Conundrum of the SC vote

With less than a month before UP votes, it is clear that the complex and variegated social engineering fabric which the BJP knitted in 2014 has frayed on the edges. The Other Backward Classes (OBCs) or the backward castes formed the warp and weft of the fibre that seemed to grow fitter with each election. A significant number of OBC leaders and legislators migrated from the BJP to the SP, which ironically never fine-tuned caste equations under the leadership of Akhilesh Yadav. The SP was synonymous with the Yadavs, and to a smaller degree, the Muslims, not because it proactively sought out the latter but benefited from minorities’ support as a legacy inherited from the founder, Mulayam Singh Yadav.

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Had the BSP retained its 2007 political character, it would be better positioned than the SP to take advantage of the fissures that cropped up within the BJP.

An intriguing aspect of the elections is, where will the Scheduled Caste (SC) votes go? The question arises against the backdrop of an inert BSP, which, over the years, had mobilised and garnered an appreciable number of the 21.6 per cent SC votes, made up of 66 sub-groups. Jatavs form the dominant grouping, and Mayawati, the BSP leader, is a Jatav. The BSP suffered setbacks in every election that followed its first success in 2007. Earlier, Mayawati thrice became the UP CM with the BJP’s support but on each occasion, she ruled on her own terms and forced her ally to withdraw support when the going got untenable for the BJP. In the Assembly election in 2017, the BSP was reduced to 19 seats, although she secured 22 per cent of the votes; however, the base she had constructed of the upper castes and the OBCs, particularly the non-Yadav OBCs, unravelled. It appeared that the BSP retained the votes of the Jatavs, and possibly a few other SC sub-groups.

Mayawati’s plight worsened with the financial tangles she was embroiled in when she was in power (which her opponents, particularly the BJP, used advantageously against her), defections, dissensions and arbitrary sackings, an inability to adopt a clear stance on important issues, adapt to the exigencies of the day, and forge tactical alliances. The last factor was possibly a fallout of the failure of her tie-up with the SP and the RLD to deliver the anticipated results in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls. According to Lucknow’s political chatter, the BSP was also hampered by ‘fund crunch’.

Since the last reversal three years ago, Mayawati has cut herself off from active politics. She emerged on her birthday which was celebrated far less ostentatiously than in the past, or on the BSP founder and ideologue Kanshi Ram’s anniversaries. In between, she launched her nephew, Akash Anand, as the political heir and appointed him the BSP vice-president with the caveat he would not seek office or contest an election but dedicate himself to the party. Not much was heard of Akash, a businessman, after the introduction.

However, the 2019 elections demonstrated that Mayawati’s following among sections of the SCs stayed intact. She was able to transfer her votes to the SP and the RLD but the inverse did not happen, proving that the OBCs and Jats continued to be so antagonistic towards the SCs that they would rather vote the BJP than be loyal to their own leaders.

The 2014 election saw the first serious churn in the SC votes ever since the SCs dumped the Congress for the BSP in the 1990s. The BJP’s goulash, cooked from Hindutva populism laced with welfare schemes and inducing a sense of empowerment in the less-empowered castes without promising anything concrete, was lapped up by SCs, particularly sub-groups like the Passis, who were BSP votaries. A rider here. Certain SC sub-groups, notably the Khatiks, Valmikis and Doms, were worked upon by the RSS for years and indoctrinated with its beliefs which persuaded them to adopt Hindutva as a political creed and treat Muslims as an adversary. Sanjay Paswan, a veteran BJP SC leader of Bihar, set forth this credo in clear terms in an article in which he wrote, ‘I see an evil design behind the propagation of the idea of an alliance between Dalits and Muslims. It is against the idea of one nation…Academically, there can be two hypothetical categories to examine the relationship and interface between Dalits and Muslims.’ He classified SCs as ‘victims of historical injustices’ and Muslims as ‘victors’ (‘proven by looking at the external invasions from 11th century onwards’).

Like the SP, the BSP upped its game at courting Muslims by giving their candidates more than a fair share of its tickets. Muslims perceived the BSP as a winnable proposition because it had the assured support of SCs, which taken together with their votes, made for a successful combination. The RSS-BJP feared the cementing of a Muslim-Yadav pact as antithetical to the Hindutva project.

Mayawati walks into elections 2022 without much political capital. Of the 18 legislators she had, 15 quit. Her only political aide, Satish Chandra Mishra, a Brahmin, has fostered the interests of his family within the BSP; in any campaign, the stage is dominated by Mayawati’s nephew, and Mishra’s son, wife and son-in-law, completing the picture of two families dominating a party that once forged a rainbow coalition of myriad social groupings. Mishra’s sole contribution to the present elections has been to reach out to Brahmins via a soft Hindutva approach.

Had the BSP retained the political character it acquired in 2007, it would be better positioned than the SP to take advantage of the fissures that cropped up within the BJP. The extremely backward castes are upset with the Yogi dispensation for exploiting their votes and giving them nothing more than a token presence in the power apparatuses. They want proportional representation at every level of the hierarchy. This was Kanshi Ram’s original slogan. His politics encapsulated proportional representation of every caste.