Lotus In an Elephant Trunk

IN AGRA, UTTAR PRADESH, Reena is torn be­tween ration and rationale. In the Dalit colony where she lives—and she says this is true for most people in her neighbourhood—Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s recent promise that free ration will continue to reach families like hers is vital for her family’s sustenance. But she is also aware that this means pressing the lotus button instead of the elephant (on the electronic voting machine), which is the symbol of Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP). It is a tough decision. If she and others like her vote for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), it means making the BSP supremo Mayawati fur­ther move towards irrelevance in the juggernaut of Indian politics.

In a way, it is a sad commentary that many voters like Reena have to make their electoral choice on the basis of a few kilos of ration. But it is also a telling sign of the failure of Dalit politics, at least in this part of India, the fountainhead of which remains Mayawati. In her rallies in Agra just before it went to polls on May 7, Mayawati brought up the issue of ration. “Do not think that you are indebted to them [BJP]?” she asked, adding that free ration did not come from the pockets of Modi or his party, but from tax money paid by people.

There is consensus among BSP’s voters that the party is fight­ing a battle for survival from which they were hoping to come out alive in a dignified manner. This, they felt, could be pos­sible with the infusion of “new blood” in the party—a reference to Akash Anand, the national coordinator of the party and Mayawati’s nephew whom she declared her successor barely six months ago. But just as the third phase got over, Mayawati in a series of posts on social media platform X announced that Anand was being removed both as party’s national coordina­tor and political heir. Anand has been in the eye of the storm in the last few days for a speech in UP in which he compared BJP to Taliban, asking people to beat the representatives of other parties with shoes. This speech may have been uncalled for, but Anand had brought the much-needed energy with his aggressive politics. “Before Anand, the only face of BSP was Mayawati,” said Badri Narayan, director of GB Pant Social Science Institute, Univer­sity of Allahabad. Apart from Mayawati, the other face of BSP was Satish Chandra Mishra, who is credited with devising a social en­gineering strategy that brought other castes to vote for BSP, leading to Mayawati’s spectacular victory in the 2007 UP Assembly polls.

“But he could never become a face as his caste made him unac­ceptable to the core voters of the party,” says Narayan. Mayawati’s decision to remove Anand was met with dismay by most BSP supporters on social media, especially the young, who felt a con­nection with Anand.

But it is not only about that. In UP elections over the last few years, BJP has taken the wind out of Mayawati’s sails, hurtling BSP into an existential crisis. Its leader, the heir to the party’s founding father, the leader who became the state’s chief min­ister four times, is today being called the B-team of BJP. In UP, in many parts, they refer to her party candidates as vote katua, the vote splitter. This is alluding to allegations that BSP fields its can­didates in constituencies in a way that it will help split Dalit and Muslim votes, helping BJP. In Jaunpur Lok Sabha constituency, for example, the party changed its candidate hours before the nomination process was to end, switching back to the sitting MP, Shyam Singh Yadav. It’s a move that is seen as likely to benefit BJP in the constituency. Even her outreach to the Muslim com­munity—she has given one-third of her tickets in UP so far to Muslims—is considered by many a part of her strategy to help BJP. The Samajwadi Party’s (SP) Akhilesh Yadav even went to the extent of saying that voting for BSP is a waste of votes.

For the largest part of an electoral cycle, Mayawati has, in the last several years, chosen to remain aloof. Just before the elec­tions, she revives herself, indulging in a rhetoric that has not helped her much. In the last Assembly elections in UP, in 2022, BSP managed to win only one seat out of 403, while BJP-plus won 273. In 2017, BSP had won 19, and in 2012, it had emerged victorious on 80 seats. In her rallies around 2017 (and later, in 2022) as well, Mayawati had made it seem as if her principal contender was BJP. She extensively made remarks about the uniform civil code and the issue of triple talaq. She issued warn­ings that BJP was to finish reservations if it came to power. But all of this felt unconvincing turning BSP into a political pygmy, while BJP became a leviathan.

BSP’S FOUNDER KANSHI RAM did not live to see this debacle. He had once travelled to Mathura in April 1980 for an exhibition on Dalit icons. His commitment to the Dalit cause was so strong that he chose to walk from the railway station to the party office carrying a heavy trunk on his head—this just to save `20 that a rickshaw puller had asked for. This commitment inspired several young Dalit youths to join him, eventually turning them into his missionaries.

