Gandhi’s programmes the leadership development mission is based on specially developed monitoring tools and measurables. It has been developed by Gandhi and his trusted lieutenant Scheduled Caste department chairman K Raju. Ateamof leaders, headedby Shukla, gets in touch with district committees of the party and asks each unit to identify five Congress-minded socially active leaders.The team contacts these leaders, conductsabackgroundcheck and then gives them tasks to check their capabilities. The activities of each leader are monitored over a period of two-three years and a dossier is prepared to see how a leader compares with others.