It takes extraordinary temerity for a party leader to assert that she will fight the Lok Sabha elections solo when the cards are stashed against her. On January 15, her birthday, once celebrated with the razzmatazz seen at mega weddings, Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) chief and former Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Mayawati stated that she would not align with the BJP-led NDA or the INDIA bloc, which hangs tenuously as an opposition front of sorts. Mayawati surfaced publicly after months but the declaration was ostensibly meant to snuff out the rumours that she was being courted by the Congress to become a part of INDIA in UP.
Consider the circumstances. In an attempt to fortify every front, cement each crack and usurp the political space, the BJP wooed—and at times succeeded—in getting regional entities aboard NDA, while discarding the ones that seemed dispensable. A hollowed-out Congress desperately clutches on to the few straws flying in the wind, hoping that one or two might bestow good luck on INDIA. The feverish prelude to the battle is marked by which of the two players, the Congress or BJP, gets the state parties on their side and inflate their own size, symbolically and substantively. The BJP, of course, is well ahead of the Congress because, in a supreme irony, its new and old allies, willingly play catch-up, seem unmindful of the danger of being subsumed by Big Brother and consigning their identities to the bin of history.
Mayawati stands aloof in the crowd of BJP seekers.
The BSP has a history of making and breaking coalitions after its incipient steps to stand solo and develop a brand as a pan-Dalit party took it nowhere. Its founder and ideologue, Kanshi Ram, made no bones about why he sought allies. In 1993, when the BSP signed a pact with the Samajwadi Party to fight the UP assembly polls and confront a powerful BJP, he was on record saying, “The reason why I concluded an alliance with Mulayam Singh Yadav (the SP’s architect) is that if we join our votes, we will be able to form the government,” which they did when they beat the BJP by a whisker. Ram’s reasoning was that Dalits should leverage their numbers—20.7 percent of UP’s population—in party politics and be in a position to effect changes.
The uneasy SP-BSP compact nevertheless saw the Dalit party adjudicate in land disputes to the advantage of the landless and enhance the wages of agricultural workers. Such initiatives brought the BSP in direct conflict less with the upper castes and more with the intermediate castes such as the Jats and the better-off backward castes, flush with a sense of empowerment brought about by the implementation of the Mandal Commission report and the rise of Yadav leaders, Mulayam and Lalu Prasad. Often, the SP’s contempt for Dalits was manifest in the frequent attacks on them by the Yadavs, while Ram was incensed by Mulayam’s propensity to take credit for the pro-people policies of the coalition government and his covert move to poach on BSP MLAs. For Ram, the intermediate and backward castes were socially on a par with the Dalits, especially the Jatavs, who were well represented in the upper echelons of the bureaucracy and police as the principal beneficiaries of statutory reservations in education and jobs.
Therefore, when on June 3, 1995, after his protégé Mayawati was sworn in as chief minister with the BJP’s support after the BSP terminated its arrangement with the SP, Ram’s justification was, “We can take the help of BJP to advance our national agenda. We feel the upper castes will be more amenable to social transformation than the intermediate castes.” The government was short-lived but in 1997, after a fractured electoral verdict, Mayawati was back as CM, thanks again to the BJP.
The BJP might have found it untenable to convince its cadre that its ‘patronage’ of Mayawati was the most pragmatic way of keeping the BSP away from the SP and refashioning its image as being Dalit-friendly. But its support helped the BSP to such an extent that in the high noon of her career, Mayawati secured a majority of her own in 2007 through an inclusive social coalition which embraced every caste and community. The BSP’s vituperative slogans against ‘savarnas’ went out the window as a blueprint crafted by her political aide and lawyer, Satish Mishra, was implemented in letter and spirit.
In a 2022 paper in The India Forum, political scientist Gilles Verniers framed his thesis on the BSP as a quest to broad-base its social ground. Verniers said the BSP’s strategy for a long time was “forging local and temporary caste-based alliances”. The tactic was not based on “some principled position on equity” but “from the externalisation of the business of winning seats to individual political entrepreneurs who chose to invest in politics by acquiring a BSP ticket”. Mayawati’s dedicated base of Jatav-Dalits in practically every constituency was a strong enough foundation for any candidate to build a pyramid of other castes and possibly get elected.
To begin at the beginning, with her vote share down to 12.9 percent in the 2022 UP elections from a peak of 30.4 percent in 2007, what accounts for Mayawati’s solo act? An unkind explanation was that facing the real prospect of the BJP’s return under Narendra Modi, she did not wish to be seen helping INDIA and jeopardising her equation with the saffron force.
But Mayawati still commands agency to some degree and would not want to diminish the capital she earned by being part of a coalition that allows her partners to prey on her votes, as they were prone to in the past. Encroachment by the SP, BJP or even the Congress could render her irrelevant in the foreseeable future.
Remember, Mayawati’s votes transfer with ease to her allies even if they are not socially compatible. It’s difficult for the SP or BJP to reciprocate in kind. Nonetheless, after remaining a virtual recluse for the past five years and avoiding agitation politics, breathing fire into the BSP will be a long haul. Mayawati anointed her nephew, Akash Anand, as the heir apparent. Like his aunt, the young man has stayed aloof from the heat and dust of politics so far, as the Dalits will probably have to look for an alternative.
Radhika Ramaseshan
Columnist and political commentator
(Views are personal)
(ramaseshan.radhika@gmail.com)