Behenji In Her Labyrinth

ON MARCH 7, THE BAHUJAN SAMAJ PARTY (BSP) chief Mayawati paid a visit to the Bahujan Samaj Prerna Kendra in Lucknow, where the mortal remains of her mentor and party’s found­er Kanshi Ram are kept. It is also a place where she has installed her own life-size statues, in which she features wearing a long kurta while holding her trademark handbag. She also visited her party office and appealed to her sup­porters to celebrate Kanshi Ram’s birth anniversary on March 15.

But BSP, whose reins she is trying hard to control, looks today like a spectral of the party Kanshi Ram nurtured and turned into the biggest representative of Dalit aspiration. A few days before making her appearance, Mayawati removed her nephew Akash Anand, who she had earlier presented as her successor. Last year, before Lok Sabha elections, Anand was removed for the first time after his “con­troversial” remarks against the Narendra Modi government. He was reinstated later, but then on March 2, he was kicked out once again. Mayawati said she made this decision because Anand was under the influence of his father-in-law, Ashok Siddharth, who was expelled from the party last month. Siddharth has been a Rajya Sabha MP; he had been associated with Kanshi Ram even before BSP’s formation in 1984. Party insiders say that Mayawati saw Siddharth trying to create a power centre of his own in which she felt Anand would be an instrument.

The young Anand was seen as a ray of hope amidst BSP’s dwindling fortunes. In a political landscape where new militant Dalit leaders like Chandrashekhar Azad (now MP) are making big leaps, Anand’s leadership was supposed to attract young Dalits to the BSP fold—an electorate that is fast being taken away by leaders like Azad and the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP’s) subaltern Hindutva. Anand’s ex­pulsion and Mayawati’s Caesar-like prom­ulgation that there will be no heir in her lifetime has put the party behind, and this at a time when the party badly needs a fresh lease of life if it hopes to stay relevant in the 2027 Assembly elections in Uttar Pradesh.

In the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, BSP went out for a duck. In the last Assembly elections in UP, it managed to win just one seat— shocking for a party that once upon a time changed the political narrative of the country from the very same state. In 2024, it got just over two per cent votes nationally even as it had fielded candidates in 488 out of 543 constituencies. In the last Assembly elections in UP, its vote share fell to 12.88 per cent from a bout 20 per cent.

But Mayawati’s decision has hardly come as a surprise to old-timers in the party like Nasimuddin Siddiqui, who is now with Congress. Once BSP’s most prominent Muslim face, Siddiqui and his son were expelled by Mayawati after the 2017 elections. Siddiqui’s brother, Zameeruddin, had been a close confidant of Kanshi Ram; it was at his insistence that Siddiqui was offered a party ticket in the 1991 Assembly elections in UP. He won from Banda and became BSP’s first Muslim MLA. When Mayawati became UP chief minister in 2007 (on her own), Siddiqui was known in UP as “mini-CM”. But in 2017, when BJP’s Yogi Adityanath became chief minister by an overwhelming ma­jority, Siddiqui was accused of indulging in corruption and anti-party activities. He hit back by playing audio conversations he had with her about alleged financial deals, prompting Mayawati to further attack him by calling him a “taping blackmailer”. At that time, many could not help but take notice that Mayawati had chosen to address the media (a rarity) for launching a tirade against her colleague while choosing not to utter a word about the Shab­birpur (in Saharanpur) violence in which Dalit-Rajput clashes led to burning of several Dalit houses (and death of one man among the Rajputs). To make amends, she later visited Shabbirpur six days after the presser—it led to further violence in the village.

Siddiqui is not alone. Ever since she tightened her grip over the party after Kanshi Ram’s death, Mayawati has expelled and isolated a string of old loyalists whom Kanshi Ram brought into the fold, and who remained committed to the ideas he firmly be­lieved in. As a result, over the years, even the Jatavs, the caste she belongs to, and who had remained steadfastly with her, began to desert her. Many now believe that the party’s chances of revival remain grim.

But how did things come to such a pass?

Kanshi Ram first came across Mayawati in 1977. She was 21 and worked as a teacher at a government primary school in Delhi. She was also studying law and preparing for the civil services. In one of her interviews compiled in 2008 by the Dalit publishing house, Anand Sahitya Sadan, Mayawati recalls that Kanshi Ram had come to hear of her fiery speeches from his associates. One late night, he dropped in with a few companions at her house in Budh Nagar—it was a colony in the capital’s Inderpuri area and had no electricity. It was here that Kanshi Ram dissuaded her from appearing for the civil services, and asked her to lead the Dalit community instead.

From that day onwards, Mayawati was groomed for political leadership. By the late 1980s, she had become Kanshi Ram’s close confidante, and her taking over the party’s mantle from him had become certain. She was first elected to Lok Sabha from Bijnor in Uttar Pradesh in 1989. In 2003, she became the BSP president. In 2006, after Kanshi Ram’s demise, Mayawati hit her peak, when the party led by her came to power in Uttar Pradesh in 2007 with a majority for the first time.

