Akash Anand’s replacement in BSP musical chairs: Who is Ramji Gautam?

This is the second stint of 49-year-old Gautam, a Jatav Dalit from Lakhimpur Kheri district of Uttar Pradesh, as the BSP national coordinator.

Gautam gravitated towards the ideologies of Dr B R Ambedkar and BSP founder Kanshi Ram at a young age, skipping school as a higher secondary student in Lakhimpur to travel to Lucknow to attend public rallies of Kanshi Ram and Mayawati at the Begum Hazrat Mahal Park. In his locality, he also actively participated in processions marking Ambedkar’s birth anniversary.

Gautam joined the BSP in 1990 and within three years became a booth-level president. He later served as the party’s sector-level president and Assembly unit general secretary in Lakhimpur.

He then left Lakhimpur to pursue his graduate studies in chemical engineering and completed an MBA in marketing and production. Gautam initially worked as a guest teacher at a polytechnic institute and later joined the Reliance Group. His work also took him to Punjab where he began working for the BSP in Mansa district. By 2011, he had had enough and resigned from a job in the telecom sector to pursue politics full-time.

Gautam got an opportunity to meet Mayawati for the first time in 2014. Soon afterwards, he was appointed the party in-charge for Uttar Pradesh’s Bundelkhand region but within a year was demoted to in-charge for the Powayan Assembly seat in Shahjahanpur district.

In 2016, he bounced back again after he was appointed as the in-charge of Tamil Nadu, Puducherry, and Kerala, a role he held for two years before being moved to Andhra Pradesh and Telangana. The same year, Mayawati removed Jai Prakash Singh as the party’s national vice-president after he said Congress leader Rahul Gandhi could never aspire to be the Prime Minister due to his “mother’s foreign origin”. Gautam was brought in as his replacement.

In 2019, Mayawati replaced Gautam with her brother Anand Kumar as the vice-president and appointed him and Akash Anand as national coordinators. In 2022, Gautam was appointed the BSP’s central coordinator, putting him in charge of Delhi, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand, and Uttarakhand.

When the BSP won six seats in the Rajasthan Assembly elections in 2018, Gautam was the party’s state in-charge. However, the party faced a setback soon afterwards as all six moved to the Congress and in 2023, the party’s tally dropped to two. In 2020, the BSP also bagged one Assembly seat in Bihar, another state where Gautam was in charge. In 2020, the party nominated Gautam to the Rajya Sabha. At present, he is the party’s only parliamentarian.

Rajaram, the other leader promoted

Gautam is not the only new face in the BSP’s top leadership. On Sunday, Mayawati also appointed the party’s central coordinator and former MP Rajaram, 56, as the leader in charge of Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Kerala, Andhra Pradesh, and Maharashtra. These states were earlier the responsibility of former MP Ashok Siddharth, Akash’s father-in-law who was expelled from the BSP last month. Mayawati has blamed the influence of Siddharth as the reason for Akash’s expulsion. Apart from these states, Rajaram also handles Gujarat for the party.

Hailing from Azamgarh district’s Lalganj town, Rajaram too is from the Jatav community. He joined the BSP when he was 26 years old and started working alongside Kanshi Ram and Mayawati in 1993.

After attaining a postgraduate degree from the Kashi Vidyapeeth in Varanasi, he initially worked as the party coordinator in Delhi, where he accompanied Kanshi Ram during a door-to-door outreach programme and later travelled with him across different states.

From 2003 to 2008, Rajaram was an MLC in UP. But before expiry of his term, the party, in power in the state at the time, asked him to resign as MLC and nominated him to the Rajya Sabha in 2009 and again in 2014.

Rajaram was the BSP vice-president for almost 10 years before serving as the central coordinator and working as the in-charge in almost every state. Most recently, he was the leader in charge of Jammu and Kashmir during the Assembly polls last year.