Mayawati and BSP's free fall

Aditi Tandon

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THE recent Uttar Pradesh Assembly elections yielded two spectacular results — the historic rise of the BJP and the decisive fall of the Bahujan Samaj Party. Ongoing for a decade, BSP’s decline this year entered terminal stages, with the once-dominant electoral force of UP confined to the lone Rasara seat in Ballia, posting the poorest performance in its 38-year history.

BSP’s decimation in UP appears as dramatic as its rise in 1984 and reasons behind its vanishing footprint are not far to seek.

Leading sociologist Surinder Jodhka attributes BSP’s progressive decline to the party’s inability to graduate from the politics of identity to the politics of ideology, and to retain or expand its support base.

Jodhka, who has followed the emergence of Dalit politics in post-Independence India, recalls how BSP founder Kanshi Ram advocated the need to transcend Dalit identity and nurture larger caste alliances to acquire political power.

The BSP founder’s original constituency was not Dalit masses, but upwardly mobile Dalit employees — financially secure but slighted at workplaces.

“Kanshi Ram not only organised Dalit employees through the Backward and Minority Community Employees Federation in 1978, he criticised them for not being sufficiently sensitive towards communities of origin and exercised moral claim on them. He advocated eschewing individual ambitions for political empowerment of bahujan samaj, a minority in political power despite being a numerical majority. Later, in 1981, Kanshi Ram set up the Dalit Shoshit Samaj Sangharsh Samiti as a precursor to BSP. He first unveiled the bahujan slogan during a 40-day 3,000-km cycle march across India after forming the BSP in 1984,” says Jodhka, noting that Mayawati detoured from Kanshi Ram’s path of inclusion by turning sectarian and promoting Jatav Dalits, and placed personal ambitions above party causes as evidenced in her monument-building spree as UP Chief Minister.

A closer look at BSP’s emergence places Mayawati at variance with mentor Kanshi Ram, whose definition of bahujan samaj included all caste groups barring three upper caste Hindus — Brahmins, Thakurs and Baniyas.

Mayawati, however, went on to create a Dalit-Brahmin alliance, hitting the peak of her electoral career in the 2007 UP elections when she bagged 206 seats out of 403 and a 30.43 per cent vote share.

The romance was not to last long. The BSP, with a Dalit-Brahmin combination, failed to impress in the 2009 General Elections. Mayawati’s prime ministerial ambitions were dashed while the Congress rode home comfortably.

In a backlash of Mayawati’s Brahmin appeasement and gradual divorce from BSP’s core ideology, several prominent caste leaders cultivated by Kanshi Ram left, undermining the party’s social base.

Hemlata Mahishwar of the Akhil Bharatiya Dalit Lekhika Manch says Mayawati lost her appeal because her strategies never favoured Dalits, nor did she publicly espouse Dalit causes, especially in the recent past.

“Mayawati’s belief that Dalits cannot win elections without Brahmins remains inexplicable. This is a drift from BSP’s ideology as even Kanshi Ram steered clear of Brahmin-waad. Under Mayawati, political power became the be-all and end-all of Dalit assertion and the movement’s moral base was lost,” says Mahishwar.

The writer points to a shift in BSP’s slogans from “Tilak taraazu aur talwar, inko maaro jootey chaar” in 1989 to “Haathi nahi Ganesh hai, Brahma Vishnu Mahesh hai” in 2007, asking, “When no one plays the religion card better than the BJP, why try? What did the BSP gain? It could not retain Brahmins as they switched to the BJP at the first opportunity. It also lost core supporters.”

As Brahmins occupied key roles in Mayawati’s scheme (Satish Mishra, BSP’s national general secretary, continues to be her principal adviser), several BSP leaders left.

Around 1995, the party witnessed the first wave of desertions with powerful OBC leaders Sone Lal Patel, Ram Lakhan Verma and others leaving in the wake of Mayawati becoming CM of a short-lived coalition in UP with BJP’s support.

She was the first Dalit CM of UP and went on to helm the state three more times (1997, 2002-2003 and 2007-2012).

Many BSP leaders quit after Kanshi Ram’s death in 2006 when Mayawati took control of the party’s organisation and finances. In 2016, non-Yadav OBC stalwarts Swami Prasad Maurya and Brijesh Pathak left the BSP for BJP, while Lalji Verma, Ram Achal Rajbhar and Indrajeet Saroj joined the SP.