These “missionaries” remained solidly with BSP as long as Kanshi Ram called the shots. He gradually consolidated his party’s base beyond the Jatavs by inviting leaders from back­ward castes like the Kurmis. In its early days, BSP consolidated its Dalit base with the politics of exclusion. The slogans in those days were ‘Tilak, taraazu aur talwaar, inko maaro joote chaar’ and ‘Ram ko phenko nadiya mein, Bheem ko lo kandiya mein’. Later, when BSP and SP came together for a short period in 1993, the slogan of ‘Mile Mulayam-Kanshi Ram, hawa mein ud gaye Jai Shri Ram’ was floated.

From the early 2000s, BSP began to woo Brahmins in the state, and it coined new slogans like ‘Haathi nahi Ganesh hai, Brahma, Vishnu, Mahesh hai’ and ‘Brahmin shankh bajayega, haathi badta jaayega’. As a result, BSP got over 23 per cent of 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, orchestrated by Mishra, 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”.

But even in 2007, SP retained 47 per cent of UP’s Muslim votes. In 2012, when Mayawati lost and Akhilesh Yadav became chief minister, SP’s Muslim vote share fell to 39 per cent. But by then, SP had been able to make inroads into Mayawati’s Dalit base, es­pecially Jatavs. The critics of Mayawati’s experiments said that the social engineering had been a debacle as BSP’s Dalit vote base felt threatened by the inclusion of upper-caste Hindus and Muslims.

In the 2014 General Election, Mayawati had failed to win even a single seat in UP or elsewhere. According to National Election Studies (NES) data, BSP lost 16 per cent of Jatav (her core vote base) and 35 per cent of other Dalit votes in 2014 as compared to 2009. In 2014, many among the Dalit middle class chose to vote for BJP; 18 per cent of Jatavs voted for the party.

After her defeat in 2014, Mayawati appeared more isolated and disconnected from her cadre and voter base. Many senior leaders got frustrated with her and left the party. In 2019, BJP continued to gain Dalit votes across India; it got one-third of Dalit votes as compared to one-fourth in 2014. It also made significant inroads into Other Backward Classes (OBCs).

One of the leaders in BSP’s old fold happens to be Anant Rao Akela, who lives in Aligarh. Akela heard Kanshi Ram speak for the first time in Ba­reilly and was so impressed that he joined him im­mediately. For years, he kept serving the party in various positions, including in charge of Agra and Aligarh blocks in the early 1990s. But in 2014, he became disillusioned with what he terms as BSP’s total fall. “The party won’t be able to win a single seat anywhere in India even this time,” he said.

After putting up a feeble fight in 2019, BSP seemed to have pulled up its socks this time, becom­ing a little aggressive in its campaign. “The problem was that Mayawati become uncommunicative while her cadre kept waiting for a message,” says Badri Narayan, but for these elections, he points out, Mayawati has addressed the cadres sending a clear message that saving the “elephant” is not an elec­toral strategy this time but a mission to save BSP from extinction.

A part of this strategy is to critique Modi’s free ration scheme as she did in her rallies in Agra. “On this alone, she has been able to mobilise voters who believe in her,” says Narayan.

But even before Anand was shown the red card, Akela saw no promise of a BSP revival. “Akash agar aakash-pataal bhi ek kar de, tab bhi kuch nahi hoga (Even if Akash moves heaven and earth, nothing is going to happen),” he says.

It is because of the awareness of the existential crisis that Mayawati has decided to maintain equal distance from BJP and the I.N.D.I.A. bloc. This, old BSP watchers say, is something that Kanshi Ram did as well when BSP was in the making. “So, you can say that Mayawati has just repeated that strategy since BSP is once again in the making,” says Narayan. An alliance with, say, SP may have helped in a few seats, but right now, Mayawati’s fight is concentrated more on wajood (existence). There is not much in terms of seats BSP can do in these elections. But she wants to get as many votes as possible so that in future it also translates into votes, and BSP emerges as the third pole.

As of now, the possibility of BSP becoming a party beyond UP is seriously in doubt. And if the past few elections and now Anand’s ouster are an indication, things do not look bright for her in UP either. But would it be correct to write her off? The jury is still out on that.

2024 Elections2024: The CountdownAkash AnandBSPGeneral election 2024MayawatiUttar Pradesh