Time for Mayawati to make way for new BSP leadership?

The recent polls giving the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) a thumping majority in the Lok Sabha and over 50 per cent votes in 17 states is a clear indication of the increasing dominance of the Saffron party throughout the country. The party did very well in Uttar Pradesh in spite of the gathbandhan between Akhilesh Yadav and Mayawati, between the Samajwadi Party (SP) and the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP).

Many analysts had hyped-up the electoral prospects of the gathbandhan creating a false perception regarding the BJP’s impending defeat. On May 23, all were surprised not only because the BJP managed to crush the SP-BSP gathbandhan but also increased its vote share by 7.3 percentage points, raising from 42.3 per cent in 2014 to 49.6 per cent in 2019. While Mayawati won 10 seats and retained 19 per cent votes, the SP was a loser as it could barely retain its five Lok Sabha seats and lost four per cent votes.

However, the BSP’s future does not look bright. There are a number of factors that lie behind the poor showing of the party.

It is a single leader party with no one else, except Mayawati, having the mandate to talk about the party – be it programmatic or organisational, strategic or tactical, leadership or cadre-related. She deliberately crushed collective leadership and finished the Dalit and Backward Class movements of the BAMCEF and the DS4 laboriously built up by Kansiram during 1970s and thus cut into the foundational roots of the BSP.

Mayawati is also known for keeping caste on the front-foot and ideology on the back-burner paying only lip service to Bhimrao Ambedkar, Kansiram and other Dalit icons. She began by highlighting caste-based identity of Dalits and pursued exclusionary politics to consolidate her vote-base. But, suddenly, she took a U-turn towards inclusive politics, forming a majority government on the back of a Dalit-Brahmin social coalition, hyped as the first Dalit government in UP in 2007.

To the utter disbelief of the Dalits, Mayawati sidelined them from plum positions in the government and leadership structure just to accommodate Brahmins and Muslims who formed the bedrock of her social engineering. That was beginning of Dalit estrangement with Mayawati.

That’s why Dalits marched towards the BJP in 2014 when Prime Minister Narendra Modi promised inclusive politics and development with his call for sabka saath, sabka vikas. And, the 2019 Lok Sabha verdict demonstrated that he won sabka vishvas too.

Mayawati’s myopic politics has not only made her lose a historic opportunity to homogenise backward class that had come together through the BAMCEF and the DS4 movements during seventies and eighties, she also failed to consolidate her core Dalit community. She was focussed on just one caste, the Jatavs or the Chamars out of 67 Dalit castes in UP. Thus, she excluded 66 Ati-dalits like the Balmikis,Pasis, Dhobis, Koris, Khatiks from her political kitty. That’s why, except the Jatavs or the Chamars, other Ati-dalits are not attracted towards Mayawati. All these Dalits have now turned towards Modi and the BJP.

Mayawati has also not developed any second-rank leadership that can take up the party reigns when she vacates her space in politics. At one point she developed four secondary level leaders – Babu Singh Kushwaha and Swami Prasad Maurya from the most backwardcommunity, Nasimuddin from among the Muslims and Satish Mishra from the Brahmin community. Unfortunately, she removed them one by one except Satish Mishra. How can Mayawati run a national party without leaders of national and provincial stature?

In recent years, Mayawati was persuaded by several leaders to nurture prime-ministerial ambitions. That prevented her from consolidating social engineering experiments in UP and replicating it elsewhere. She made a unique theoretical intervention in electoral politics called reverse social osmosis that operationalised inclusive politics in UP. That stunned everyone at home and abroad. Harvard University invited me to explain that theoretical intervention.

Instead of consolidating her social engineering and fine tuning it to make it more effective, she renounced that experiment and unnecessarily went for a Dalit-Muslim coalition in 2017 and a Dalit-Yadav gathbandhan in 2019. She seemed to be experimenting with electoral strategies but is not sure what is the right thing to do.

Lastly, Mayawati also lacks oratory skills. Therefore she is not able to establish a rapport with her non-Dalit constituency. Though a law graduate, she has never impressed people with her eloquence or eye contact with them. She reads the written script word by word making her speeches dull and boring, lacking in both ideative content and linguistic brilliance so needed of a leader.

All this has enabled the BJP and Narendra Modi to steal the show in UP. Most of the Dalit MPs and MLAs in UP are from the BJP, giving the party access to the Dalit community. Modi-Yogi governments have worked in tandem to ensure delivery of goods and services to Dalits, the poor and the marginalised that has pushed them towards the BJP and made Mayawati a little less relevant for them.

In this backdrop, it is perhaps the right moment for a new Dalit leadership to emerge in UP. Mayawati must either make space for some new Dalit leader to take over otherwise the BSP’s days seem to be numbered.

Dalits are no more beholden to any party, not even to Mayawati’s BSP. Their options are open. The way ‘BJP-system’, reminiscent of erstwhile ‘Congress system’, is emerging, the indications are loud and clear that Dalits are moving towards BJP. Should they get their due space and attention in the BJP, it will be very difficult for Mayawati to pull them back. That makes the future of Mayawati and the BSP a little uncertain.

(AK Verma is Director, Centre for the Study of Society and Politics, Kanpur)