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 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.