Naseemuddin Siddiqui, Mayawati’s closest confidant at one time, moved to the Congress in 2018 after she expelled him. He took with him hordes of BSP leaders.

Mayawati’s alliance experiment with the SP in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections also failed. She bagged 10 seats but the SP was confined to five as BSP’s Dalit votes never transferred. Questioned for failing to sway her own support bases, BSP rushed to call off the alliance, only to bite dust in the 2022 UP polls.

Political analyst Badri Narayan says a consistently weakening organisation and a missing second rung leadership was a major cause behind BSP’s decline.

“The BSP organisation continues to shrink. Many social groups have left and a second rung leadership has not come up. Mayawati’s ability to hit the streets has reduced, as has the space for Dalits in the party,” Narayan notes.

He says while Kanshi Ram nurtured Dalit leaders in political spaces, often spotting them in villages, Mayawati increasingly gave tickets to winnable candidates.

“Gradually, Dalits, who continued to face challenges of survival, started viewing BSP as less of an alternative. They vacillated towards the BJP, which gave them security of survival through pro-poor schemes like free ration, housing, cooking gas, toilets and dignity by way of celebrating Dalit icons within the Hindutva ambit,” Narayan says, adding that BSP’s appeal among UP’s 66 caste groups remains limited.

The road ahead for BSP would be tough, experts say, noting that Mayawati would need to return to Kanshi Ram’s path of stitching broad caste alliances and organising them as a political force without being beholden to upper castes.

To revive, the BSP would need to transcend Dalit identity to include larger caste bases and understand that people need motivation to sustain their identifications with political forces, says Jodhka.

Kanshi Ram realised this urgency. While he believed that caste was a useful tool and a resource to acquire political power, he was critical of what he called “Dalit-ness”.

At the first World Dalit Convention at Kuala Lumpur in 1998, the BSP founder had said, “Dalit-ness has become the biggest weakness of Dalits. It makes them dependent and dependents can never become rulers.” In Kanshi Ram’s construct, bahujan samaj was a group of officially classified OBCs and Scheduled Castes, plus religious minorities, which he aimed to bring together with Dalits as leaders. The larger purpose of this mobilisation was building a society grounded in human dignity, free from caste oppression and hierarchy.

“But under Mayawati, dignity has remained confined to a few core leaders and voters have felt alienated. They have switched over to the BJP, which has offered them a dignified space within Hinduism. The upper castes BSP once wooed have also returned to the BJP, which they see as a house of their own. So BSP must cultivate a different type of ideological system to transcend caste and regain political power,” Jodhka explains.

Though experts say a decade of decline is too early to write off a national party, they agree the BSP would need to reinvent itself to revive. Can Mayawati realise her mentor’s long-forgotten slogan, “Jiski jitni sankhya bhaari, uski utni hissedaari”? Only time will tell.

The Rahul-Mayawati spat

After Rahul Gandhi claimed that the Congress had offered to ally with the BSP and project Mayawati as a CM candidate but she refused due to fear of CBI, IT Department and Pegasus, the latter hit back, saying the Congress should worry about putting its own house in order.

Mayawati rejected Gandhi’s insinuations of going soft on the BJP in UP unlike Kanshi Ram, who fought for Dalits, and asked, “The Congress contested the 2017 UP polls with the SP. Why could it not stop the BJP?” Mayawati also attacked the BJP, saying it was hell-bent on making India “Opposition-free”. Earlier, after losing the UP polls, Mayawati had said, “The BSP is not BJP’s B team. Only we can defeat the BJP. We will alter our strategies and come back.”

How BSP came into being

• BSP founder Kanshi Ram was born in 1924 in a Ramdasia Sikh family in Khawaspur village of Ropar. After studying science in Punjab, he joined as a junior scientist at the Explosives and Research Development Lab in Pune, where he saw caste discrimination being faced by Dalit employees.
• He founded the Backward and Minority Communities Employees Federation in 1978.
• In 1981, he formed the Dalit Shoshit Samaj Sangharsh Samiti, delineating the concept of bahujan as a broad section of Indians.
• In 1984, he formed the Bahujan Samaj Party, with UP as his karambhoomi.
• In 2003, Mayawati took charge of the BSP.
• Kanshi Ram died in 2006.
• Mayawati went on to become UP CM four times.