India, March 13 -- Congress leader Rahul Gandhi made a massive, retrospective claim about what his great-grandfather, India's first PM Jawaharlal Nehru, would have done for caste justice had he been alive at the time of Kanshi Ram's rise as a political pioneer from the Dalit community.

"If Jawaharlal Nehru were alive, then Kanshi Ram would have been a chief minister from the Congress," Rahul Gandhi said on Friday, speaking at the Samvidhan Sammelan held in Lucknow ahead of the birth anniversary of Kanshi Ram.

Nehru died in 1964, while Kanshi Ram broke out onto the scene with his founding of backwards-championing BAMCEF in 1978, and later, the formation of the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) in 1984.

The BSP, under Kanshi Ram's protege and mu...