A Barq booster to Maya’s win-Muslim mantra

Hours later, Mayawati’s nephew and BSP national coordinator Akash Anand tweeted, “The views expressed by SP MP about respected Mayawati ji are the opinion of people in every party. Behenji (Mayawati) has uplifted Dalits, Muslims, OBCs and every section of the society.”

Barq’s remarks have come as a jolt to his own party, which is struggling to win the support of non-Yadav voters and retain the trust of Muslims after the death of party patriarch Mulayam Singh Yadav.

Popular in west UP as a hardliner minority leader who speaks boldly on national and political issues, the five-term MP started his political career as a Bharatiya Kranti Dal MLA from Sambhal in 1974. Barq, later, became Samajwadi Party state general secretary.

Days before the 2009 Lok Sabha elections, he resigned from Parliament and contested the next elections as a BSP nominee. He won again, this time by defeating the SP candidate. He returned to the SP but lost in the 2014 elections. In the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, he won as an SP nominee in alliance with BSP.

Sources in the SP said that Barq is upset with SP president Akhilesh Yadav after the latter appointed first-time MP from Moradabad, ST Hasan, as the party’s floor leader in Lok Sabha last month. The SP currently has only three MPs in Lok Sabha after the party lost Muslim-dominated Azamgarh and Rampur seats to the BJP.

What makes Barq’s praise for Mayawati important is its timing.

The BSP recently launched an aggressive outreach campaign to win Muslim support. After the 2022 Assembly polls in which the party was decimated — it managed to win only one out of the total 403 seats — the BSP has been trying to convince Muslims that the Samajwadi Party is not capable of defeating the BJP electorally despite getting solid backing from the community.

So, barely a week after the poll results, Mayawati declared former party MLA Shah Alam alias Guddu Jamali as the party’s candidate for bypoll in Azamgarh Lok Sabha seat that was vacated by Akhilesh. Jamali could not win but got a decisive number of Muslim votes resulting in defeat of Akhilesh’s cousin, Dharmendra Yadav. The SP also lost Rampur to the ruling BJP amid allegations that party leadership kept silent on issues related to Muslim community and senior party leader Azam Khan who spent over two years in jail.

Mayawati also managed to induct Imran Masood into the BSP. Masood, a prominent and controversial Muslim leader of west UP had quit Congress to join the SP in the run-up to the Assembly polls. After SP failed to win a majority, he left the SP to join BSP. Mayawati appointed Masood as the party’s convener for the west UP region and tasked him with winning the community’s support in neighbouring Uttarakhand too. Last December, BSP declared Masood’s wife, Saima, as the party candidate for the Saharanpur mayor seat.

Mayawati also inducted Shaista Parveen, the wife of former MP and gangster-turned-politician Atiq Ahmad, into the party and fielded her for the mayor seat in Prayagraj.

Last month, Mayawati told UP Muslims to ponder over the results of the by-elections in Mainpuri Lok Sabha seat and Rampur Assembly seats. She referred to the low voters’ turnout in Rampur as a “planned one”, and wondered whether the SP’s victory in Mainpuri and its loss in Azam Khan’s stronghold of Rampur, was the result of an “understanding” between SP and BJP.

Last week, Mayawati also hit out at the BJP for its move to woo Pasmanda Muslims by holding separate conventions for them. “Muslims will not fall in the BJP’s the trap because Muslim is first a Muslim and Pasmanda later,” she said. She also took up the issue of over 4,000 families, mostly Muslims, facing eviction in Haldwani in Uttarakhand. She termed the eviction of “Muslim families” an “inhuman act”.