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Journalism of Courage
In front of a ramshackle building with peeling blue walls marking it as the zilla karyalay or the district office of the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) in Bijnor, Amar Singh, 74, sits on a broken chair. A veteran worker of the party, Singh recalls driving Mayawati around in a jeep during her victorious 1989 Lok Sabha campaign from Bijnor — her first electoral triumph.
“It was from here that the BSP’s successful electoral journey began. Behenji worked tirelessly, going door to door. She once declared in a public meeting, ‘Pandit ki beti Indira Gandhi Pradhan Mantri ban gayi. Ab ek chamaar ki beti banegi (Indira Gandhi, an upper-caste’s daughter, became PM, now it’s the turn of an untouchable’s daughter)’. The slogan ‘Chamarin hoon, tumhari hoon (I am from the Chamaar caste, I am yours)’ would electrify the crowd,” Singh recalls.
He remembers a time when the party had just five workers in Bijnor and contested elections with a mere Rs 80,000, of which Rs 5,000 was returned unspent. “Sahab (BSP founder Kanshi Ram) had said if he had Rs 1 lakh, he could have won Haridwar as well in 1987,” Singh adds.
Singh’s colleague, Ramnath Singh, 70, reminisces about the grassroots mobilisation that fueled the BSP’s rise. Kanshi Ram and Mayawati cycled from village to village, collecting Rs 2 from each supporter. “There was not a village in Bijnor where Behenji had not stayed overnight,” he says.
In the 1970s, the Bahujan movement had fueled a new political consciousness. The BSP’s formation in 1984 institutionalised this vision, culminating in three tenures for Mayawati as Uttar Pradesh’s Chief Minister in the 1990s and early 2000s.
By 2007, Mayawati had achieved an electoral landmark: a full majority government in UP and a fourth term as CM, propelled by a grand social coalition of Dalits, non-Yadav OBCs, and Muslims. At its peak, the BSP secured 206 Assembly seats in 2007 and 21 MPs in 2009.
And then, much to the dismay of party workers and die-hard sympathisers, the Bahujan machinery slowed down. What was perplexing was that Mayawati herself didn’t seem to be trying too hard to arrest the slide. As she fired her partymen for speaking up — and, in some cases, even for speaking — she came across as autocratic and somewhat burdened. She recently sacked her nephew and once-heir-apparent Akash Anand for the second time in as many years. The party, which, in the 90s, was a bulwark against the BJP’s Hindutva politics, with slogans such as “Miley Mulayam-Kanshi Ram, hawa ho gaye Jai Shri Ram”, is now without a clear adversary or ally.
Today, the BSP has just one MLA from Uttar Pradesh and no presence in the Lok Sabha. The party’s vote share has plummeted — from 30% in 2007 to just over 8% in 2024. Even Dalits, who form 20% of UP’s population, seem to be deserting the party.
“It’s sad to see the party in this state… Dukh hota hai. Sahab’s movement made us aware of our strength, empowered us and gave us a foothold in the power structure that had kept us out,” says Amar Singh.
The Indian Express reached out to BSP national coordinator Randhir Singh Beniwal on the efforts being made to revive the party’s electoral fortunes. “There is an extensive planning in this direction. It will be shared only after a discussion with Behanji,” said Beniwal, who was recently appointed to the post in place of Mayawati’s brother Anand Kumar.
On the party’s shrinking footprint, Beniwal said, “I am newly appointed. A comprehensive study will be done and discussed with Behanji before we share it with the media.”
Messages sent to Mayawati’s office and national general secretary Satish Chandra Mishra went unanswered.
On the ground, the steady dismantling of the inventive social coalition Kanshi Ram had come up with — of non-Yadav OBCs and Muslims, yoked to the party’s core Dalit support base — is only too evident.
Non-Yadav OBCs were crucial to the BSP’s ascent, but they have since migrated to other parties. Leaders such as Babu Singh Kushwaha, Swami Prasad Maurya, Om Prakash Rajbhar, and Dr Sanjay Nishad — once nurtured by the BSP — either formed their own parties or allied with the BJP.
Hargyan Singh Prajapati, a former BSP OBC leader in Nagina, a constituency adjacent to Bijnor, says: “OBCs lack a distinct political consciousness. Kanshi Ram’s movement had bridged this gap, but once in power, the party slowly began sidelining them and Jats such as Shashank Shekhar became power centres. No one was listening to people like Babu Singh Kushwaha. OBC workers in the party had a difficult time getting their work done, so they drifted to the Samajwadi Party (SP) and later to the BJP.”
