The political churn in UP

Radhika Ramaseshan 

Senior Journalist

The political cross-currents flowing through the plains of Uttar Pradesh have doubtless perturbed the BJP that sat pretty not so long ago after amassing a record number of seats in the Lok Sabha and the Assembly elections.  The BJP’s sanguinity was disrupted when the state’s Opposition, comprising the SP, BSP and RLD, combined into a joint front to fight the BJP in four bypolls, three Lok Sabha and one Assembly polls, and made a neat haul. The Congress, a fringe player in UP for over a decade, did not figure in the trio’s estimation. 

There was no joint campaign. Barring the RLD’s father-son duo of Ajit Singh and Jayant Chaudhary, the chiefs of the SP and BSP, Akhilesh Yadav and Mayawati, respectively, stepped back, allowing their candidates and local leaders to run the show. The unstated rationale of the SP and BSP was an alliance cemented several months before the Lok Sabha elections, that they both direly need to stall the BJP’s juggernaut. This would inevitably court trouble and come undone before the big battle.    

Political wisdom has it that in UP nothing is a done deal unless it is signed and sealed, so volatile is its politics. As is her wont and true to her conviction in expediency and compromises, Mayawati has beamed confusing signals that may give sleepless nights to Akhilesh Yadav and Ajit Singh. In her latest press conference, she attacked the BJP for the assault and lynching of Muslims and Dalits and raised questions over the Rafale deal. In the same breath, she held the Congress culpable for farming out bank loans to the ‘corrupt’ and allowing them to abscond when the going got tough. Mayawati’s comparison fits in with the BSP’s basic political philosophy, expounded by her mentor Kanshi Ram who described the Congress and the BJP as two species of equally venomous snakes. As UP waits with bated breath for Mayawati to unfold her pre-Lok Sabha election move, some observers believe that the ‘simulated’ suspense was intended to ratchet up her bargaining power to net a bulk of the 80 seats. Others, especially former Dalit bureaucrats who had worked with her, ridiculed her for living in la-la land and dreaming of reclaiming the Dalit votes that the BJP spirited away in 2014 and 2017.  

The BSP held sway over UP’s Dalit politics from the nineties after its founder and ideologue Kanshi Ram worked diligently to first create support grids on the ground from the lower echelons of politically-conscious government employees and later superimposing the substructure with goodwill and help from the Dalit bureaucracy that had by then emerged as a strong pillar of the upper caste-dominated administration. Mayawati became the face and voice of the new politics of Dalit empowerment. She astutely co-opted the most backward castes who were looped out of the arc of benefits brought by Mandalisation.

Chandrashekhar Azad, a law graduate from Saharanpur, threatens to upset the BSP’s applecart. He was incarcerated for over a year under the National Security Act for fomenting disaffection between the Dalits and Thakurs over a localised conflict. The fact-finding accounts that came later blamed the Thakurs for inflicting the major part of the violence on the Dalits. Not one of them was arrested, lending credence to the suspicion that CM Yogi Adityanath, a Thakur, would not hurt his kinsmen. Azad was released last week. Although he claimed that he will not participate directly in the Lok Sabha elections, his help by proxy, through his mother, in the Kairana and Noorpur bypolls for the non-BJP front confirmed he nurtured political ambitions.  

Azad is 30 years younger than Mayawati. The Bhim Army Bharat Ekta Mission he founded in 2017 represents an admixture of philanthropy with militancy, intended in the end to take Dalit empowerment to a level beyond stagnating in the circle of bargains — and many might say, self-centredness — that became the hallmark of the BSP. The army runs schools funded by local donations because Azad’s outlook was quality education must precede emancipation. He stressed on bringing the ‘Bahujan samaj’ together so that the poor and the gullible were not victimised by the self-seekers. Was that a dig at Mayawati? He clarified she was like an aunt to him because their bloodline was identical. Mayawati promptly snubbed Azad.

Did she perceive him as a threat? In the past, Mayawati snuffed out her internal challengers like the Queen of Hearts. Azad may be a different kettle of fish because he harps on the ‘Bahujan path’, a departure from the BSP’s ‘inclusive’ ‘sarvajan’ plank, uses words like honesty and transparency and makes it clear that Gandhian ideology is not for him. Those familiar with Dalit politics believe that in the backdrop of the recent victimisation of Dalits that found a focus in the Bhima-Koregaon clashes, Azad’s idiom and politics appealed to a new generation of Dalits in UP who increasingly perceive Mayawati as a leader under siege, but undeserving of their sympathy, because of the multiple cases of alleged corruption she is embroiled in.

Akhilesh Yadav may not be that beleaguered but he’s not over the hump despite claiming and possessing the inheritor’s title against serious odds in the SP. His uncle, Shivpal Singh Yadav, who is Mulayam Singh Yadav’s younger brother, quit the SP and floated his own Samajwadi Secular Manch. Shivpal, incidentally a Mulayam favourite, plans to contest the 2019 polls. Political watchers know Shivpal as a backroom strategist and a favour-dispenser that helped create a formidable network of clients for him in the SP’s borough in west-central UP. 

The benefactors of a politician’s benevolence, so important in UP, remain beholden to him for life. Early assessments say Shivpal can potentially damage the SP in at least half a dozen seats, including those that the party managed to pick up amidst the ‘Modi wave’ over four years ago.