It’s all Maya

Mulayam Singh Yadav can take comfort from the fact that he is not alone in his discomfiture over the quirky twists and turns of UP’s politics. Joining him in the boondocks is the state’s erstwhile chief minister, Rajnath Singh. UP chief minister Mayawati, fresh from her various electoral triumphs, is sparing no effort to push him further and further into a corner. Not only has she junked his brainchild — reservations for the most backward among the OBCs and Dalits — she has done it in such a way as to expose the schisms within the BJP leadership, by claiming that the move had the backing of senior BJP leaders like Om Prakash Singh and Lalji Tandon. On Saturday, her government threw out the amendment ordinance that the previous government had made to the 1994 Uttar Pradesh Public Service Act, providing reservations to the most backward Dalits and OBCs.

Mayawati insists that her latest move was done only to expedite appointments and promotions, held up by the Supreme Court having stayed the amendment ordinance. She argues that there are some 28,700 vacancies which need to be filled. While this is as good an excuse as any — which chief minister would like to pass such a great opportunity by? — there is another reason too. Mayawati is playing for the long term, and by destroying a plank which had at one time promised to keep Rajnath Singh well-entrenched in Uttar Pradesh politics as chief minister for years to come, she hopes that she has well and truly clipped the wings of a potential rival. As the then chief minister Singh had moved with remarkable efficiency to woo the ati Dalits and ati pichhara in the run-up to the UP assembly elections. He had set up a Social Justice Committee which had come up with this recommendation for such reservations in record time. So audacious was the move that no political party, including Mayawati’s Bahujan Samaj Party, could be seen to oppose it. If the apex court had not stayed it, the move may have actually helped shore up the BJP’s declining fortunes in the state.

The BJP’s alliance with the BSP, which brought it back to power in the state, is already proving to be a crown of thorns. When the BJP leadership in Delhi was pushing for such an alliance, it was looking at the advantages it could gain from such a tie-up in terms of its own position at the Centre. For the moment, however, the BJP in UP is suffering grievously. Kalraj Mishra’s resignation as state BJP chief only underlines this.