As BSP's hold in UP politics falters, rivals move in for the kill

Watch: Mayawati sacks Akash Anand again: Political gamble or party crisis?

Declining vote share

Mayawati’s decision to sack her heir-apparent and nephew Akash Anand as the party’s national coordinator a second time within a year and, subsequently, expel him from the party has come at a time when the BSP is at rock bottom. The over 20 per cent vote share her party steadily commanded in UP between the 1990s and 2012 when she lost the UP polls, after her only stint as CM with an absolute majority, has been on a tailspin.

From the all-time high of a 30.43 per cent vote share in the 2007 UP elections which gave Mayawati, then a former CM of three unstable tenures in different coalitions, her first five-year stint in power with 206 seats, the BSP’s vote share dropped to 25.91 per cent in the 2012 polls and then to 22.23 per cent in 2017, before crashing down in 2022 to just 12.88 per cent.

An even bigger blow came two years later with the Lok Sabha polls when the BSP polled just over nine per cent votes and drew a blank across the 80 seats of UP.

Also read: By sacking 'heir apparent' Akash, Mayawati may have dealt a suicidal blow to BSP

Dalit vote bank 'up for grabs'

The 2022 UP polls and the Lok Sabha elections of last year broke the impression that the state’s Dalits were Behenji’s unwavering voters; undeterred by the BSP’s electoral triumphs and defeats. The 2022 results had many political commentators concluding that the non-Jatav Dalit communities, who comprise just short of half of UP’s total Dalit population, had drifted away to the BJP and the SP, given the aggressive outreach these parties made towards them as opposed to the BSP supremo’s palpable political inertia.

That the 2024 Lok Sabha polls saw the BSP’s vote share slip to 9.39 per cent has since strengthened this perception of the non-Jatavs deserting Mayawati. The more ominous projection for Mayawati from the 2024 results, however, is that even her own community of Jatavs, comprising an estimated 11.5 per cent of UP’s total population or over half the state’s Dalit population, was now losing faith in her ability to provide them political patronage.

Dalit activists and political commentators as well as Behenji’s own fellow travellers from the Bahujan movement believe that her decision to expel Akash from the party at a time when BSP’s cadre was desperately looking forward to an aggressive, young and educated leadership could now put the entire Dalit vote bank of UP – Jatavs and non Jatavs alike – “up for grabs” for her rivals.

“So far, whether it is the Congress, the BJP or the SP, all of them thought Jatavs won’t leave the BSP and so they focussed on other Dalit communities like Pasis, Koris, Dhobi, etc., but the way Mayawati has been acting, Jatavs will also start moving away from BSP now... the entire Dalit vote bank is up for grabs,” Ram Kumar, co-founder of Dynamic Action Group (DAG), a collective of nearly five dozen UP-based Dalit rights NGOs, tells The Federal.

Watch: Mayawati vs Rahul: Is India's Opposition crumbling?

Ray of hope

Kumar, who also belongs to a Jatav sub-caste, says while there is still “immense respect for Mayawati among Jatavs” the community is also getting “increasingly disillusioned” with the BSP chief’s steering of her party. “When Akash, began campaigning during the Lok Sabha elections, the community saw a ray of hope; they liked his aggression and his frankness in admitting the present BSP’s shortcomings... his expulsion from the party snatches away that hope not just because he was a promising young leader but more so since there is no sign from Behenji that she will herself take charge, meet people directly and lead the movement from the front,” Kumar said.

Mayawati’s decision to appoint her younger brother and Akash’s father Anand Kumar and party veteran Ramji Gautam as the new national coordinators for the party hasn’t enthused her cadre either.

“Neither of them have any political capital of their own; if they visit a Dalit basti alone, people won’t even know who they are,” a former BSP MP who once handled the party’s outreach programmes in eastern UP told The Federal.

Dalit support for granted

The MP added, “Behenji doesn’t realise that she cannot go on taking Dalit support for granted... these are not the times of Kanshi Ram (BSP founder) or the early phase of her own leadership of the movement when Dalits would just see the elephant (BSP’s party symbol) and vote because they felt yeh apni party hai or because a Dalit ki beti has asked for their vote. Now they want to know what a party will do for them.”

Further, he added, “We understand Dalits voting for the BJP because it is in power and can promise so many things but they are also voting for SP and Congress because when BJP does something anti-Dalit, SP and Congress leaders speak up... Behenji keeps quiet and she has sacked the one party leader (Akash) who was actually speaking up on these issues so why should the community keep rallying behind her”.

Interestingly, conversations around which parties stand to gain from the visible emasculation of the BSP throw up names of the usual suspects – the BJP, Akhilesh Yadav’s SP and the Congress – and not that of Mayawati’s fellow Jatav and Azad Samaj Party chief Chandrashekhar Azad who made an impressive debut as the Lok Sabha MP from Nagina last June.

Emergence of Azad Samaj Party

Azad, who rose in Dalit political imagination with his aggressive Bhim Army a decade ago, shares most credentials that Akash Anand can boast off – youth, belligerence, oratory and a Dalit identity. Yet, few believe he can stake a natural claim to the BSP’s vote base just yet.

“He may have won his seat in the Lok Sabha but he lacks both resources and the network and cadre that the BSP has all over UP among Dalits,” Lucknow-based senior journalist and author Sunita Aron had said in an episode of The Federal’s Capital Beat the day Mayawati had benched Akash.

Dalit activist and political commentator Prof Ravikant agrees with Aron and adds that Azad “hasn’t shown the political maturity that was expected of him... he wants to build a Dalit-Muslim vote bank for his party but has neither vision nor narrative... most importantly, by attacking Mayawati regularly, he won’t endear himself to the Dalits because even if Dalits are disillusioned with Mayawati, they will still not tolerate anyone, even a fellow Dalit, insulting her”.

Who will benefit?

In Ravikant’s view, if the BSP chief “doesn’t go back to being the Mayawati UP saw in the 1980s and 1990s, her entire base, Jatavs included, will slowly get fragmented between the BJP, SP and the Congress”.

Of all these parties, Ravikant said, the BJP and the Congress have the best chance of “benefitting from the BSP’s implosion in the long run” because “despite Akhilesh’s repeated assertion of working for Dalits aside from backward castes and minorities, the Dalit of UP, especially in west UP and Bundelkhand, harbours a deep-seated mistrust of the SP due to the atrocities on the community by Yadavs”.

“The Congress, given that it has a Dalit president in Mallikarjun Kharge and an unwavering pro-Dalit voice in Rahul Gandhi, should seize this opportunity... it should move quickly to simultaneously do two things – identify and promote non-Jatav Dalits in the party and in elections while Kharge, Rahul and Priyanka Gandhi should collectively reach out to Akash and try to either bring him over to their side or encourage him to float a party with which the Congress can ally. This would be the perfect way to counter the BJP’s Dalit outreach and it will yield electoral dividends not just for the Congress but also for its ally (the SP) when UP goes to polls in 2027,” Ravikant said.