Opinion Mayawati’s struggle for relevance

Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) leader Mayawati’s decision to expel her nephew Akash Anand — a day after she removed him from the position of national coordinator for the second time in 10 months — draws attention to a beleaguered party. The BSP’s continuing internal disarray, combined with its unchecked electoral decline, has dulled the lustre of a party that once held out a radical promise of representation and empowerment of the most marginalised. Its failure is writ large in times when the question of “social justice”, riding on renewed demands for a caste census, has resurfaced. Mayawati’s party has neither been able to frame a fresh narrative of inclusive politics — as it once did through its social engineering experiments, be it the bhaichara sammelans or the shift from bahujan to sarvajan in its slogans and rhetoric — nor has it been able to adequately step up to the challenges of an intensifying political competition, or adapt to the needs of politics in the social media age.

The BSP had marked many firsts in Indian politics. Kanshi Ram’s emergence as a Dalit icon in the 1980s, amid the dominance of the Dalit Panthers in the discourse, argued for the importance of strategic alliances. The rise of a Dalit woman as chief minister of India’s most politically influential state, the renaming of institutions to commemorate Dalit icons, the installation of statues of Ambedkar in public parks — all these were not only strategies to mobilise the Dalits, but also helped open up public spaces and acknowledged the exclusions that had long been inscribed and routinised in them. Mayawati’s outreach to upper castes took it to its zenith in the 2007 assembly elections, when it received a 30.46 per cent vote share in Uttar Pradesh. The party’s fall to 12.9 per cent in the 2022 assembly election and 9.39 per cent in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections calls for urgent introspection.

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The BSP has been challenged by the BJP’s purposeful and organised outreach to non-Jatav and Jatav Dalits, Chandrashekhar Azad Ravan’s energetic claims on Kanshi Ram’s legacy, and SP’s politics of pichda, Dalit and alpasankhyak (PDA). But it has been debilitated, more, by its own weaknesses and hesitations. The party’s inability to put together larger coalitions, for instance, a strategy that delivered for it in the past, has taken a toll. Kanshi Ram’s politics showed a recognition of why Ambedkar called political power the gurukilli or master key. But that could only be achieved by an agile politics, and the framing of new electoral strategies, that, for now, seem to have gone missing from the BSP’s repertoire.