Kanshi Ram was born on 15 March 1934 at Pirthipur Bunga near Khawaspur in Ropar district, into a Ramdasia Sikh family, and worked as a scientist at the Explosives Research and Development Laboratory at Pune.
He organised government employees from Scheduled Caste and backward communities from 1971, first in an employees' association that became BAMCEF in 1978, then founded the DS-4 in 1981 and in 1984 the Bahujan Samaj Party.
His argument was that the numerically largest section of Indian society, which he called the bahujan, could hold power directly rather than through patronage from other parties, and that the route to it was organisation among salaried Dalits who had the means to fund it.
The party he built formed the government of Uttar Pradesh four times under Mayawati.
In Punjab, the state he came from and the state with the highest Dalit population share in India, it has never won power.
He died in Delhi on 9 October 2006. Punjab has named institutions after him and has not voted for what he built.
In 1982, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Poona Pact, he published The Chamcha Age, an attack on Dalit politicians who held office inside parties run by others. A chamcha is a spoon, and it is what he called a representative handed his position rather than winning it. The book is the clearest statement of why he would not work through an existing party.
He sat in the Lok Sabha twice, for Etawah in Uttar Pradesh from 1991 and for Hoshiarpur in Punjab from May 1996. He held the Punjab seat for about a year and a half.
Why the movement did not take hold in the state he came from is a standing question in Punjab politics. The usual answers are that Sikhism's formal rejection of caste left Dalit politics here without a separate religious idiom to organise around, that the Scheduled Caste vote is divided between Ravidassia, Ramdasia and Mazhabi rather than consolidated, and that the Akali Dal and the Congress both took Dalit candidates in early. None of the three is settled.