Prajapati is now with the Chandrashekhar-led Azad Samaj Party Kanshi Ram (ASPKR). A rising figure in Dalit politics, Chandrashekhar won the Nagina seat, once a stronghold of the BSP, in the 2024 Lok Sabha polls.
Chandrashekhar’s constituency representative Vivek Sain, an EBC, was earlier with the BSP. “OBC leaders did not leave the party, they were made to leave. Such situations got created. And Behenji did not stop anyone,” he says.
As the OBCs drifted away, so did the Muslims. In Bandukchiyan market of Dhampur, which falls in the Nagina seat, businessman Mohammed Shafique, 76, remembers how Mayawati marched on foot for several kilometres to protect Muslims during the 1990 Bijnor riots.
“There was a time when Behenji would talk about the issues of the community. Today when Muslims are being humiliated on a daily basis, she has gone quiet. Why would the community stick with her,” he says.
Parvez Pashi, district president of the Muslim Bhaichara Committee in Nagina, says, “Behenji used to fight for the weak: Dalits, backwards and minorities. When she used to hold the mike, she would roar. Officials feared her even when she was not in power. Later, Behenji began ignoring the people who built the party. Then, she forgot her voters.”
Even among Dalits, the dissatisfaction is evident. At Adopur village in Bijnor, village Pradhan Joginder Singh, a Jatav, the community to which Mayawati belongs and which has stood by her through all her electoral battles, admits, “People feel disconnected. She no longer speaks out, nor do her leaders meet the community. How can you expect votes if you don’t engage with the people? If I am not able to do anything for the village, people will look for a new pradhan. It does not matter what I have done in the past.”
Singh claims that a section of Dalits in the village have already shifted their loyalties to the BJP. “BJP has organisational strength. We used to only hear about the RSS, but now they have an office in the village. They are holding shakhas. What is the BSP doing?” he asks.
In Jaitara village in Dhampur tehsil, part of Nagina constituency, daily wager Mukesh Kumar Singh, 50, says he has voted for the BSP all his life, but doesn’t hide his disappointment. “Behenji has done a lot for our dignity. So I vote for her out of respect. But the community is going away from the BSP. What has she done for us lately? Even safai karmachari jobs have been taken over by others. On the other hand, when the SP government came to power, all police stations had Yadavs. The BJP may not be giving jobs, but at least it gives free ration.”
At Jalalabad, a village that’s part of the reserved Mohanlalganj assembly seat in Lucknow, Rajesh Kumar, a 30-year-old farmer and construction worker, says the BSP has been missing in action since it lost power in 2012. “We see SP and BJP leaders here, rarely the BSP. Why would the Dalits stay attached to a party if it doesn’t try to get to power. Everybody wants to stay with the ruling party or with a party which has potential to win,” he says, adding that his family, traditional BSP supporters, now vote for the BJP. “It is not the responsibility of the voters to work for the BSP’s win. That’s the responsibility of the leaders.”
Party insiders and former leaders attribute the party’s decline to Mayawati’s increasing detachment from the grassroots, her silence on key issues and the embracing of dynasty politics, besides external factors such as the rise of Hindutva politics under Narendra Modi.
Many former BSP leaders also cite ticket sales as a major issue. “Behenji turned the party into a marketplace. The local leader and party workers would work for five years to prepare the ground for the party, but when the elections came, a money bag from outside would get the ticket. It was disheartening,” says Ompal Balyan, whose association with the BSP started while he was in Class 9 and whose father, a Bahujan singer on All India Radio, worked closely with Kanshi Ram. But Balyan is now with Azad’s ASPKR.
At the party’s Bijnor office, a party worker says, “Earlier, Behenji would give tickets to OBCs or upper castes or Muslims depending on how many votes the candidate commanded in his community. Add to it the Dalit votes and the candidate would win.”
Party leaders also complain about Mayawati’s inaccessibility. They say that beginning 2003, the party ushered in a system where certain senior party leaders controlled access to the party supremo.
It’s a system, they say, that led to the BSP losing its prominent leaders to other parties — Naseemuddin Siddiqui (now in Congress); R K Chaudhary, Ram Achal Rajbhar, Lalji Verma, Indrajeet Saroj (now in SP) and Swami Prasad Maurya (who, after stints in the BJP and SP, is now president of the Rashtriya Shoshit Samaj Party).