From the early 2000s, with a social engineering plan orchestrated by the party’s Satish Chandra Mishra, BSP began to woo Brahmins in the state. As Mishra, a Brahmin himself, began to find ways to attract upper-caste voters, the party coined new slo­gans like ‘Haathi nahin Ganesh hain, Brahma, Vishnu, Mahesh hain’ and ‘Brahmin shankh bajayega, haathi badta jaayega’. The dividends appeared fast—the party got over 23 per cent votes in the state’s 2002 Assembly elections, which meant that the party was get­ting votes outside the Dalit fold. In the 2007 state polls, BSP’s social engineering formula turned the electoral tide so success­fully that Mayawati’s victory—her party got a vote share of over 51 per cent—was seen by some as the beginning of “Dalit Raj”.

BSP’s social engineering and its embrace of upper castes was seen by many Dalit intellectuals as a compromise to Kanshi Ram’s founding ideology. In an article in the Economic and Political Weekly, the scholar Anand Teltumbde wrote: “there is an intrinsic conceptual error in assuming the BSP as a Dalit party. How could there be a Dalit struggle without the definition of its friends and foes? By pushing such issues un­der the carpet, it actually negates the Dalit struggle itself,” he wrote.

While the social engineering experiment fetched good results in 2007, other things began to taint, bit by bit. There were allegations of tick­ets being sold and not giving enough representation to different oppressed communities. These alleged practices and Mayawati’s own arrogance began to affect party old-timers. A BSP mem­ber in Lucknow once told this correspondent of an old-timer, who, he said, was so committed that he once donated his entire sal­ary to the party, then cut his pocket with scissors and told his wife back home that his pocket had been picked. As the party under Mayawati became more non-inclusive, many prominent leaders could not see their future with BSP any longer. In 2016, one of the party’s biggest OBC faces, Swami Prasad Maurya, resigned from the party; he termed Mayawati as “daulat ki beti” (daughter of wealth) in­stead of “Dalit ki beti” (daughter of a Dalit). After Anand’s expulsion, Maurya, who is currently with the Samajwadi Party (SP), told The Indian Express that Mayawati moved away from Kanshi Ram’s core ideals leading to a “surge of thailashahs (moneybags)” in the party.

Other loyalists like the Kurmi leader, Barkhuram Verma, also found that no place had been left for them. The Kurmis in Uttar Pradesh are as many as Yadavs, but with Mayawati isolating their leaders, they went away, too. In came BJP which has been trying to woo the most backward castes (around 15 per cent) since the early 1990s. In 1990, when Mulayam Singh Yadav ordered police firing on Kar Sevaks, 16 of the 21 people who died were Kewat-Nishads, one of 17 such communities. With Narendra Modi coming to power, this wooing became even stronger. Invoking figures like Kewat in the Ramayana, BJP managed poll victory in 2017 and 2022 UP elections with this inclusivity (in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, SP managed a dent in this umbrella, but BJP has since then started consolidation efforts).

What has also worked against Mayawati is the impression that BSP often acts as the B-team of BJP—some even believe Anand’s first expulsion was because of his vitriolic remarks against the Modi government. In UP, Mayawati’s party candidates are called “vote katuas (vote splitters)”, alluding to the party fielding its candidates in constituencies where it helps split Dalit and Muslim votes, leading to the BJP candidate winning. In 2024, in Jaunpur Lok Sabha con­stituency, for example, the party changed its candidate hours before the nomination process was to end, switching back to sitting MP Shyam Singh Yadav. This was seen as a move to help BJP, but due to SP’s Picchda, Dalit, Alpasankhyak (PDA) outreach, BJP’s candidate came second. Even her outreach to the Muslim community—she gave one-third of her tickets in UP to Muslims— was considered by many a part of her strategy to help BJP. Akhilesh Yadav even went to the ex­tent of saying that voting for BSP is a waste of votes. Not surprising that her Muslim vote share has been reduced by 75 per cent. After her abysmal per­formance in 2024, Mayawati went on to blame Muslims for the debacle; she said that the community had not been able to understand the party and that in future elections, Muslims would be given a ticket only after much thought.

The biggest challenge to Mayawati, though, remains the young Dalit voter. While the younger generation of Dalits is conscious of casteism, it is also true that BSP’s grip has loosened over the young as compared to the previous generations. The sociologist André Beteille has pointed out how long-term changes in caste dynamics are being ignored. He says that in three major areas of social life, caste has been on a decline: “First, the observance of the rules relating to purity and pol­lution was becoming weaker. Second, the regulation of marriage according to the rules of caste, was becoming less stringent. And third, the relation between caste and occupation was becoming more flexible.” This is something that BJP has cashed in on quite ef­fectively. As the political analyst Badri Narayan says, the new middle class among Dalits is getting influenced by Modi’s new language. According to CSDS data, even among Jatavs, support for Mayawati has come down to 65 per cent (in 2022) as compared to 87 per cent (in 2017). In 2024, data reveals that this support dropped to 44 per cent.

After her outburst of sorts against the Muslim community in 2024, Mayawati has in recent times been trying to get it back into the BSP fold. She criticised the Uttarakhand government over its decision to seal madrasas in Dehradun. She also criticised the UP government for removing (unauthorised) loudspeakers from religious places during Ramzan. This is clearly an attempt to disrupt SP’s PDA outreach. But for her party, it may be a matter of too little, too late.

Akash AnandBahujan Samaj PartyBSPChandrashekhar AzadMayawatiUP politicsUttar Pradesh