In Mayawati’s paternal village of Badalpur in Gautam Buddh Nagar district, Dayanand Singh, a Jatav supporter of the BSP, says a few years ago, some elders from the village had gone to Lucknow to meet her to raise issues concerning the village. “But she did not meet them,” he says.
His neighbour Sandeep Singh, a Dalit, points out that it has been 15 years since Mayawati visited her village. “Look at SP leaders, they live in their villages,” he adds.
Balyan, the former BSP leader, points out it was not always so. “Behenji once valued workers. Naseemuddin Siddiqui would be sitting out and she would meet workers from Bijnor.”
However, following the success of 2007, he says, Mayawati not only tinkered with the party’s ideology by wooing Brahmins, but also got cut off from the grassroots.
“After attaining power, did you ever tie a rakhi to a poor Dalit? Did you ever sit with your community and eat with them? Did you ever shower affection on a cobbler or a rickshaw puller? These may look like political stunts, but they matter,” Balyan says.
He quotes Kanshi Ram to add, “Jo apna itihaas bhool jaate hain, unko itihaas bhool jaata hai (History won’t remember those who forget their past).”
Mayawati’s preference for family over party loyalists, too, has caused discontent among workers. “Kanshi Ram never felt threatened about appointing Mayawati. But she felt insecure about Chandrashekhar Azad. Instead, she chose her nephew, who has never set foot in a Dalit village,” says Sandeep Singh from Badalpur village.
Moreover, Mayawati’s silence on key issues is seen as a betrayal.
A veteran BSP leader in Lucknow says, “I become tongue tied when voters ask me why Mayawati is soft on the BJP. She never attacks BJP governments on their failures and instead targets the Opposition. And when she does mention the BJP, it’s to offer suggestions for better governance. That sends the wrong message.”
He adds that after Akash was removed from his post in May 2024 — Mayawati had cracked the whip following his speech against the BJP in Sitapur — the party cadre and voters were left confused. “Akash was the only BSP leader who was taking on the BJP. His expulsion has sent a message that Behenji is under some kind of pressure,” he says.
“You are so scared that you don’t even come out, you don’t speak? Even today if Mayawati comes out and challenges the BJP, the entire society will rally behind her. What is she scared of? No one has the courage to touch her,” says Balyan.
As the political sands in the Dalit landscape shift, leaders such as Chandrashekhar Azad are hoping to reclaim Kanshi Ram’s legacy.
Adorning the walls of the living room of former BSP MLA Rameshwari Devi’s house in Dhampur are photographs of Dalit icons — Jyotiba Phule, Chhatrapati Shahu ji Maharaj, Ambedkar, Kanshi Ram, and a recent addition: Chandrashekhar Azad. Earlier, that space belonged to Mayawati.
In 1989, the year Mayawati won the Bijnor Lok Sabha seat, Rameshwari had won the Nagina Assembly seat on a BSP ticket. Both Rameshwari and her husband have been associated with the Bahujan movement since the days of the All India Backward and Minority Communities Employees Federation (BAMCEF) that Kanshi Ram founded in 1971.
They recall the struggle that the Bahujan movement went through when, for a Mayawati meeting in Seohara, a town in Bijnor, “no one was ready to give chairs”. The meeting was finally held, she says, after they arranged for bricks for Mayawati to sit on. “In the early days, we worked selflessly for the mission. But things changed. greed seeped in. Now, Chandrashekhar Azad gives us hope,” she says.
Yet, at the BSP office in Bijnor and elsewhere in the state, hope remains. “Behenji still commands immense respect. If she steps out, acknowledges mistakes, and fights, people will return,” says a worker.
A senior party functionary in Lucknow’s Mohanlalganj offers a way out. “Behanji will have to start attacking the BJP government in public to convince voters that she is taking them on. She will have to travel across the state… If she does that, BSP will win the trust of voters, including the Muslims.”
Back in Badalpur, Mayawati’s home village, at a dried-up pisciculture centre established during her tenure, caretaker Satyendra Singh says: “If more investment is made, the centre can be revived. The administration has to take a call.”
The same holds true for Mayawati’s BSP. Whether she makes that call remains the defining question for the party’s future.
